It Changes Lives

By Jinda Kelly

Author Jinda Kelly has wanted to be a doctor since childhood. Decades of medical training and clinical work have informed her lifelong search for the root causes of illness and further defined for her a fundamental difference between healing and curing. She now believes that the process of healing goes far beyond that of simply curing and requires something extraordinary.

In It Changes Lives, a wide range of modalities in holistic medicine were used to help patients in their healing processes, from orthodox to epigenetics, acupuncture to energy medicine, as well as homeopathy and nutritional approaches. She tells the stories of those people whose journeys she shared as they travelled through their illnesses, sometimes in cases where there did not seem to be a cure. From the leap of faith necessary to help the boy who kissed the duck to the understanding of Aboriginal spirituality that helped a woman recover her memory, these anecdotes describe those who made headway against chronic illness for which orthodox/allopathic medicine alone had no answers.

Inspiring to doctors and patients alike, this collection of personal narratives offers accounts of extraordinary healing through holistic medicine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504302128

Jinda Kelly

Jinda Kelly is a qualified medical doctor practicing in Australia. She has backgrounds in molecular biology, nutritional medicine, homeopathy, traditional East Asian medicine, and indigenous healing.

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Copyright © 2016 Jinda Kelly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0211-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0212-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 06/15/2016

Contents

Introduction

1.   The Boy Who Kissed a Duck and Changed My Life

2.   The Dizzy Paramedic

3.   Cheap Cheese!

4.   The Oppositional Defiant Teenager

5.   I Am Tired, Doctor

6.   Women’s Blood Mysteries

7.   Them Hairy Fellas

8.   Gurruuja Whale Tales

Glossary

Bibliography

Recommended Reading

Soul receives from soul that knowledge,

Therefore not by book nor from tongue.

If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind,

That is illumination of heart.

—Rumi, Soul Receives from Soul

Introduction

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. As a young child growing up in a Third World country, I always felt infinitely curious as to why people get sick. Such was my earnest desire to answer this question that I decided, in my childhood innocence, to simply go to the source. I approached a man with leprosy and sat and shared my kumara (sweet potato) with him as I pondered the conundrum (much to my mother’s horror when she later found out). Why was it that some people could come into such direct contact with leprosy and never get sick, while others could contract this sickness when they only seemed to look in the general direction of an ill person? It was a splinter that stayed in my mind throughout my formative years, and even into my medical studies at university—so much so that I deferred when I was only halfway through the course and took up studies in immunology and molecular biology in an attempt to wrestle deeper with this question. Yet a life in the laboratory wasn’t a career I was cut out to pursue. I instinctively knew that in order to answer my question I needed to interact with real people in the community who were grappling with illness in day-to-day life. Consequently, I abandoned any thoughts of a PhD and returned to medical school to finish my training.

Although I felt drawn to the role of the emergency doctor, I knew this alone wouldn’t suffice to help me answer the fundamental question of why people get sick. As an emergency doctor, you are right at the cliff’s edge, helping those who might fall, but it was much farther up the causative chain of illness than I knew I needed to be. Thus, I decided to become a general practitioner (GP) as my primary profession; more particularly, a rural GP, in order to cast my net wide and gain the broadest experiences I could as a doctor. Rural GPs are generally required to work in circumstances and situations with less peer support and with greater patterns of diversity, so they have the potential to become better all-rounders: i.e. they come to know a lot about a lot. Such doctors often display greater adaptability, forged from a broader base of experiential knowledge.

Winding the clock forward a few years, I found myself practising in exactly this position, and, particularly in those first years, on a steep learning curve. After I had found my feet as a new doctor, I decided I would survey my patients to see how many of them were actually getting better. What I discovered was that approximately 30 per cent of my patients were not getting better. Of course, there were exceptions, where stabilising patients or maintaining their current levels of health was a yardstick for improvement (i.e., they were not deteriorating). However, in many cases, the patient’s ill health had simply found a plateau and remained there, suspended, it would seem, from either improvement or deterioration by the standard medical approach employed by me.

Among the cases where patients began to improve was the handful that had made progress with assistance beyond that which I had given them. These included sessions in modalities ranging from acupuncture to energy healing and homeopathy, to name but a few. This of course was of great interest to me, and I would ask, How did you get better? What did you do? When my patient couldn’t tell me in the detail I required, I would turn up at the clinic of the acupuncturist¹ or the homeopath to ask for myself. These have been, and continue to be, deeply revelational experiences that have grown me as a doctor. Yet why do some doctors fail to enquire further when a patient improves through employing means outside those which they themselves have prescribed? Sadly, this attitude is a pitfall of the profession for some.

To be a doctor requires a certain trust in your own capacity. This steadfast belief in yourself is necessary in order to make the difficult decisions upon which lives may depend and also to offer an anchor of support for those seeking counsel. Yet this firm resolve can, in some cases, create a rigidity of thought that may lead to misguided self-certainty. I consider myself fortunate that a sincere curiosity to understand the roots of illness has given me an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. As a doctor who is searching for the root causes of dys-ease, I have endeavoured to foster the qualities of adaptability and flexibility, and I practise the path of humility so that I can continue to discover more.

As Socrates is reputed to have said, Wisest are they who know they do not know, and it is from this starting point that true knowledge begins. It has been conservatively estimated that of the 11 million bits (or units) of information that reach our senses per second, only 50 bits per second register in conscious awareness.²,³ Does this not then highlight the reality of just how little information we often act upon, and how much more there is to know? Could this imply that listening more astutely to our intuition or gut responses in a situation may in fact be based upon far more information than a rational decision alone? How can we apply this knowledge when we diagnose and treat patients?

In traditional East Asian medicine, diagnosis takes the form of listening with the whole body. The physician not only hears what the patient is saying but listens to the tenor of the patient’s voice, sees the colour tones of the face, is aware of the smell and the texture of the patient’s skin as they palpate the pulse and listen for further signs. Is the skin clammy or dry? What are the mannerisms of this person? Is his or her voice excessively loud or soft? Is he or she abrupt, dreamy, and so on? All this constitutes deep listening, and it continues in this manner throughout each examination of every patient.

Deep listening is a practice that I began to consciously develop after I first met the man who became my mentor. The very first time I laid eyes on him was in the driveway to my clinic, where he was waiting for me. You’re late! Wombol had chided me, with a stern face, despite the fact that I had never seen this man before and had no recollection of a prior engagement. He held my gaze a moment longer, and then suddenly he burst into a great belly laugh and slapped his thigh in mirth. And that was the beginning of what has become a most potent friendship in my life.

Wombol comes from the Gumbaynggirr nation of Aboriginal people in Australia, and the word used for the practice of deep listening is Ngaalgan, which means the quiet stillness and inner deep listening through which the way will be made clear.⁴ There is no doubt in my mind that this approach has deepened my insight into why people get sick and helped me to better assist patients in restoring health. He taught