Dr. Joe Tatta:
Okay everybody, welcome back to the Healing Pain Summit. I have a fantastic guest you today that’s been on my calendar for like two months and it’s going to be so powerful. It’s really going to help you on the way to healing your pain. Her name is Dr. Kim d’Eramo and the topic of the lecture today is how to instantly get out of pain using mind body medicine. So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Kim d’Eramo to get started. She is a physician speaker and a number one bestselling author of the Mind-Body Toolkit and founder of the American Institute for Mind-Body medicine. After healing herself from chronic pain, chronic illness using MINDBODY tools, she now empowers men to use the same tools to really shift their body chemistry and more important their brain activity to patterns that create health and wellbeing. d’Eramo conducts online group training programs and speaks internationally to doctors, medical students and the general public. And with that great intro, welcome to the young pain summit.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So great to be here, Joe. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Thank you. So I know a little bit about your history, but I want to share with everyone on the summit. So you are an emergency medicine physician as well as the trauma physician and it’s kind of a unique position cause you kind of, you have transferred or transitioned from that to come mind body medicine. What, what happened there?
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
It was a really interesting journey because before I went to medical school I was already very interested in how the body heals itself and what is going on in there. And when we have this placebo effect and you tell the person they’re going to get better and then they get better. And then these other people where they take all the pills in the world and they never get better and they have these chronic illnesses. So I was so intrigued by learning about what is going on that’s making that good outcome happen and how can we as doctors study that and implement that. And that’s where we should be pouring billions of dollars and research to find out like how to make that tweak. So we get that result because we do have the ability to heal ourselves. So in my experience in emergency medicine, I trained at Grady hospital at Emory University in Atlanta.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So it was a level one trauma center, really, really intensive critical care medicine and trauma surgery all day long. But I still saw that there would be some patients who would have great outcomes and other patients who it’d be like a disaster. And I could see that there was this difference in mindset, not just on the part of the patient. And yeah, I believe I can get better and so I’m going to get better. But also in the part of the team, the doctor team and the staff who were helping work on this patient, if we were connected and coordinated, it was like a magical symphony and things would go smoothly. But if there was discordance and people were really shut down to this kind of, this other level of connection that we have with each other, um, you know, we could, we could open that up or we could shut that off and it’d be like, Oh my gosh, this is such, this is so much work and then we’re not getting the results we really want.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So I began to really look at that. Like how do we have an effect on what’s happening around us and how do we have an effect on what’s happening inside us in our own bodies? And having come through the whole experience where, you know, doctors diagnosed me and told me I had this chronic illness and you’re going to have to be on medication for the rest of your life. And I’d previously been incredibly healthy running marathons, like just everybody would say like, where do you get all your energy? But this maybe two year period is about a year and a half to two years where I was just shot and it went to every doctor I could go to and nobody had a really good answer. You know, but he could tell me this is what’s going on and this is what you need to do.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
And when I finally got a solution, it was like, this is ridiculous. I have to take how many medications and this is going to be the rest of my life and I have to do what? And I was like, you know what? I’m not buying it. I think there’s something else. But the idea of I can heal myself. You know, I just didn’t have the tools. So if you think, well, I can heal myself so I should get better, like you’re in for a long haul because it’s like a beat down. I shouldn’t be sick. I should be better at this. So I decided that I wanted to first of all expand my practice to incorporate these principles, which had an amazing effect and helping my patients heal. And the second piece was to help teach people how they could reliably get that result reliably promote healing in their body, reliably increased their energy levels, reliably end pain and sometimes instantly. So those are the tools I’ve written about in my book. And that is what, what are we talking about here today?
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Excellent. Well, what I love so much about what you teach to people as people, how to heal, which is the power of their mind and nothing else. And I think when we talk about people who struggle with chronic conditions, and obviously chronic pain is one of them, that you’d expect that someone’s kind of going to slip you this white piece of paper and you’re going to bring in, you’re going to fill it for prescription and boom, you know, everything’s going to be solved. But you know, it’s so great because there were no side effects. The mind, body medicine, and I think that that’s the one, you know, big takeaway that you really offer people.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
One of the things to clarify too is that yes, I say, you know, if you can create this shift within your body will heal. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be modalities that you take advantage of that help you experience that feeling like it’s the difference between being disconnected. You’re not aligned with wellbeing and you’re trying acupuncture or chiropractic or physical therapy or medications or you name it and not getting better, versus you get aligned and either immediately it’s done deal, you’re well, or you get a chiropractic adjustment and now it’s good. Or you just find this one thing that’s like, Oh my gosh, if I take this greens supplement, I don’t have my allergies anymore and I’m healthy. But what I find when people do get aligned and in mind and body aligned with wellbeing, and we’ll, we’ll talk about what that means. That the solutions are incredibly simple and they are very quick. Like, it’s not like 10 years later I finally better. It’s usually immediate and they’re really, really simple. It’s not tens of thousands of dollars. And now I finally have this solution and kind of swimming around in this complexity of all the problems, um, that when you do get aligned, it’s amazingly, um, simplified what it takes to help you stay well.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
So talking about some of those success stories, um, can you share with us maybe a patient’s story or how you’ve seen people kind of reverse that chronic pain they’ve been suffering with
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
my favorite story. Well, my own story was really pretty notable too. Can you hear me okay because I know there’s like a rain storm here. My, um, my story was pretty notable but I have this other patient is one of my favorite stories because she was also a physician. She was diagnosed with thyroid disease. She was overweight, sluggish, had been like a couple of years, couldn’t lose weight and just trying so hard. I’m going to go out and run. I’m going to go out and run even though I don’t feel like it. I’ve got to keep running. I’ve got to keep this weight down. And she, you know, she was burnt out, didn’t have any energy. And finally they told her, yes, you have this steroid disorder, you have a nodule on your thyroid. They found it with the ultrasound. Her lab values were off. You’re going to need to go on thyroid medication.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
Now. She had depression. She had anxiety, her career, she was like just miserable in her career and things were falling apart and her relationship was like ending. I’m calling this whole thing off and in just, Oh, we’ve worked together for a couple of months, but in just that first month, because she had to go back for a recheck for the thyroid before they started the medication, she completely resolved all of the thyroid disorder starting shedding weight immediately. No more depression, no more chronic. She had like body pains and things like that that was over. And her relationship came back together. She had beautiful, beautiful marriage and her career started to Excel just in ways she hadn’t never even considered that this whole fallout had been happened, wasn’t the end of the road. It wasn’t a nightmare, was actually the best thing that could’ve happened. But it was in really reframing that, that she could see what was being orchestrated in her life and health wise, she had never looked back.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
She’s been healthy ever since. I know her very well. She is. Um, you know, she shed the weight, she’s held it off. She doesn’t have thyroid disease. And that was a little bit of a cool story because you know, she never needed to go on all these medications and she just, she doesn’t need to get tested anymore. But all of these things that were just like floating out in space, that depression and anxiety and the weight and the low energy were unmanageable. And the harder she tried to fight and just like make it better, the worst things got, which was like the same experience I had. I tried to fix myself and heal myself. You cannot fix yourself. You can’t fix any, he was a doctor. You cannot fix your patient. The best you can do is put a bandaid on it. But if you began to approach it with this mentality that we’ll discuss today, everything opens up because your body has the ability to rebalance in a way that allows it to heal. So how can I allow that myself is a totally different question than how can I fix the problem?
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Right? So it’s kind of becoming one with the process versus you know, going to someone expecting that they’re going to actually do something for you or to you to help you heal.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
Yeah. It is connected in your body so that it’s, it’s like, Oh, you know, I’ve got to do this thing and this is going to support me. I’m going to do this thing to support myself. I’m going to eat this food to support myself and it’s a whole different reality then, Oh my God, I can’t eat that and I can’t eat that and I got to go do this in a fight. So yes, it’s a major change.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
So let’s dive into maybe one or two they can share with us maybe one or two the strategies that you’ve used either with that patient who had thyroid issues or maybe another patient who was struggling. You know, with other chronic diseases,
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
there been so many different patients who’ve, who’ve consistently had the same results. Because we’re in, we’re working with the basic truths of the body, the trues of how the body heals. So I use this one technique called the instant elevation technique. And the instance elevation technique is based on the premise that most of what we’re doing is putting us in the fight or flight chemistry to stress chemistry that’s been shown to underlie every major illness known to man everything from diabetes, heart disease, stroke, overweight, cancer, but also things like fibromyalgia, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome. And that’s the inflammatory stress chemistry. When we’re in that inflammatory stress chemistry, we are creating physical disease cause our cells are being bathed in those chemicals. And we’ve even seen that that’s what turns the genes on for disease or turns the genes off that allows you to stay healthy is this chemistry that’s going on in yourself.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So you want to get out of fight or flight, but you can’t do that by trying to learn more or do more or work harder cause that’s just creating more stress. So the fastest way I have found to just snap you out of the fight or flight is this instant elevation technique. And the three components of it are really the whole underlying premise for everything that I teach. We go a lot deeper into it in the, in the book and in the, in the work, but we can touch on it really simply. So it’s a B, C aware, breathe, choose. So the first step is you become aware and you become aware of your body to center your attention, which is your energy on your physical body. Most of the time we’re walking around and worrying about what happened or I can’t believe this person said that, or why did I do that thing?
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
And you’re creating more stress chemistry cause you’re living in the past. Anger is a result in emotional frequency that you’ll feel if you feel anger a lot is because there’s some part of you that’s in the past playing a record of something didn’t go the way I wanted it to go or something happened that I didn’t want to happen. And part of your energy still back there. So when you bring your awareness into your body, you actually release that. Just let it dissolve and you bring your attention right here. Right now. You can’t be in both places at once. So you consciously do that. Sometimes if you’re anxious or fearful, your is off in the future. So worrying about what’s going to happen or what I have to do next or how am I gonna handle this thing obviously creates the stress chemistry. So you can’t just say like stop worrying about things.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
You can only do a proactive thing to anchor your energy into a new mindset, a new awareness and a new level. So you just bring your awareness into your body so your body only lives in the now so you feel your body right. And I could ask you how you feel emotionally. Most people will be like, I have no idea what I feel emotionally. But you can feel yourself physically and start practicing bringing your attention into your physical body. And you know, how do my shoulders feel? Is there tension in my neck? Is there anything going on in my low back? A lot of times people carry attention in these areas that will get your attention and that’s fine. Just get your attention in your body. The second piece is breathing. When with stress and creating all that inflammatory chemistry, we are breathing into the chest and it’s shallow breathing and it’s chest breathing. So you don’t realize you’re doing that. But I’m even like when I had my private practice, sometimes all I would do is help a patient to change their breathing. And it’d be like, Oh my gosh, like this is a whole new world. I’ve never felt this way. So you want to bring your breath all the way down to your belly and just try this with me. You just take a slow deep breath in through the nose
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
and bring it all the way down, relaxing your shoulders, relaxing your chest, and bring it down to let your belly balloon out as you inhale and then exhale and let your belly sink back in. Connects, heal through the mouth or through the nose. And you do three breasts like this. So let the belly balloon out, relax your chest, and then just exhale. Let your belly sink back in and then do one more slowly. Breathing in, let the belly expand and then exhale and relaxed. Just let it come back in. You practice and you get better at this. So it just becomes a natural way. You’re always living. But what happens when you do this and not only changes, you know, you get a little more oxygen, but it turns off the fight or flight nervous system that’s located up in the chest and the back of the rib cage.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
All those nerves kind of keep firing, keep firing as if you gotta, you’re running from the tiger, you gotta do this thing. Oh my gosh, it’s not going to be okay. You’re constantly living in reactivity such that if I asked you like stop and take three breasts, no, no, no, no, no. I can’t. I have to do this other thing and I have to, I’m so busy, I got to take care of everything. But when you learn to do it, you immediately turn that off and you realize like it literally evaporates. What was I so worried about?
Dr. Joe Tatta:
What’s amazing to me is something that is so automatic, like breathing. Yeah, we kind of lose control of him. You have to kind of teach ourselves to come back to that very primitive, very primal thing. But that alone could be the one step that takes you from painful to pleasurable. That side, it decreases
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
your pain response. So what this does when you get out of the fight or flight is it not only shuts out the stress response, it makes you, um, you know, like your pain receptors are firing up and they’re flared up and all that stress chemistry makes that more flared up. So you literally, it’s like internal endorphins. Your body starts to secrete endorphins, oxytocin, dopamine, all of the things that turn off pain. So if you want to help you have an internal pharmacy, how do you ignite it? Well, you don’t just hit the button for dopamine and take a pill. Like you literally help your body to create it internally and breathing this way. Bringing your awareness into your body, feel your body, and then slow and deepen your breathing is the quickest way that I have found to help people activate that chemistry, that feeling chemistry, that will immediately decrease pain.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
I think. That’s great. So how many times would you recommend that they practice the breathing and the intention? I have people set their alarm when they first learning those three times a day. So like 10 o’clock, two o’clock, five o’clock whenever you want to spread it out in your day because you’re walking around in your day and you’re creating all this stress chemistry and you’re living in reaction and you just experienced this urgency, which is why you know as your mind goes, your body follows. That’s why you start to breathe in that faulty way. You start to read like you’re running from a tiger, you gotta retrain your body. And the first time I’ve had people do this to like, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to read through my belly. It’s okay. The best way to practice is to imagine that you are.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So if you just close your eyes and you just imagine that you inhale and your whole chest relaxes and your belly just balloons out and then you just imagine you exhale and your belly sinks back in and you stay relaxed. It doesn’t have to be actually happening in physical form because as your mind goes, your body will follow. Your body. Does have the ability to relax certain muscles and contract other ones and you don’t have to figure it out and try really hard to make it happen. You can use your at your visualization, you can imagine it and allow your body to follow and that will shift your breathing. So that’s a second piece. That’s B, a, B, C, C is your choice. So what am I going to choose if I remember that I have a conscious choice over everything I’m experiencing? Oh my gosh, I’m so fired up and I’m upset and I want to feel a sense of peace and serenity, or I’m in so much pain and I want to feel relaxed and comfortable.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
You make a conscious choice to let, now that you’ve brought your attention, your energy, your personal power into your body, where is the only place you can ever access it? You’ve slowed your breathing and got out of the fight or flight stress response. Now you can command a choice and let your higher mind know your body’s wisdom is constantly creating, but you’re not realizing that you get to be in command. So if you’re doing affirmations like I’m pain-free, I don’t have disease, I feel great, it’s not going to do anything because you’ve got to get your awareness, your, you’ve got to pull back your personal power that’s already out there creating chaos and call it back in so you can give it a new command and that’s where the empowering choice really has immense impact. I’ve seen people clear like decades and decades of this like, God, I feel like such a victim in my health. I’ve been paying all the time. I’m on all these medications. I’m doing everything right. I’m trying so hard, what’s going on? And you feel like a victim. I’m just a victim to my fill in the blank of the illness that’s been diagnosed with, but you can call your energy back to create something new and this is the fastest way that I found to help you collect that and use it for your own healing.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
What do you love about that? Is that I sit in all branches of medicine probably except for psychology. You’re focused so much on the body and so much on physical symptoms as well as you know, or the systems with that we have within our body. But we really don’t say, Hey, the one thing that’s guiding all of us is actually our brain. So why don’t we start there?
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
We’ve only in the last five years have we done all this research and uncovered the power that the mind has on the body. It’s been there for thousands of years and old other cultures and ancient practices. But in conventional Western medicine, it’s so new. So we’ve, we’ve been able to see chemically, we’ve been able to see in research, we’ve been able to see what’s going on in the brain firing and how powerfully this affects everything going on in the body. Like I said, even the genetic code expression, and none of this has been integrated in the foundation of clinical medicine. So we’ve got the last five years of what we’ve discovered is outweighing is more than what we’ve known about how the mind works and the mind’s impact on the body and all of the history of medicine before that. And none of it’s been incorporated into conventional practice. So that’s why people will say, well, why didn’t my doctor tell me this? How come my doctor doesn’t know about this? You got to have a pretty forward thinking doctor to be digging into this very unconventional way of thinking and understand what is really going on.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
So I guess that brings me to the next question then, and I know it’s a really tough question, but how do we begin to kind of change this paradigm of around that, you know our thinking that the mind and the body are kind of separate and you hear people use the term mind, body medicine. But if we look at traditional medicine today, we’re still really all practicing in our own silos. You know the physical therapist is doing one thing, the nutritious is doing another thing. You know the mind body medicine psychologists is doing another thing. How do we start to bring everyone together? Because I really think you can’t, you can’t have them separate. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work
Dr. Kim d’Eramo: (20:24)
the best way for us to really connect because everyone’s finding out the same truth. When you connect with the body and you connect with the wisdom of the body. It’s one truth that’s operating for everyone and that’s why you know, I was trained as an osteopathic doctor and in a foundation of osteopathic medicine, the body can heal itself. The structure and the function are related. Meaning if I move my body around a certain way, it’s going to change things chemically and that the mind and body are connected. But then you look at like the foundation of chiropractic foundation of acupuncture, the foundation of natural apathy. They all have the same innate understanding of how the body heals and what to do with that, how to ignite that because we’re all looking at, we’re studying the same system in conventional Western medicine, we have arrived at things in a very different way.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
We’ve looked at like, what can I see under the microscope and that’s what I can now believe and implement and nothing else. So when we look at organic, we look at nature. I’m just going to study nature. Get connected in your body. You will arrive at the same conclusions. You don’t have to believe me. You’re going to have to just, okay, I’m going to take it at face value. She sounds good. No, just work it in yourself. Connect in your own body and listen to your own wisdom. That’s my greatest strength and talent as a doctor can only be to connect you with your own higher wisdom. You have a guru in there, you have an inner physician and that is the greatest gift that I can give you is to connect more fully with that force, with that intelligence and let it guide you, let it help you come to your own conclusions and yeah, the natural progression of that is you collaborate with like minded people and everyone’s in the same, in the same fields and everyone’s discovering the same kind of thing from a different perspective.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
I mean, I love the guests that you have, especially in your new booking. Tell us a little bit about your new book.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
The mind body toolkit is, it’s got 10 easy tools that I’ve used and I’ve used them with like all my patients. Even just one of them will change your life. Just practice one of them. And so many people have told me like, I got your book. This has been the most amazing week of my life because I keep really nurturing myself with it and it’s changed everything. And it’s the foundation of the work that I do in my group work online with patients. I guide people to use this more specifically with their work. But it’s to instantly increase your energy, enhance your productivity, because you’re changing what’s going on in your brain. You tap into your genius idea. Not like, let me just work harder so I can make more money. No. Where’s my billionaire idea? Like how can I be at that level? It changes what’s happening in your brain. And too, I’m into reverse disease. It’s going to change. Your genetic code. Expression is just going to can change your chemistry. It’s going to change your pain sensitivity and what’s happening within your body. So the tools are amazing.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
So if people want to connect with you and learn more about not only your book but about how they can work with you. Can you share with us your website and then where where you are?
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
I met Dr. Kim deramo.com and you can go to Dr. Kim d.com for short. Do you like do it dynamo, Dr. Kim D. dot com but I had a special, do you want me to tell them about the, I have a special, I put together a gifted, one of the reasons Joe, I don’t know if you’re familiar with EFT, Meridian tapping, EFT tapping. I found to be one of the most powerful mind body tools and I use it almost all the time. And so you gotta learn a little. I knew we wouldn’t be able to get into it here too much, but I put up some training and it’s part of my online program, the mind body solution. And this was like a bonus section I did. So I created a prescriptive tapping sequence for anxiety, for pain, for depression. And you basically just do like gentle percussion in different areas of your body.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
It turns off at the brain chaos that’s already going on. So now you can put more information, good information in and instill a sense of calm and wellbeing that happens immediately. So I have some training for EFT to, to teach them a little bit about how it works, what’s going on in my brain, and then the tools of really simply beginning to use it for yourself. So they’ll get that training. Um, and then they will also get to get the instant elevation technique. I did a video to bring them much more in depth with how they’re going to use that. And then there’s a self diagnostic quiz that I used with a lot of people to kind of, what’s the core that’s really holding me back. And there’s three different profiles I found most people fit into that is the greatest block to their success, the greatest block to their health that’s causing them to be in that repetitive pain pattern over and over and nothing’s helping.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
So that’s a diagnostic quiz and the link is Dr. Kim D. dot com healing pain, Dr. Kim, D. dot com forward slash healing pain. So you can go and get them free gifts there and I can’t wait to see how people begin to use it. Especially like the EFT with pain. It is amazing. I had one guy with a decade of severe chronic low back pain in four minutes we got him a hundred percent pain free and he was not a believer. He’s like, I don’t know about, he was an MD psychiatrist. He’s like, I don’t know about this cognitive stuff, I don’t need that. And we overrode his pain and or minutes and he has been changed forever since.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
But that’s amazing. And there’s even some good evidence based research on EFT.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
I’m presenting at an international emergency medicine conference in September in Rome to teach ER doctors about EFT tapping and breaking the pain trauma. It’s the trauma pain sequence, trauma pain, anxiety sequence that we see so many patients come to the ERN, they’ve all have anxiety, they all have pain. And it’s been some kind of like trauma that’s happened either physically, mentally, emotionally. So doctors are embracing these modalities and it’s, it’s time because people really, really need this healing.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Yeah. And that trauma connection could be a recent trauma or trauma from long ago,
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
decades, or it could be something you don’t even remember that your life, I’m carrying that and it comes up, you move it and it’s like, wow, I don’t have pain anymore.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
So this has been Dr. Kim d’Eramo. You can find her on her website. Please download our free giveaways. It’s been an incredible, powerful interview with you today. Once again, give us your website so everyone knows where to find you.
Dr. Kim d’Eramo:
It’s Dr. Kim D. dot com and if you go to Dr. Kim d.com board slash killing pain, you will get the bonuses and we’ll go forward from here.
Dr. Joe Tatta:
Okay, great. So this has been Joe Tatta and Dr. Kim d’Eramo today on the Healing Pain Summit. And we’ll see you in the next session.
