Meanwhile, in the fall of 1969, my family moved to a farm outside LaCrosse and began our work with Appaloosa horses. My wife has been the major force in that work, but our involvement with horses opened the door to my old, dormant interest in psychic phenomena! In October 1970, I flew to Colorado to visit Sun Appaloosa Ranch, where the owners were retiring and had some champion horses for sale. I drove down from Denver to Castle Rock, and when Joyce Cannon opened the door, I knew her at a deep soul level! We spent a couple of hours discussing psychic phenomena and even past lives, which I had never before even thought about! I wound up purchasing eight of Ralph and Joyce's horses, and we became good friends.
Two weeks later, I received Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain from Joyce. Wow! That really did the trick. I was excited to see how far parapsychology had come in eighteen years. Another week passed and Joyce sent me Shafica Karagulla's book Breakthrough to Creativity. Here was proof of practical application of clairvoyance! I wrote to Shafica and asked for an address of Kay, who had been mentioned in the book as highly accurate in making medical diagnoses just by seeing the patient. She told me to “find your own psychic.” I was disappointed but began asking colleagues if they knew any good psychics! I was lucky to stay out of the insane asylum.
In November 1970, on my monthly visit to the University of Minnesota, where I had a teaching appointment, I said to one of my colleagues, “Pain is the most common symptom that takes patients to a physician, but no one has specialized in pain management.” His response was, “An interesting idea, but who would ruin his career doing that!” I was immediately convinced that I should found a comprehensive pain management clinic. Over the next nine months, the idea incubated. In July, I visited Dr. Wilbert Fordyce at the University of Washington to see his five-year-old Behavioral Modification, or Operant Conditioning, Program. Working with just one hundred patients in the five years, he hospitalized them for two months. His program was what I would call passive behavioral modification. But he had a 60 percent success rate doing little but ignoring their pain and weaning them from drugs, as well as a modicum of physical activity. He felt that if he had only a 10 percent success rate with these chronic pain patients, then society would break even. The cost of these patients to the medical system is enormous! In August 1971, I made the decision to leave Gundersen Clinic, as I needed space in which to develop my ideas. I went across town to St. Francis Hospital, where I was allowed to take over an entire floor in the oldest part of the hospital to develop an inpatient pain management program. Not being born Catholic, little did I suspect at that time how strongly I would be attracted to St. Francis— and have been for many centuries. More about that in a later chapter.
I was already being sent four hundred chronic pain patients from around the world to consider DCS. I was selecting only 6 percent, rejecting the other 94 percent as too disturbed emotionally to have even this relatively benign procedure. Now, you have to realize that I knew virtually nothing about psychology or psychiatry. The worst course I ever took anywhere was psychiatry at Duke. On the final exam, they gave this asinine directive: “List five qualities of a good psychiatrist.” I wrote “Crazy as Hell” five times. They threatened to flunk me until I replied, “Do you want me in this class again next year?”
In October 1971, I opened the world's first comprehensive pain clinic, The Pain Rehabilitation Clinic. Those four hundred patients I was being sent each year were the first to experience my form of “active” behavioral modification. They were hospitalized and gotten out of bed at 7 a.m. and not allowed to return to bed until 9 p.m. They were assigned many active physical activities, sent to the YMCA five days a week for water exercise, treated with my intuitively received electroacupuncture, the old crude electrical stimulator patented in 1919 by C.W. Kent, a naturopath from Illinois, and ignored when they mentioned or demonstrated pain behavior. I enlisted a young psychiatrist to do “Group Therapy” with my key insistence that they must not be allowed to complain about anything. Little did I know! A year later, I sat in on one of his sessions that I found appalling—it was largely a bitch/moan party. I have never since indulged such pandering in group wallowing!
In January 1972, Dr. Janet Travell was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, stating that all the publicity over James Reston's control of pain in China after his December appendectomy wasn't that important. “There's a young neurosurgeon in Wisconsin who has a Western form of acupuncture!” Acupuncture was suddenly a hot item. I had been doing my totally spontaneous form of electroacupuncture since 1966! (Synchronicity number 2). Soon thereafter I was invited by Dr. Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower's physician, to visit him to discuss my Western form of acupuncture –-major beginning of Synchronicity number 3! In April 1972, I flew to Boston to consult with Dr. White, truly one of the great Brahmins of American Medicine. At 84, having just flown in from Greece, he was busy seeing patients. We spent two hours enthusiastically discussing my work and I flew home.
A month later I received a phone call: “I am Bob Matson, president of the American Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine. We are holding a symposium on acupuncture in June at Stanford University. Dr. Paul Dudley White is to speak, and he said you know much more about acupuncture than he does. Would you replace him on the program?” Who could refuse that?
I went to the symposium, which was attended by twelve hundred physicians. I met many who became lifelong friends, among others:
• Dr. William Tiller, chair of the Department of Physics and a leading materials scientist interested in parapsychology
• Drs. Bill and Gladys McGarey of the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix
• Olga Worrall, renowned spiritual healer
• Dr. Felix Mann, British physician specializing for twelve years in acupuncture
• Dr. Phil Toyama, Japanese/American physician and acupuncturist
I learned from Dr. Toyama that the technique I had been using, of placing a needle in the center of pain and stimulating a needle below the pain to one above the pain, was one basic principle of traditional acupuncture—although they had been twisting the needles for manual stimulation. Later, I was to learn also that the Chinese began using electrical stimulation of needles in 1966—the same year I began doing that— another synchronicity! But perhaps the most important life-changing event at Stanford was talking with the McGareys. I told them I was planning a symposium on pain at the end of September. They said, “You should meet Dr. Bob Brewer. He is a surgeon who thinks like you. He is planning a symposium in Virginia Beach, at the A.R.E. the end of August.”
Thus began what for me became the “rupturing of the mental hymen,” as I learned later from Dr. Andria Puharich. Now you need to know that I had never heard of the A.R.E. or Edgar Cayce! “The Week of Attunement” symposium was a highlight of this life. I learned about colonics, color therapy, trance mediumship and, above all, reincarnation. I also met Dr. Genevieve Haller, a wonderful chiropractor and dear friend. Her husband, Jeffrey Furst, had just written The Return of Frances Willard. When I asked for a referral to a good psychic, he suggested Henry Rucker. That led me full steam ahead into medical intuition!
I learned that, off the program, Dr. Lindsay Jacobs was going to do a past-life therapy session. I was able to get in to watch it, and it literally blew my mind! I said to myself, “I must try this but I can't do it in front of anyone else—maybe I was a prostitute in a Greek war camp!” I have to assume I was! Otherwise, it would not have entered my mind! Dr. Jacobs agreed to do a private session. It was indeed transformative. I saw myself as a physician in Egypt three thousand years ago during a cholera epidemic. We stopped