The Physics Of Healing

Darin Ingels, ND

Dr. Eckel, Thank you for having me.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Indeed. I’m excited for this talk. As I mentioned before we jumped on, having a clinician on and the unique perspective of what happens in real life is a very important piece of the puzzle when we’re talking about bioenergetics. And the title of our talk today is “The Physics of Healing”. Why did you bring that up, on how the body heals, this was important for you to address?

Darin Ingels, ND

Well, you know, I think if we think about medicine as a whole, when you and I were in medical school, we spent hours and hours learning about the chemistry of the body. What affects the chemistry? What affects a hormone? What affects a nutrient? What effects a metabolic pathway? And yet, we virtually learn almost nothing about the physics of the body. But when you get into cell biology, you look at our most foundational, fundamental human being layer. We know that cells change electrically, really before they change chemically. So if you think about a mass cell that creates allergy symptoms. Before the mass cell degranulates, it releases all its chemicals. There’s something that happens at a very subtle electrical level in the cell itself, that then starts that cascade of all these other things to happen. 

So we’re really missing the bigger picture of the body. And I think when it comes to healing, this is something that we have the capacity to influence in so many different ways, but it virtually gets ignored in medicine. And I look at my own patient population in which are a lot of people with Lyme disease and other types of chronic illness. They go from doctor to doctor getting one therapy after another that’s really designed to change chemistry. And again, we virtually ignore how can we influence the physics of the body? So I think this is an area of medicine that gets really just dismissed because it sounds too woo-woo, it sounds too hokey. Because we still have a hard time quantifying these things, it’s just hard for people to kind of get their mind around. But I have a harder time understanding how I can hold this magic box up to my ear and talk to someone on the other side of the world. I can’t see it. I can’t feel the signal, but I know it’s there. I’m like, why is that? Well, it’s a radio wave. Well, what’s a radio wave? 

It’s a type of energy. And if we break energy down, we’ve got all these very high frequency patterns and we’ve got these very low frequency patterns. And, you know, you I were just sharing a little bit before we jumped on, but I wanna share with the audience Luc Montagnier, he was a PhD microbiologist. He actually won the Nobel Prize for being one of the co-discoverers of the HIV virus. He passed away last year, but in his laboratory in Paris, they’ve actually been measuring this very low frequency that they found is emitted from the DNA of a bacteria. And you can imagine how extremely low that’s gotta be. But based on that, they found it’s almost like a fingerprint. It’s unique to the organism and they have this very high tech way of being able to identify what that bacteria was based on this low, low, frequency that the bacteria is emitting. So I think his lab is just a good example. In their case, they’re using it as a diagnostic tool, but we also know that there are ways of applying frequencies to our body that actually helped facilitate healing and facilitate better tissue repair. So I’ve always been fascinated that we’ve got this whole world out there that really hasn’t been explored that could have such a huge impact on people’s health.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

It is, it’s almost from the very beginning of scientific thought process, there was a schism. There were the native cultures that went more bioenergetic, and then the other cultures that went into physical matter form, like the Cartesian way of the matter. And now, we’re now again maybe gathering more momentum of these things coming together, which is a really exciting time to be in practice as a clinician, and to be able to bring these thoughts into clinical encounter. That component of the subtle electrical body. How do you apply that in the real world? We talk about a lot of different therapeutics. Maybe you’ve got some favorite therapeutics that you’ve seen benefit with, but really just at the metal level, do you talk to your patients about that?

Darin Ingels, ND

Yeah, again, my population is a very generally chronically ill population. Many who’ve tried numerous therapies. Again, whether it’s a nutritional therapy, an herbal therapy, a medication, and they kind of keep hitting this wall. And I often wonder it’s like, well, if the chemistry was the sole problem, we should be able to correct that with the appropriate therapy. And in many cases they failed to work. So I think it goes a little bit deeper than that, about what is it that stops the body from healing and look, you and I both know that it is built into our DNA to heal. That is innate in being a human being. So when we cut our hand, it knows how to heal. We don’t have to tell to do that. It knows how to do that. That whole mechanism is designed. So we’ve got this intelligent design that body knows how to heal. It’s just what stops that process. And I think we could look at any number of different factors, whether it’s toxicity, whether it’s infection, whether it’s emotional trauma, all these things affect us, not just at a physical level, but I think very much at an energetic level. And is it altering our natural vibration, our natural frequency. 

And I think to a certain extent, it probably does. And it makes a lot of sense too, right? I mean, you could apply any number of electrical devices to your body and your body is 80% water, which is a great conductor of any kind of electrical signal. If we know that, you know, stand in a bathtub with a toaster and it electrocutes you and shocks you, take that down 20 levels, scale down. We know that we can apply frequencies that do good things to the body and not necessarily, you know, negative things to the body. So really it’s just about, I think, finding these things with each person that, you know, what are those obstacles and again, what are different ways that we can utilize again, the physics of the body to encourage healing and you know, you asked about, “Well, do I have some favorites?”. Sure. I mean, I’m a big fan of P.E.M.F. Pulsed Electromagnetic Frequency. There’s actually been a ton of research. Germany has done over 1500 studies on P.E.M.F and the concept behind it is that, again, your cells have its own natural frequency at which it resonates and that’s the frequency your cells want to be at. 

Again, that’s where they function the way they’re supposed to, the enzymes work, the repair mechanisms work. But we get bombarded with all these negative frequencies like Wi-Fi and 5G and routers and things like that, that are not in sync with our own natural frequency. So the idea behind P.M.F is that let’s put that same frequency in that your cells are used to, and what they show in the research is that it helps improve circulation. It helps with tissue repair. It helps with pain. It helps with inflammation. And because it’s such a low amplitude frequency. In most cases, when you’re receiving this treatment, you don’t really even feel anything, you know, lay on a mat or sometimes you’re attached to different things to part of your body. But it’s just putting in that beneficial frequency instead of a negative frequency. And again, it’s safe, it’s clinically effective. It’s easy for people. 

They’ve now got a lot of home devices for people that don’t have access to a practitioner who might have one of these devices. You can buy your own. So that’s been one of my favorite things, but I think if you look at other therapies out there, like homeopathy. I mean, in my own personal experience, I was a chronic Lyme patient. And again, I went through a lot of different therapies which did help. I mean, I did herbal therapy, dietary changes, lifestyle changes, all of that made a difference. But really I got to that point where I was 85, 90% better. I had that 10% I couldn’t shake. And I was fortunate to have studied with the homeopath in Belgium. And then I ended up studying with her for many, many years afterwards, but she gave me a homeopathic remedy. 

And literally, within a couple of weeks of taking it, all the rest of my symptoms completely went away. I think in the world of homeopathy, it’s always been criticized because, well, you can’t see it. You can’t feel it. You can’t measure it. And like, you’re right, but we’ve also got studies. Particularly animal studies where there is no placebo effect with animals showing the clinical benefits. And of course it’s been around for hundreds of years. So I know it’s one of these things when we have a hard time measuring it and quantifying it, it’s a little harder for people to maybe accept that this is doing something positive for the body, but those are just two examples of things I use routinely in my practice that I find work really well for patients. And again, I think it’s really working at that subtle, energetic level to shift the cellular changes.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I love it. And with the body being at 80% water base, as a great transducer for electrical activities, subtle energy bodies, massive energy bodies. Do you do anything to prime the body to receive these energetic treatments? Or what’s your thoughts on that?

Darin Ingels, ND

Well, just like you said, basically, you know, you gotta have water. I think we could argue that a lot of the population out there is not hydrated nearly to the extent they need to be. So if you’re not getting adequate hydration, all that fluid that’s necessary to allow for that cell to cell communication might be halted a little bit. So just encouraging healthy fluid intake, people that aren’t getting jacked up on drinking coffee all day long, or even tea, wanna make sure that they’re getting good sources of clean filtered water. That’s step one for everybody. 

Beyond that, I think in those other things we do in terms of diet and nutrition and gut health, if you’re not absorbing all the nutrients your body needs, those are all the co-factors in tissue repair. So whether it’s a damaged brain or a damaged gut, we need to ensure that you’re putting the right nutrients in the body. That’s gonna allow again the body to do what we want it to do. So when we sit down for our first visit, it’s always a discussion about diet, nutrition, hydration, because if that’s not functioning well, and along that, if the gut’s not functioning well, it’s very hard for everything else to work the way it’s supposed to. So if we can get those pieces in place right off the bat, again, we give your body the best fighting chance to get well.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

I love it. I see that, also clinically of, we’ll tend to get those that are really into energy and they kind of forget about their body. And if you don’t have the vessel, the receptor, this miraculous thing that we walk around in, and it’s not primed to receive those subtle energy signs and input. And I mean, we can attune our bodies to receive more of the information that is actually passing by us at all moments in time. So I really appreciate that point. What other therapeutics in that bioenergetic energetic front do you think have great promise? Or other ones that you’re really excited about?

Darin Ingels, ND

Well, the one that’s free and easy, is meditation. The most powerful healing tool in your body is your brain. And if you can utilize that in a way to start signaling the rest of your body, I don’t know if you follow Dr. Bernie Siegel at all, he was a cancer surgeon outta Yale, and he used to talk a lot with his patients about mindfulness and meditation and positive imagery. And he would find that when patients would do this, they would heal faster after surgery. In some cases, their cancer would go away. He just has these amazing stories about how powerful mindset, positive attitude, and visual imagery, are really important to healing. So again, this is a conversation I have a lot with my patients about having that vision of what are you like when you’re well, make it very sensory. 

We know that the subconscious brain reacts to pictures. It doesn’t react to words. So having a very powerful visual of what are you doing, where are you, who are you with? Do you feel the warmth of the sun, the sand in your toes, whatever that is for you. But this is something anybody can do every day at home whenever it’s convenient for you. But the consistency of it is really the key. People who are consistent about doing it. Then of course, there’s so many other health benefits of meditation, but we’re basically using a brain as a way of signaling the other cells in your body that we want it to heal. We want it to do what it’s designed to do. And having some imagery like that can be really, really helpful. So for people who have a hard time meditating, and look, I suck at meditating, I’ll be the first to admit it. I don’t like doing it either, but again, I know. And again, I’ve seen it with so many people that when they can commit to it over time, it can really make a big difference. And there’s Dr. Siegel, again, you could download his guided imagery. Again, if you have a hard time, just sort of meditating on your own. There’s a lot of people out there like him that have these things where you just tune in, listen, they guide you through the imagery, so you don’t have to work as hard for it. 

And some people are cool of just chilling by themselves, sitting quietly for 20, 30 minutes and having that visual, having that meditation. So again, cheap, easy. Anybody can do it. You don’t have to need a lot of training on how to do it, but it does take time for your body to get used to getting in that quiet parasympathetic state. And it’s really not about turning your brain off. You’re gonna find things float through the brain and that’s okay. Let it come, acknowledge it, let it go. And that’s okay. So I’m a big fan of that. I’m also a huge fan of acupuncture. Again, I’ve had a lot of experience with Chinese medicine. It’s a whole completely different system of medicine. But my guess is, 5,000 years and however many billion Chinese people, they can’t be wrong. So there’s so much history and experience with that, with acupuncture. And how is it the putting needles in these very specific points really do anything in the body. But again, I can remember, I blew my back out many years ago and got acupuncture. And within a week, I mean, I was up and running.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Wow.

Darin Ingels, ND

My own personal experience has been pretty positive. And again, I’ve had a lot of patients that do it. So again, it’s another thing that we have kind of a hard time explaining, but it’s been around for so long. There’s so much experience with it that we know this is another way. And I like it too ’cause a lot of insurance companies now cover acupuncture.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure.

Darin Ingels, ND

So it’s another therapy that people don’t necessarily have to pay out of pocket. So again could be very valuable for a lot of folks.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Helpful that way. What, I wanna back up to the meditation component because what do you find the resistance for, people have resistance to that,

Darin Ingels, ND

Yeah.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

And maybe they feel like they’re too sick or there’s too much pain. You’re dealing with some significant, chronic, debilitating diseases in people. And I’m guessing you’ve heard every resistance move in the book for that meditation prescription.

Darin Ingels, ND

Yes.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

So how do you help people overcome that?

Darin Ingels, ND

Well, I think a lot of the resistance is that when you first start. Again, you feel like you’re not doing it right. There’s a right way to do it. There really isn’t. They feel like that they’re not seeing a benefit immediately, which is true. So many of us, especially when you’ve tried so many things that haven’t worked, it often creates this mindset that you now expect other things aren’t gonna work. And I think of the same thing with exercise, weight loss, it’s a long game. It’s not something you necessarily gonna see the changes within a day or a week or even a couple of weeks. But you find over the course of a longer period of time. And hey look, if it took you 10 years to get to feel this sick, expect that it might take some time to get you to heal again. But in that, I’m like, look, you give yourself a break. You don’t need to be critical of yourself when you start, you’re gonna suck at it like everybody else, you’re gonna have all these things flooding in your head. And you know what, say, start with five minutes, start with five minutes. 

Set a timer, five minutes on your phone, go sit for five minutes and just start. And then after you get to five minutes, great, let’s go to 10 minutes, 10 minutes isn’t so bad. Okay. We’re gonna go to 15. And people find, actually fairly quickly, that they’re able to increase that time because it’s now easier to get in that relaxed state. It’s easier to meditate. All these things that used to come flooding through their head kind of stops once you do it more frequently. So we have to get people past that hurdle that they’re gonna do it incorrectly, they’re gonna make a mistake, or that it’s just not gonna be effective. They just need to understand that this is a process like anything else. It takes time and it’s okay. 

You know, don’t have to be great at it, but if you just stick with it and it’s like any other therapy, right? You know, you get the best benefits when you stick with it. If it’s something you bail because you didn’t see immediate results, most things aren’t gonna work. So you just need to give a little bit of time and give yourself a little bit of a break, that this is a new thing and anything that’s new is different. And it’s gonna take you maybe some time for your body to adjust to it. But again, it can be such an incredibly powerful tool for people when we can gauge their own brain and their healing process.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Love it. That is one of the most overlooked, conventionally, is incorporating in that mindset. The biology belief, the utilizing the full capabilities of what our brains are capable of. So on this, I wanna return to the subtle energy body and healing, because you are in, your specialty, is with Lyme. And all of these co-infections, and a lot of people get fixated on the bug, it’s on the bug. Does your approach, is it more of this global, more of this holistic approach of let’s increase your vitality to a point where that becomes an irrelevant discussion? How do you balance that in there?

Darin Ingels, ND

Killing the bug is a small piece of the puzzle. And I think if we talk about just microbes in general, is it the germ or is it the terrain?

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Darin Ingels, ND

And at the end of the day, it’s really about the terrain. I mean, I think we saw this pretty evident with C0V!D, right? We had some people who got sniffle and other people that died. If we say it’s relatively, I mean, I know there’s variants, relatively the same virus. Why are we having such a dramatic difference on how people are impacted by it? And it’s the same thing with Lyme, I mean, I’m sure if I lived in Connecticut for almost 20 years, if I tested everybody in new England, I’m sure I would find the vast majority of people have antibodies against Lyme, but they don’t all have Lyme disease. So is it the bug or is it the terrain? And my own story, is that I got bit by a tick right before I started my own practice and I was stressed outta my mind and I think it was the perfect storm, the timing two weeks before I opened my own business, working long hours for eight months. And then I started to relapse. 

I think, had I not been under that duress, I probably would’ve been fine. Had I gotten bitten at a different time, I might’ve been fine. So it really was the perfect storm. I know that my terrain was not where it should be and that just allowed this thing to kind of take over. So as we’re talking about really any kind of chronic illness, but specifically Lyme disease, obviously we need to address the bug, but all these other things we know that make the terrain less hospitable for it. That’s diet, sleep, movement, mindfulness, dealing with trauma. All these things is what helps make the terrain healthy, so that all these other microbes, Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr virus, don’t overrun you and make you feel sick.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

That component of dealing with trauma. That has come up quite a bit in a bioenergetics summit. How do you address that with your patient base?

Darin Ingels, ND

Well, I am not an expert in trauma. I acknowledge that I know it is a major obstacle for most people with chronic illnesses. It’s just what’s the best way to get at it. And I’m fortunate to have met other people out there in the world, that this is their wheelhouse. So I’ll refer to different people out there, who specialize in helping people move through trauma. What I find is that if that’s part of the picture, talk therapy by itself usually isn’t enough. They need some extra level, again, to really get to that deeper layer of the subconscious mind. That’s where I think that real work happens. So again, I’m fortunate to have met several people out there that deal with that. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that up front. And when we talk about trauma, so often we think about the big tea, the big things, death of a family member, divorce, child abuse, these kind of things. And in many cases, it’s not that. It’s these very little things that might have happened. And I was just talking with someone the other day about this. 

And I think especially as a child, if something happened, maybe it was a bully or maybe someone picked on you ’cause you wore a funny shirt, where you could look at it now as an adult and go “Who cares? They made fun of my shirt because I had it into an alligator on it or whatever”. But their perception is a child is so different than as an adult and the way your child brain interpreted that event could be very different than the way you’re rationalizing it now. So these little things, again, can add up over time and I’ve done a lot of reading about adverse childhood events. Donna Jackson Nakazawa has written several great books, one called “Childhood Disrupted”, that kinda walks through how these events can have such a big impact on your health as an adult. And so much autoimmune disease, neurological disease, they’ve tied into these adverse childhood events. So I think it’s important again, if you’ve been dealing with chronic illness to at least be aware that this could be part of the process and that there are ways out there to help manage it. And again, I am not an expert in that field, but I’m happy to refer those folks to people who I think do a better job at.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure. Yeah. I think it’s good to be trauma informed as a provider, because it is the underlying schism that may have created the illness that’s right in front of you today. Returning into this physics of healing, because that that’s a big piece of it, what other pieces of the puzzle do you want to put on that topic?

Darin Ingels, ND

Yeah, I think it’s really being mindful. I guess, again, having that awareness that, again, there is that very subtle electrical or energetic piece that is part of all of us. And I think if as long as people are aware that that’s something that exists and is also something that we can manipulate to a certain degree, we can use to our advantage. I think again, where people maybe get stuck is they just don’t know that this is something that they can do. This is, they don’t know that there are ways, whether it’s something like meditation, or homeopathy, or acupuncture, or whatever you’re using, but there are ways to, again, start changing the bottle in this very subtle way. I’ll give another example. I have a patient that had chronic Lyme disease. I worked with her for at least five years. I mean she did everything and she was a very compliant patient. So it was never an issue that she wasn’t doing what she had. She did everything, diet changes. She had done antibiotics. She had done herbs. She had done nutrients. I mean all of it. And there was some improvement, but we never got her over the finish line. And I saw her five years later. I didn’t see her for five years. So I worked with her for five years. Didn’t see her for five years. 

And she showed up in my office one day, and the last time I’d seen her, she walked with a cane, she was still quite disabled, you could just see it in her look in her face, that she was struggling. And I honest to God, I didn’t even recognize her when she walked in the door. No cane, she looked amazing. And I said, what happened? And she said, well, I basically stopped doing everything I was doing. And I started doing Rife therapy. And I, she bought her a home Rife machine, and I did Rife therapy every day for two years and it basically cured her. So I kept thinking back on that, I’m like, well, was everything else that we were doing, was it actually: A not, addressing really the fundamental problem, or B, was it even making the problem worse for whatever reason. 

Maybe we’re adding so much to her load, if her nervous system and her sort of bioenergetics system were so fragile, were we basically overloading her with very well intended things, but so much that her body couldn’t handle it. But if she really kind of approached it by just putting in these very subtle, low amplitude frequencies, that was enough to allow her tissue to actually heal. I mean, I think in her case, that’s exactly what happened. So again, as a practitioner, I’m always very mindful of that. It’s like, do we have to go in with big guns? I mean, can we do these very subtle things to get a big change and really kinda depending on the person and where they’re at, it’s not an unreasonable approach. And I have some people who do it this way, where that’s their preference and they have access to it. So again, we don’t always necessarily have to go in with big time expensive therapies to make this change. Sometimes again, these very subtle type of frequencies and subtle changes can make such a huge difference.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Love it. Ah. So good. Thank you for sharing that story, too. Any last parting words for folks of the listeners and viewers of the bioenergetics summit?

Darin Ingels, ND

This all sounds very foreign to you and this you’re hearing this for the first time and you’re just not sure, reach out and find practitioners who deal with these kind of things. And there’s a lot of us out there. Because, we can certainly help give you guidance on which things we think might be most helpful for you. Again, there’s more than one way to deal with it. But again, having that awareness is the first step, but then reach out and find people in your community that can really help facilitate instituting some of these treatments for you.