Gladden longevity — Episode #63

Steve Reiter: Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, founder and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show, we want to answer three questions for you: How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? And how do we live well beyond 120? We want to help you optimize your longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information. Now, here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, founder and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show, we want to help you optimize your longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering three questions: How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? And how do we live well beyond 120? I'm Steve Reiter and, Dr. Gladden, we just got done with Dr. Howard Cohn, who has a clinic in Southern California, and he's doing-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: He's doing some fascinating things there in Costa Mesa, right?

Steve Reiter: Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It was a really fascinating conversation. Yeah, we got into some areas that I didn't know we were going to get into. If you want to talk about healing at a profound level, emotional healing, healing the things that are held inside the body, and ways to actually go in and basically move past those things, liberate yourself from some things that are holding you back in your life and your health, is a fascinating conversation. I think people are going to really love it.

Steve Reiter: Yeah, he was talking about neuro-emotional technique, and I've done something kind of similar with something called Psych-K and seen profound changes in my life, my emotional state.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Cool.

Steve Reiter: So, I'm really interested in learning more about this, and so listeners definitely want to listen. We also, in the Age Hackers Plus section, we talked about quantum neurology, and so for people that are interested, ‘Hey, what's quantum neurology?’ be sure to subscribe to Age Hackers Plus, and there you can check it out.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yep, absolutely. Fun stuff.

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. I'm here with Steve Reiter. Steve, today we have Dr. Howard Cohn with us today. Howard is a really interesting guy. He has a Bachelor of Science and Biology that he earned in 1986 at the State University of New York, but he did his doctorate in chiropractic in 1989 in LA and then went on to do a lot of other certifications, one of which was done at the International College of Applied Kinesiology, where he continues to be a board member. Dr. Cohn, you've done some very interesting work in the way that you've layered together technologies, I'll call them, and approaches to heal people at the Cohn Health Institute, and I just want to welcome you to the show.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Well, thanks, Dr. Gladden. It's great to be on this show. I've heard great things for so many times, if you will. I've watched a lot of your podcasts, and every single time, I'm thrilled with the information that we're getting, and I've referred a lot of people to it, so it's a pleasure being here with you.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, I appreciate that. We're trying to democratize the information. So,  tell us a little bit about the Cohn Health Institute and what your overall, overarching approach is there. But after you do that, I want to get into some of the emotional and quantum neurology things that you're doing. But what's the big overview to start?

Dr. Howard Cohn: Well, the big overview was to really create what we call an oasis where people can go to realize that, as we say, there are no incurable diseases and only incurable people. If you want to get better, you can. You just have to subscribe to the things that are available to help you get through it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Love that comment. Let me just interrupt you for a second.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Yeah, go ahead.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: It's such a great comment because we're always the limiting factor in our lives, for sure. What we believe is such a limiting factor, as well. So I love that idea that there are no incurable diseases, only incurable people, which really boils down to incurable mindsets, if you will, mindsets that refuse to be cured or whatever. Is that what you're thinking?

Dr. Howard Cohn: A hundred percent. And the thing is, we don't know what we don't know until we find out that we didn't know it. There's none of the stuff that I do in practice, and my physicians and staff and docs and practitioners do that I even knew existed when I was a youth, if you will. My mom was a nurse, and I thought I knew what health was. I thought it was that if I was bitching about something, I would go to the bathroom, open up that cabinet, and there'd be some pharmaceutical to get me to stop bitching of whatever I was doing. My mom taught me what do I take for a headache. What do I take for my stomach? What do I take if I have this problem, that problem? And what I realized is that that was not... As I got older, I'm not creating any health, but it was what we call ‘disease or symptom management’, and we wanted to...

My start was when I was 16 years old. I happened to, at a Career Day in my high school, not even knowing what I was going to do with my life as a 16-year-old, that I actually had an opportunity to attend a presentation from a chiropractor, which I did not know or have any understanding of what a chiropractor did, or why they did what they did. But I had never met anybody more excited about what they did in their life. This guy said he would pay to do what he did, and most people and most doctors I met were just trading time for money. They were not... A lot of my dad's friends were doctors, and they hated it. They were just miserable, and they were surrounding themselves with things every day that were not exciting.

And this guy was just the most exciting person I've ever met. And really, he explained the philosophy of what he was doing, why he was doing it, and how it changed his life. And I went home that day and told my parents I was going to be a chiropractor. I thought my mom was going to fall over. She planted the seed by calling me "her son, the doctor" so many times when I was a little kid. And so, as we say, we rebel against our parents, so I became a chiropractor.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. All right. Well, good for you. Good for you. So yeah, that's interesting. I got a little bit of that same messaging coming through, for sure. Mom wanted me to be a doctor.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Here we are.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, I wasn't so sure about it, but she was.

Dr. Howard Cohn: That's right.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Good stuff. Okay, so you did that, you got your degree, and then obviously, you evolved into some other things, so things have progressed a lot since then.

Dr. Howard Cohn: A hundred percent. The advice I got when I went to school was that I should go to the clinic and I should see who people are standing in line to see and find out what they were doing that no one else was doing. And then the focus on nothing but those two... Ask them what the two biggest... Focus on what they were doing, but him or her, whoever was, what the two biggest weaknesses were in the school, and to focus on nothing but that. And when I did, I remember the person who it was had really standing room only in the clinic, and this person was the best with their hands, and they knew something called, they did something called ‘applied kinesiology’, which I had never heard of. And to be honest with you, I went to a lecture on the subject, and I actually walked out after 20 minutes because I thought it was ridiculous. We jokingly say now, growing up in New York, we come out of the womb with our arms crossed. So, there's like our opinion... I'd never seen anything like it. It looked ridiculous. The whole thing... To this day, I've been doing it for 36 years. It still looks ridiculous, but the results are unparalleled. So, I had an opportunity to-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Well, let's talk about this. Sorry to interrupt you. Let's talk about-

Dr. Howard Cohn: No, go right ahead.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: ... About kinesiology for a second because that's an abstract term, probably, to most of the listeners.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, tell us what you're talking about.

Dr. Howard Cohn: "Kinesiology" is the study of muscles; "applied" means we apply it to your body where we use your body like a computer and your muscles like a keyboard, and we just access information. A lot of it's based on traditional Chinese medicine and the meridian system. And what we're doing is we're looking at the body through three lenses: the physical body, the biochemical-nutritional body, and the mental-emotional body, knowing that anything can cause anything in the human body. And so, our goal is, using this biofeedback muscle strength testing, if you will, to get real-time information as to not only what are weak areas, but what are the priorities that the body has, and also to get feedback on what is the best in intervention at that moment. Is it something nutritional? Is it something medical? Is it something physical? Is it something neurological? Is it something physiological? And then, we have a host of different interventions that really up-regulate the nervous system and restore functional health.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Let me interrupt you again just for a second, so the audience can visualize this. Describe to us what you would be doing. I'm familiar with it from the standpoint of you can put a supplement in someone's hand, and then you can see what their strength is relative to their ability to resist you, say, pushing their arm in a particular direction, things like that, muscle testing, if you will. But just walk us through what that might look like, so the audience has some sense of what's going on here.

Dr. Howard Cohn: There's a huge, let's say, clinically reproducible way of doing it. And then a lot of us have seen people do different things like that. So, traditionally, although you can test muscle, you're testing the strength of a muscle. Let's say I have somebody hold their arm out, and we're testing, they're resisting it; we're trying to push it down, they're holding it up. So what we do is, in what you described, they can hold something. Let's say they held cane sugar in their hand. Well, most people, not everybody, most people would go weak on that. And if you held something in their hand, filtered water, then most people would strengthen on that. Meaning one is good for them and one is not good for them. However, there are more accurate ways to do it. It's best to salivate it, put the supplement, the whatever you're testing, in somebody's mouth.

Sometimes you can't do that. Sometimes we're testing homeopathic remedies and homeopathic vials. So we have thousands of what we call "tester vials," and in that vial could be the frequency of, let's say, a different infectious agent, toxic chemical, heavy metal, anything that could really affect the human body. And we're looking for feedback. If something weakens somebody, we want to see, does it have anything to do with what's going on with their body. So, let's say, for example, somebody's holding a vial of mercury, and they came into the office because they were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And then we would run, also, maybe a 24-hour urine test or a naturopath would, or we would run a hair analysis, and mercury, let's say, would be off the chart. And then we would look at their dental history, have them open their mouth, take pictures of their mouth, and they have this hunker mercury amalgam filling in a molar, that if you pulled it out and dropped it in a 10-acre lake, the EPA would condemn the lake as toxic from mercury. And yet, dentists have put it in people's mouths since the beginning of time.

So, that's one of 10,000 different examples. And then we would look to verify it by holding the vial of, let's say, mercury. And then we would look to see what would offset it. We can test, you're holding the vial mercury, then you're holding a vial of, let's say, a cilantro or chlorella or some Chinese herb that detoxifies metal or a metal binder, or any of these carbon-based things or zeolite, whatever they would test on, in the right person, match their physiology. We can get feedback on what would help them, let's say, detoxify that from their system. Because even if somebody upgraded their mouth, they went to a biological dentist, they cleaned out their amalgam, it's still in their tissues, it's stored in their fat. There are ways to test it. And we do demos. I do demos all the time. On our website, you can see me... A picture's worth a thousand words. So, for 35 years, up until the last few years, I did a health class every week where we demoed this recently. I just shot all videos of it and put it up on our Cohn Health Institute website where your viewers could watch me demonstrate it and walk through the physical part, the nutritional part, and the emotional part because, again, it does look wild when you see it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Well, one of the beauties of it is, it's like real-time diagnosing, and it's real-time feedback in terms of what's going to be helpful or beneficial. And I think being able to close the loop on that... And if I'm not mistaken, there are some people that learn to even do this themselves at home, where they can have somebody push on their arm if they're holding something.

Steve Reiter: Or, what I was taught was two finger loop.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yes, yes.

Steve Reiter: You can do it that way.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yes.

Steve Reiter: See if you can pull it apart or not.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yes.

Dr. Howard Cohn: That's what's called an O-ring... Yeah, that's called an O-ring test. You can test like this. So, we have quite a bit, especially 10x more now in the last few years, remote clients, patients, if you will, where we're having to test people. And it sounds, again, wild that we can test and get feedback, but it's no different than the fact that the three of us are talking right now, and we see each other with crystal-clear clarity. There's a cloud for a computer, there's a morphic field, if you will, it's called, in the energetic field that we all can interact with. It's how remote viewers see things. It's how people get information and how people feel things when their kid is in an accident in Alabama, and they're in Chicago, and they just knew it. It's the same thing. We just have... It's like a dog whistle. Just because we don't hear it doesn't mean the frequency or the signal is not sent.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, we're talking about physiologic things impacting the body that are being detected through the applied kinesiology, the muscle testing, the muscle strength testing, we'll call it. What about emotional states? What about if someone's feeling anxious or depressed, or there's an event in their life, or a person in their life or things like that? Is it possible to now move this more into the space of psychology or psychiatry, or neurology? What are your thoughts about that?

Dr. Howard Cohn: Well, our clinic at the Cohn Health Institute has become quite known worldwide for something called NET, which stands for Neuro-Emotional Technique. There was a recent documentary done on it called "Stressed," and anybody can watch it. They came to our office and interviewed a lot of our doctors. I think we have more certified NET practitioners in our office than any office on the planet now. And it's dramatic. When people get it done, their comment is, "It's like six months of therapy in a minute." It's not psychology, it's not psychiatry, it's not social... It's not any of those things. It's what's called ‘the physiology of emotions’ that we're dealing with when we do it.

So, basically, the origin is, in Chinese medicine, we have what's called the five-element theory, and we have earth, fire, metal, wood, and water, and every single element has certain meridians in it. And each meridian has specific emotions related to it. So for 5,000 years, traditional, classically trained Chinese medical physicians knew that if someone was angry, frustrated, or had aggression, and they were not expelling this emotion, but they were holding it inside, they would have liver issues. If they had grief or sadness, or yearning, they would have lung issues. If they had low self-esteem and hopelessness, they would have pancreatic or splenic issues, and on and on and on.

Then there was a doctor in San Diego, California, about 40 years ago or so, who had that observation with studying Chinese medicine and also setting the observations of Ivan Pavlov, who was not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. He was a physiologist from Russia, famous for his Pavlov dog studies, where he coined the term ‘conditioned response’. And those two philosophies were put together with functional muscle testing, applied kinesiology, and something called neuro-emotional technique, which is now practiced by medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, chiropractors, and therapists around the globe. So it's looking at the physiology of emotions. And why it works so fast is because emotions are really physiological, not psychological. And what I tell patients is this is that-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Let me just interrupt for a second because that's an interesting point. It's an interesting point because many people have probably heard that when something happens to us, we carry it in our bodies. It left an emotional scar, so to speak, or there's an emotional trauma, even a trauma response to it. But we carry it in our bodies, so to speak, and when we're re-exposed to it, we feel it in the body. You can tell. It's a little bit of this go-with-your-gut kind of sensation as to what you're feeling. So it's kind of an expansion on that, that these emotional states and traumatic experiences are stored in the body to some extent. So now, okay, so if that's a given, that we are storing these things in our body, and it could be particular organs, or muscle groups or posture or lots of different things get brought into play, then if you're using the technique, the NET, then how is it that you're correcting? How are you diagnosing and correcting it in short order? Walk us through that a little bit.

Dr. Howard Cohn: It's semantics. So, it's really important that people understand the concept, the aerial view of it. So, how emotions work is what you don't express, you'll repress till it expresses this disease or dysfunction. Like Woody Allen used to say, "I never get angry, I just grow a tumor." And everyone goes, "Ha-ha," right? But it's really like that. And so, basically, it's done through verbal, didactic interaction.

For example, let's say somebody comes in and they have Crohn's disease, and they're bleeding out their rectum. They have a full-on situation. And so, we do something called therapy localization, which is, I can test, let's say, the strength of a muscle. I can put my hand on, let's say, in that case, a sigmoid part of the colon over my gut, and it'll weaken the muscle. And then what we do is we take their other hand, we put on their forehead, which is right where your frontal eminence and your frontal bone is, and it'll make it stronger. So, one makes it weak, and the other one makes it stronger, which tells us that there's an emotional relationship to what's going on with the colon. If it didn't make it stronger, then we would go on and run allergy panels and see what they're eating that's ripping their gut up or all that kind of stuff.

But let's say it did. And then we say there's an emotional relationship to it. So, why this works is these are really emotional reflex points. If you took a thermoser, which is a sensitive thermometer, held it on your stomach, and put your hand here for 20 seconds, you'd see the temperature over your stomach rise because it's an increase in blood flow and a relaxation point. These are old-time, what they call ‘neurovascular points’, right on your forehead. So, if we use those points, too, as biofeedback... Again, it locks them in, and it puts them in the state.

It would be like if I'm on my computer, it has all these different events that... Our body's a bio-computer. It stores every single thing that's happened in our life. That doesn't mean they're firing off at once, but otherwise, we would not be able to function in our world. But we have these things in our life called ‘significant emotional events’. It's the thing that happened when I was two or five or 12, but I held onto it.

And then we have what's called ‘triggers’. Triggers are people or things that trigger us, right? And it's biologically there. If I'm three years old and I see the pretty red light in the kitchen, and I go, "Oh, let me touch the pretty red light," it turns out it's a hot stove, and I burn myself. A week later, I'm walking in the kitchen, and I see mom left a red pot holder out, the stove's not on, but every time I go by it, I'm flinchy. Didn't tell myself to be flinchy; it's unconscious to me.

And this is what people awaken to. They don't know that they're in their own way, or they have their own pattern going on. And if they do, we're looking to break it up. So, let's say soon as they touch their colon in this case, and here, we take their hands off. And then what I will do, no kidding, testing their muscle, and I'm saying different emotions related to, in this case, the colon. So, colon emotions are things like dogmatic positioning, crying, grief, and sadness. So let's say it's sadness. When I say sadness, their arm goes weak, and they're like, "Oh my God." So, we're putting them in the state where they think they're that age. So I'll immediately say to them... Again, the goal is not to do the Dr. Phil thing and pretend to know everything about their life in three minutes. We're not psychoanalyzing anything. We're looking for where there's a neurological break that has an emotional attachment to it.

So when I'll say, "Of all the things going on in your life right now..." Let's say this was Steve. I go, “money, job, finance, career, relationship, family. What are you sad about?" And they would say different things. It's usually the first thing that pops in their head. But if it's not that, then I'll keep testing to find the right thing. And then we're going to see what it triggers in their past. So we're going to actually, again, verbally say, "Let's go back to your past." It'll go weak. And we start at the beginning, is it prior to conception? Because you'll inherit eye color, hair color, and high blood pressure tendencies. You can inherit emotional baggage. In the Bible, it says, "You'll inherit the sins of the fathers." There's enough documentation of the genetic part.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Well, yeah, this is epigenetics. And this is what's documented, that it's handed down over three to four generations, quite honestly, before it might get washed out.

Dr. Howard Cohn: You know. There's some as that. So, we got to get to the very first, otherwise, it's like mowing your own lawn to get rid of your weeds and think your weeds are gone. They're not gone because you got to get to the root, what's called that ‘significant emotional event’, where you did not release it. And again, in their life, it's manifesting a one or two things, either a health problem or a behavior or a lid in if they're trying to achieve something or trying to... I had a patient yesterday who should be breaking her record on her track team but is not. So when we test her, it's not the function of her body. It's not what's going on biochemically. We got her on all these different things. It really came down to her head space of what she believed and her relationship to the person who she'd be breaking the record of, who was a friend of hers. And unconsciously, she didn't want to take something away from them.

We all know the Roger Banister thing. Nobody ran a four-minute mile because they thought the blood and their lungs were going to explode. Soon as he did it. Now everybody that year running a four-minute mile; it was their consciousness that changed. So, that's how it is. And then we would trace it back. So, let's say in this example, we would go from conception to birth, birth to five, whatever. Because you could also... You're in your mom for nine months, so if she's going through something, you're feeling her stuff, and it might not be you.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Do you have a way to actually get at what was happening to people in utero?

Dr. Howard Cohn: Yeah. Yes. So, for example, I'll tell you one of the things that come up the most when you see people that have been everywhere and done everything, they have something called ‘a vanishing twin’. There are books written about... There's even a psychological diagnosis code right now for-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: What's called... A vanishing what?

Dr. Howard Cohn: A vanishing twin.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Twin.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Twin. In utero, for every set of twins you see walking around, there's so many that have been conceived but never came to fruition if you were birthed. Usually, within the first 90 days, they're not formed, there's some genetic defect, there's whatever, and they're just resorbed in their mom's endometrial tissue, and maybe mom spotted, and that's where your brother went when she was three months pregnant. Or it just gets absorbed in the first period. And then that's when it comes out. And there are all kinds of data about that. And there are books written about vanishing twins.

So, what'll happen is, you're starting the world with another person next to you, and then they're not there at two months, three months, four months, and then we have these things happen in people's life. "Well, why can't I have a relationship that lasts longer than three months?" Some people have guilt complexes because someone died because they could live because they thought they were eating all the food in utero. Other people have things where they become overachievers because they're living for two because someone died so they could live. Other people go, "Why am I here? God took the other child, but I'm here." This is crazy. It's crazy. But if I didn't see it a thousand times, I wouldn't have brought it up.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's fascinating.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Dramatic.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: I've not heard about the vanishing twin before. It just hasn't crossed my radar. But that's a really interesting thing. But how do people get in touch with that? How do you ferret that? You just ask them, do you have a vision?

Dr. Howard Cohn: We're asking the body. What we'll do is, let's say it finds out that it's in utero, then I'll get it to the month, first month, second month. Usually, if it's like the eighth or ninth month, it's not a vanishing twin unless that twin died, and they know it. And one of the most common things we'll hear when you do this work is, "Oh my God, nobody knows about that. How could you know about that? I've never told anybody." So, because the body stores everything, it's created that bloody colon, that tumor, that weak kidney just to try and get you to pay attention to yourself. And that's why it's the most dramatic. A lot of things we do are dramatic, but people are very enrolled in the story of their life. And I've had billionaires on my tables that would spend, get their whole life, trade every penny they had, if they can get on the other side of something that they know... They're just miserable. They have all the money in the world, but they're miserable. And it really has to do with things that are going on in their head, which, when you see it, you think it's simple or silly, but it's not because we all have our own story or stories. And a lot of us don't know it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, it's interesting because, again, we all know that the number-one thing that gets in the way of us succeeding or getting where we want to go or reaching any aspiration is ourselves, which comes down to a belief system, which also comes down to this imprinting that we're carrying. And part of it is that, for a lot of us, I've gone through this as well, is that you can't really see it because you've normalized it in the sense that "It's just how life is." And so, you really have a hard time even seeing that you're living in reaction to something, right? Because "it's just how life is." So, it takes some work to actually get to that. And it sounds like through the muscle testing, you're actually able to highlight for people things that they might even be blinded to in terms of what's holding them back or what's keeping them from what I call "living their unencumbered lives," where they're no longer encumbered by these things.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Right. So, I think the thing is, the proof is in the pudding when you can, what we call, "clear it out." And so, it's a real-time thing. So, we're not just making it aware for them that they have an epiphany, but we are what we call tapping it out, so to speak. So, there's a lot of in the middle part, but fast forwarding to the end, they'll hold their hand on their emotional reflexes, they're holding their colon, and I'll be tapping on a spot that's somewhere, in my case, there's a body way to do it, an acupuncture way. But I'm tapping on, let's say, a spot over their fifth lumbar spine where the nerve exits that goes to their colon. And so, why... They're doing two things. Number one is they're taking deep breaths in and out because emotions live in the breath. That's why when people get stressed out, they go, and they stop breathing, and they lock it in.

And the other thing is, I have them thinking about what happened when, in this case, let's say, when they were in utero. And so, they're trying to imagine that that happened. Most of them happened before year 12, and they're things that they remember from seven, they didn't make the basketball team, or they didn't get the cheerleader. "My mom never showed up on time to pick me up at school," or "That one teacher gave me a bad grade," or the things... It's authority. Mother, father, teacher, preacher. It's the people we give our power to when we're younger. And really, true health is the goal, which is to help people get their power back. Because a lot of times we've had events in our life, physically, nutrition, we've given our power up. And like you say, we've normalized it, and we go, "That's just the way it is."

And we say, when we do this, it's never too late to have a happy childhood. Because of things we never really imagined... Because we walk people through the awareness because it's a lot. It is a dramatic physiological change that happens in an instant. And everyone's comment the first time they get it done is, "I felt like I just took a coat off I didn't know I had on." And for many years, we would actually take a picture of their face before and after. It looked like different humans. The scowl just got light, just to really demonstrate that your mind and your body are one thing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Just to be clear, the way that you're actually clearing this is you're having people put their hand on an area that's associated with the affected element, we'll say, put it in a place that's associated with the root, but also the root cause of the healing. And then you're doing something to manipulate them either with tapping or something else that enables them to release this. Is that what I'm understanding? Is that correct?

Dr. Howard Cohn: Correct. Correct.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay.

Dr. Howard Cohn: And to further, since we're on the subject, I tell them before we do it, I go, "Listen, there are four things you have to understand before we do this. Number one, your body never lies. I've done this a hundred thousand times and never seen one wrong. We're going to find out something that's triggering you, and we're going to find out something that happened when you were younger that is significant to you. That's number one. Number two is emotions have no logic. If emotions were logical, we would sit there for two minutes, figure out our own stuff, and go on with our day, but they're not. It's an unconscious-subconscious game. The third thing, which is probably the most distinct thing to realize, is that what we're dealing with is emotional reality. It's not always historical fact. It's our perception of what we thought happened when we were two or five or 12."

So, for example, let's say I hold up a quarter, Doc, and you're looking at heads, and I'm looking at tails. Now we could both say we're looking at a quarter, but if you describe what you see, you go, "I see an old dead President." And I'm like, "What are you talking about, Doc? I see a bird." And then Steve's looking at both of us from the side like we're both idiots and goes, "I see ridges," because he's looking at the side of the quarter. And this makes the news so exciting to watch because we only have our perspective, and we're going to argue for our perspective because it's what we see. But if we took the 360 or aerial view, which most of us just don't ever think to know to do, to see someone else's side, to turn it around and, "Look at what I'm looking at." "No, I see it. I see it's a bird."

And the last part, too, that seals it up, is the mind doesn't know the difference between something real or imagined, anyway. So if I describe to you a lemon, I cut it in half. I show you that pulpy part of that lemon. I say, "Dr. Gladden, stick your tongue out." You do it. I take that lemon, I rub it back and forth on your tongue, and I squeeze all the juice ‘til the lemon- the juice is no longer in the lemon, it's in your mouth… If you keep listening to me talk, you'll have a tart taste in your mouth now, which is a physiological change to the human body, but there's no lemon in the room. It's just been suggested to you. So, those four things mushed together are every human being having their own experience, expecting everyone else to understand what they're feeling, doing, and knowing. It's impossible.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Ooh.

Dr. Howard Cohn: It's absolutely impossible.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's profound. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. It is impossible. And yet there are people that can be empathetic, and there are people that have the ability to stand in other people's shoes to the extent that they can and try to look at the quarter from the other side. And maybe they're looking at it from 45 degrees and not head-on. But yeah, I think it is interesting to cultivate that skill, though, to be able to try to stand in other people's shoes because it does give you a sense of empathy. And I find that true. I find that most of the problems in life come when we're judging other people. And most of the solutions come when we're standing in the other person's shoes and looking at from their perspective and working to find a solution that works for everybody, which is what you're doing here. Because you're actually not having to change your own mental perspective, but you're actually aligning yourself with the problem from their perspective and then giving them a gateway to step through to resolve it on some level. I suppose that's what I'm hearing.

Dr. Howard Cohn: Yeah, I got to tell you, it's dramatic. I demoed it every week in a class for 27 years. And I always knew it was happening. You would see these dramatic results. But I will tell you, the thing that really notched me up to really believe that this was the kind of work that would change the world was after a health class I was teaching, there was a woman there who was training dogs for the Seeing Eye Dog program.

And my office at that time was on the second floor, and she came to me, and she goes, "Do you think this would work on dogs?" And I go, "Well, in theory, it works on dogs and cats, people who don't speak English, because words are vibrations, and your body picks up the vibration of what you're saying." And I go, "What the heck?" I go, "Disclaimer; I'm not a vet. We don't treat dogs." No, just to be a good citizen. And what you do, which sounds, again, crazy, it's the same way you would treat a baby. You use the person as a surrogate.

So, for example, let's say if Steve was holding your shoulder, your hand, or wherever, and I would touch spots on you, Dr. Gladden, I could test Steve's muscle and get information.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, wow.

Dr. Howard Cohn: So, let's say you came to see me, and you were quadriplegic, God forbid, and you were in a chair. I would not be able to test an arm or leg or anything. I could test your neck extensors or flexors.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Sure.

Dr. Howard Cohn: But that's about it. And that would get tiring and irritating after a while. So, I can use a surrogate. So we did the same thing with the dog. This one dog was about to flunk out of the Seeing Eye Program because the dog was afraid of the stairs. It would not go up the stairs. It was afraid to go up the stairs from whatever, who knew why. Didn't matter because the story is just what happens in her head. So, it turned out that the dog had four different emotional life events, trying to muscle other dogs out of the way to get food, all these different little silly things. And because dog life is so much simpler, but we cleared the dog out completely, and six, seven minutes later, the dog ran up the stairs, just ran up the stairs, and everybody was watching, and they're like, "Holy shit." They're like, "Oh my... How? What? No way." Because they knew this dog, and they knew this dog wasn't going to pass their program.

And the reality of that is, it is that dramatic. Dogs are the best. I didn't know if the Dog Longevity Program is in place yet. But dogs are great because dogs are not skeptical. Dogs aren't worried if their insurance is going to pay for the care or not. Dogs do not subscribe to the placebo effect, which was the biggest thing that I saw that day. And they're happy no matter what the result is. So they're the perfect patient. And nobody spends money on themselves, they spend on their dogs. So anyway, that's my editorial about dogs.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: But that is fascinating that this technique can cross species, so to speak, and you can use it with infants, people that are unable to be muscle tested directly. This whole surrogate thing is pretty fascinating. So, with this being in play, I would think there'd probably be a line out the door and around the block for people to come in and get this. And I guess one of the questions would be, what's the durability of this, so to speak? How durable is this, do you think?

Dr. Howard Cohn: Oh, it's this evidence. It's ridiculous, once you clear something out, it's gone. So, what we tell them is, “Once something's gone, it's gone”. We just have a lot of these what’s called ‘significant emotional events’, meaning... Let's say we find out that you were angry at your dad for taking away your GI Joe doll when you were five. So, when we clear the anger, you're no longer angry about that. And then whatever your trigger was, be that your spouse, your child, whatever, is no longer there.

Now, you still may have another emotion on the same event. And in Chinese medicine, they call that "surrounding the dragon." You would go and try and figure out to make sure that you've got as many triggers out on a specific event as possible. So, the concept is you're trying to get to somebody. You're not trying to change anybody. You're trying to get them to a point of what's called "okay-ness." Like, okay-ness. So, what we see a lot, sadly and unfortunately, is women that have been inappropriately treated by men. Raped, molested, sodomized, ritual abuse, cults, all the things that I grew up and thought was, "Oh, that I hear about it, but I never see it happen." It's when you start practicing this, and then everybody who's had their hysterectomy has something in their past like this. And you see causality.

And then we say... If somebody was, God forbid, molested, they're never going to be in agreement and get happy about what happened. But they got to get okay that it happened. Otherwise, they're getting molested every day, unconsciously, in their head, every time they see a man or a person or thing that reminds them of that event, and it eats them up from the inside out. So, it's really about getting this okay-ness.

What I always tell people, I go, "The true definition of health is not being symptom-free. True definition of health is ease in the midst of chaos", meaning that you are going to have all kinds of stuff come at you in life, physical trauma, chemical poisoning, and deficiency, mental, emotional abuse, and stress. But your ability to navigate it and be flexible and resilient determines how healthy you are. I know there's a lot of things that you do that you're able to look at your place that no one's looking at or no one's put it together. What I liked about you is it's the same kind of philosophy. We bring people together. All my practitioners have to have a physical, nutritional, and emotional technique, and everyone has to do something no one else does so that we have this oasis of things to offer. And I tell patients when they come, they're going to get better whether they like it or not. Which means if I can't help them, one of my doctors can. If they can't, I'm spidered out in a hundred clinics around the world that do stuff way even wilder than us, which since knowing you, you're on that list, buddy.