FACT SHEET
(Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes
Solution-Revised and
Updated. The Complete Guide to
Achieving Normal Blood Sugars. Little Brown and Co., New York)
By the time he was 4
years old, C. Norman Shealy knew he wanted to be a physician. Just how far
down the road that would take him, he could never have imagined at that
time. Now, Dr. Shealy's ideas have
been the foundation for pain management therapies used worldwide, and the
''Shealy Program'' is the mainstay of chronic pain treatment and management
sought by patients and physicians alike.
Shortly after graduating from Duke Medical School, and beginning his career as
an accomplished neurosurgeon, Dr. Shealy noted: ''The most common symptom in
the world is pain, and yet nobody specializes in it.'' At this early phase of
his medical life, he decided to look into pain, what causes it, what we can do
about it, and how it affects us as human beings.
He had not been investigating long before he recognized that the majority of
long term fixes for chronic pain did not come from the established medical
community, but from the ''folk domain.'' Shealy began a series of research and
experimental processes which included any ideas he could come across that
claimed to be able to treat chronic pain in the long term without the use of
narcotic medications. Consulting and researching with acupuncturists, mystics,
faith healers, color therapists, folk healers, and other non-traditional
therapists, and blending this new knowledge with his medical background, Dr.
Shealy came to the conclusion that, while none of these methods was THE cure
for chronic pain, almost all of them had developed a documented history of
being able to successfully eliminate chronic pain in a good number of their
attempts. It is at this juncture that he decided that ''It is the interaction
of the four main fields of stress; the chemical, physical, electromagnetic,
and emotional; that is the cause of all illness, not some, all.''
Now, Shealy embarked on a lifelong quest to find ways to manage successfully
chronic pain. He opened his first pain management clinic in La Crosse,
Wisconsin and developed a long series of successes in treating patients who
had been otherwise untreatable. During this period, he developed a device
called the dorsal column stimulator, which uses small electrical currents to
adjust the electromagnetic fields within the spinal column. The stimulator was
so successful in treating previously untreatable chronic back pain that it has
become a favored treatment for pain by physicians world-wide. The
breakthroughs generated by the dorsal column stimulator contributed directly
to the development and patenting of the TENS system of electrical stimulation,
a pain treatment regimen now in demand throughout the medical community.
The cost-effectiveness of Shealy's treatments for back pain has led to a
series of breakthroughs culminating in the discovery of urgently low levels of
a chemical known as DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) in almost all patients
suffering chronic pain. Shealy's further research developed 4 procedures that
could effectively raise these DHEA levels in humans, without the use of
medications, and his studies documented the cessation of this chronic pain in
almost all subjects studied. His now patented system for curing chronic pain
is used by traditional and non-traditional practitioners in nearly every
specialty today.
While conducting all of this research, Dr. Shealy noted an abnormally large
group of patients he was treating for chronic pain were also clinically
depressed. Wondering if there was some connection between this chronic pain
and their clinical depression, he sought and gained a Ph.D. in psychology.
Further study did show, in fact, that with or without chronic pain, depressed
persons also showed a low level of DHEA, and so he began a course of highly
successful treatment of chronic clinical depression, again by naturally
raising the patients DHEA levels and normalizing serotonin and beta-endorphin,
the natural narcotics, without the use of drugs or medications. Other studies
are by Shealy and many others have determined that virtually all illnesses are associated with deficient
DHEA levels, and may be treated non-pharmacologically, by adjusting those
levels therapeutically.
In 1999, Dr. Shealy retired from actively seeing patients, and spends his time
now dedicated to further research and teaching. Having begun his career using
alternative forms of treatment for patients, he now desires, through research,
teaching, and writing, to blend what he and others have learned via his
discoveries with the more traditional approaches to medicine, allowing his approaches
to benefit patients in all medical specialties.
C. Norman Shealy entered Duke University at age 16 and Duke Medical School at
19. He was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha honor
societies and became the permanent class officer of his graduating medical
school class. He interned in Internal Medicine at Duke and then had a year of
General Surgery at Banes Hospital, followed by a five year residency in
Neurosurgery at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Board Certified
in Neurological Surgery. In 1961 he spent 9 months working with Sir John
Eccles, Nobel Laureate, at the Australian National University. In 1977 he
earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook Institute, the leading Humanistic
Psychology School. And he received a Doctor of Science degree from Ryodoraku
Institute.
He then spent 3½ years at Western Reserve Medical School, where his research
led to both Dorsal Column Stimulation and Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve
Stimulation (TENS™), both now used worldwide to help control pain. In 1966 he
became Chief of Neurosciences at Gundersen Clinic, one of the 10 largest
clinics in the U.S. In 1971 he founded the first comprehensive pain and stress
management clinic in the world. The Shealy Institute was recognized for
several years as the most successful and most cost effective pain clinic in
the U.S. Over a 30 year period his clinic treated over 30,000 chronically ill
patients with a remarkable 85% success rate.
His other contributions include: