Paul St John Interview

INTERVIEW WITH PAUL ST JOHN, JULY 2009

Interviewer: Randall Clark

You have been recognized as the developer of many of the techniques in manual therapy with NMT and INT, the atlas work and the visceral work, how do you develop new ideas for new treatment?

I think first it's always been about the patients, being attentive to patients, asking why is that happening, it always comes out of asking why? And a person's particular suffering, patients have taught me because I am very attentive to what they say and their experiences, and asking why, and then getting excited about figuring out why! When I know I am supposed to know or do something, there is always a very uplifting energy and I recognize this process because I feel very energized by it. I always feel that way when I see a new patient, can't wait to figure out why they are hurting. When I see something new, like the woman I first treated to develop Aquasomatic therapy, she was an Olympic Cyclist, and her degree of suffering in pain and reflex sympathetic dystrophy was considered incurable, but she was a vital athlete in her twenties whose life was debilitated, what I was doing wasn't working and when I stumbled on something that did work and I said why did that work and what is this big difference of working under water and out of water. So the same thing with studying another discipline for example developing the atlas work, seeing why are there so many schools of thought in the chiropractic community centered around the atlas that didn't make sense to me, that you could focus on one little area of the body and people could make a living just doing that. Because I was already aware of how things integrated, but when I studied what their belief system was and why they believed they were getting results and that they could actually show that they were getting results, in other parts of the body, then I realized how many systemic control mechanisms there were in the brain stem and the medulla and how important the reticular activating system is because it is the control center for tonus in the body. So with the basis of that new knowledge and excitement, then I started to see the potential that if this was treated more efficiently and integrated more than just focusing on doing a little adjustment of the atlas, it really taught me the value of the importance of this anatomy. I remember having a conversation with Dr Stan Pierce, who is recognized as a highly skilled atlas adjuster, the way he presented it was he said just think about a washcloth twisted at the top, it affects the whole washcloth, well that is what happens in the spine, only in the spinal column it is the size of about a quarter. There are 4 trillion neurons, imagine the potential for disrupting the whole electrical system in the body.. So once it was rational to me and the fact that could produce results, I felt that I could improve on those results by integrating other things that I already knew, just looking at the atlas and that it articulates with the occiput, so if the occiput is distorted then the atlas has to be distorted, and what's the greatest influence on the occiput, well it's the temporal bones. So then you start the whole snowball affect of seeing integration and the fact that in the temporal bones, the labyrinth is the control center for balance, is there and it communicates to the sacrum where the center of gravity is for the human body, and that's real integration. So it's always been this process of stumbling across something and asking why? Or getting excited about the existence of a group of knowledge and expanding upon it and being more efficient in treating a certain part of the body. In therapy you take what works and expand upon it - its' creation. I always know when I am on to something because I feel this internal energy coming out of me and it is exciting and fascinating and I know that I know that I am supposed to be pursuing this and immediately I start seeing the future, the potentials of it based on the existing knowledge base that I have.

So speaking of that energy, you have been in practice for over 30 years, you have developed 2 certification series of seminars, you have taught and lectured internationally, and you have revolutionized this industry, and you are about to launch Aquasomatics.......what is it that keeps you going, what drives you? In the field of bodywork, the lifespan is not very long but you have been doing this a long time. Where does this energy and excitement come from?

I think that because I have had the good fortune of treating people who are in pain and I was injured quite badly in Vietnam, and when I was out of pain, I was so grateful to be out of pain, just that bond that gratitude and satisfaction I get from helping another human being in pain, it's very satisfying to me, and when I am in the office I want to be busy, I don't like gaps in my schedule, I want to be treating people.....people are fascinating to me, I am the kind of person who would be bored if were doing just relaxing massage, not that I am against that and I do get relaxation massages for myself, but I like fixing people who are broken because pain can destroy your energy and enthusiasm for life, and when people get their life back you can see how much more productive they are and how much more fulfilling their relationships are, that is satisfying and exciting to me, to be a part of that healing process and I am very grateful to be a part of that process. That is what keeps me going, because pain in itself is a very creative process to get rid of it, and I think I have always been appreciative, it is an honor that people trust me with their bodies, therapy is a very intimate thing and once people realize that your motives are pure and you are there to serve them , they share incredible things about their lives with you, and how their pain and suffering has affected other parts of their lives, I feel very honored to be able to support their lives in that way. As I create new work I find that I am able to support more and more people, that's why literally when I started researching Aquasomatic therapy I had no idea how much easier it is to work under water, than fighting gravity, that was so fascinating at how different organs, like a kidney, so hard to get to on land because you have a small area between the thoraco- lumbar fascia and the ascending and descending colons to fit your hand in there, but in water you can separate tissues and get your hand around the kidney in a way you can't out of water, the fact that I can take almost the whole stomach in my hand, in water, you cant do that out of water, how pliable the whole body becomes, it gave me a whole new understanding of what it meant to be on the water planet to have this incredible resource all over the planet and yet we are not using it very efficiently. Always to make these discoveries, I have always been humbled and grateful to be a part of that process and to try to keep that very pure, keep that sense of gratitude, and that seems to be rewarded by being able to discover more things , because I am aware that if my ego gets out of control or I am the " doer" in this process that the process stops - it is very humbling to me to be the facilitator of the process and not really the creator of the process.

INT is not recognized by as many health care providers as it should be, why do you think that is? And how can the INT community create awareness within the medical community as well as with the general public?

In creating INT the vision has always been for me , I would rather create 10 people who know an entire system and practice the whole system, rather than create thousands of people who practice piecemeal, so in creating INT we wanted something that we could copyright and paten. It's a whole body of knowledge that is living, constantly expanding. But there are certain principles, such as measuring people in the world of form and function; these are some of the basic tenets in physics. Take for instance a NASCAR driver, if you change the form of that car, you change the way it functions. Well if you change the form of the human body you change how it functions as well. And particularly the cranium, or trauma to the organs, or the atlas because of how it can interfere with the function of the brain stem, those are key areas that are important, or you can make a case for the pelvis because it houses the center of gravity and the pelvis can flex, extend, obliquitize, shear, so it's really seeing how the body integrates, that's a key word, understanding how distortions in the pelvis wind up in the head or trauma to the head winds up in the pelvis, having the atlas distorted and knowing how many systemic control mechanisms there are in the brain stem is extremely important to understand. So the key word is integrate and to have a system, to have a body of knowledge that is alive and expanding. If you just create a body of knowledge and don't ever expand it that means you are not growing, I would hope that till the day I die I will still be curious and want to know more, I think my best asset as a therapist is I always ask the question, "Why?" and I am fascinated by how things integrate, particularly the body with the mind. How what people are thinking affects their bodies. There have been many aspects of bodywork that have gotten so caught up in the mind aspect that they don't see how different imbalances affect different parts of the body. I don't ever want to be in the position where I am playing amateur psychiatrist and lose sight of the fundamental fact that in manipulating the body we are like sculptors of the body and that the body always works best when it is in balance and equilibrium and to get more skilled at looking how to manipulate that balance between form and function.

So you think that treating this as a whole, that these complete therapists will help raise the awareness in the public and by working with other healthcare professionals, that we will be able to raise this awareness?

Yeah, and I think by creating certain research forums in the future and not being afraid to integrate with physical therapists or chiropractors, because the body of knowledge accumulated and skill set that we have as INTs can stand on it's own with any profession because, in being someone who has only treated people in pain my whole career, I have mostly seen other people's failures , people who were unsuccessfully treated by other disciplines, we don't have to tiptoe through the knowledge , be afraid to express what we do and why we do it, and a key thing is bringing an awareness to the medical and chiropractic profession. How many people are walking around with a short leg and how that influences the whole structure because people believe that imbalances in the body are mostly functional and that they can make legs grow, after people are done drawing, that they just analyze people laying down and think that people legs at different heights is mostly functional instead of structural. Just that one piece of knowledge can save hundreds of thousands of unnecessary surgeries, ruptured discs, herniated discs, real tragedy to joints disintegrating, that's a key piece of information. Almost 60% of the population are walking around with 5mm or more leg length differences, now that creates problems in terms of physics; joints wearing away, we will probably be the organization that brings this to light.

In what areas of medicine and health issues do you see the greatest potential for growth with INT?

Certainly trauma victims because you see this maximum medical improvement (MMI) on insurance forms, most of the people I have seen have reached their MMI and still we were able to get them a great deal of relief from their pain, the principles that INT is based on are so sound anatomically and physiologically that it's a matter of realizing that organs , the kinetic energy that goes into a trauma victim's body, that goes through the body, as in a car accident for example, just doesn't affect the muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia, but it also affects organs, so the organ massage work is incredible! Just this morning I saw a young man , a bicyclist who was hit by a car 5 years ago, immediately his stomach started bloating and this is 5 years, he has had no relief, in those 5 years he has seen 25-30 professionals in a lot of different disciplines, and not once did he ever receive organ massage. After the very first treatment when we looked at him there wasn't one horizontal line in his head, his temporal bones were tilting one way, frontal bone the other, his cranial base tilting another, he is a perfect example of how poorly trauma is treated - he reported this bloating to every one he has seen - and his stomach, small and large intestine, all extremely rigid and hard, very sensitive, that represents a real failure of our profession in physics, of how when this kinetic energy goes into the body it can rearrange the human form, the medical profession doesn't even recognize cranial manipulation and that you can move the cranium as readily as you can if you have good techniques. The importance of the atlas and un-twisting the brain stem, this young man got up and said I have just gotten more relief than I have in all the things I have done in the last 5 years, how is that possible? Well it's possible because we understand these forces in psychics and the integration between form and function.

So I think trauma victims are one and chronic pain patients are the other reason. Once you have suffered long enough you more or less are a pharmaceutical patient, really just anesthetizing the central nervous system as a formulized treatment is not the way to treat chronic pain, so I think those are the areas, but there are so many area. In the area of geriatric treatment, they are treated very poorly because they are not touched therapeutically; really we are on the basement floor on what service we can provide to humanity.

The certification process for becoming an INT is changing; how do you see the process of education and training, say in 5 or 10 years from now?

Well first of all they are going to get whole field of knowledge, we are going to stop the idea that people can take one or two seminars and then call themselves an INT therapist like they did with Neuromuscular therapy, that term and process became so bastardized over time that for example at one massage school in the Tampa Bay area, people took 4 hours of Neuromuscular training and put on their cards that they are NMTs. That bastardization took place all over the country - or we would have people take a portion of our work, rewrite a manual, tweak it a little bit , and call it something different. One is that we want to have a whole system, much the way Rolfers have done, they have a whole system and a whole body of knowledge, you can't call yourself a Rolfer if you just took a little bit of Rolfing. Well we see the wisdom and the value in that so we want to be able to have a system that if you apply he work accurately and with skill that you can duplicate the results, that puts you in a pretty lofty fraternity, gives you a certain amount of confidence, and then whatever other knowledge you get from any other system or body of knowledge is just gravy added to your basic skill set, but not having a basic system, or skill set, is probably the biggest weakness we had in NMT, it led to a lot of frustration because we would refer people to those we thought were practicing NMT and then they wouldn't measure people, and then they are just doing guesstimation work instead of that basic body of knowledge in how the body has been distorted. So I think in 5 or 10 years people will be very proud to be INTs. The training and testing that they undergo will have real meaning and value and will give them a set of skills that they can, anywhere in the world, integrate with health professionals no matter what their level of degree, M.D.s, Chiropractic, D.O.s, and be colleagues, not a lesser pee-on, because you are considered just a massage therapist. Because this work is very sophisticated and the result is second to none, so I see this coalescing, not that we will become a bunch of arrogant people who think we have all the answers, but that we do have some answers, and those answers are reproducible and can be applied to the suffering child, humanity. Pain is treated very poorly and dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. I don't think we've begun to touch the surface of the value of human touch.

So what are the new developments and treatments on the horizon for INT?

There are several, one that I have been working on for almost 5 years, Aquasomatic Therapy, that is the application of applying therapy under water, because once you do that you eliminate almost a ton of gravitational pressure on the human body - when that happens miraculous things happen, vessels dilate, joints decompress, you can see that in a basic water aerobics class where older people who walk and can barely move their hips and joints, and lower backs, suddenly they have a tremendous range of motion. That's different when they are on land, that ton of gravitational pressure, which according to the NASA website is 14.7 pounds of pressure per square inch of the body that is compressing us. So if you spend any time in water and then as you walk out and you suddenly feel your body is very heavy, until you get back to adjusting to the forces of gravity. Quite by accident I treated a person who had reflex sympathetic dystrophy, who had been injured quite seriously. A chronic pain patient for 7 or 8 years, she had been told by her third neurologist that she would need a morphine pump in her body for the rest of her life, because of her area of dysfunction in one of her legs, so acute that you couldn't even touch it. Quite accidently, I fell against her in a pool and I apologized because I knew I had hurt her and she said she hardly even felt it. And then touching her leg underwater which I could do, and then out of water which I couldn't do, I asked why? So that led us into researching and creating a table on which we can do therapy under water. I think this will revolutionize therapy as we know it on this planet Earth, I mean here we are on the water planet and we have barely begun to touch the surface of the value of doing therapy under water. That is a very big statement; I think it is true after applying this therapy for 4 years now.

The other more immediate thing is a nasal decompression program that we have developed and that has been developed. Just because we didn't discover, but looking at the palatine nerve which has an anastomosis to all of the other cranial nerves, why does nature do something like that? So we found that by decompressing the structures in the nose and influencing the breathing method that you can make systemic changes all over the body, so this Nasal Decompressing Program is something that we will be doing on the horizon.

Well thank you Paul for your time, you are truly an innovator in the field and I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with me today.