We all desire a fruitful life, which includes having a healthy mind, body, and spirit. This is why our guest, Dr. Jerry P. Gore, studies and practices holistic medicine until today. He is also a frequent speaker and blogger and enjoys teaching in the community. He wants to educate patients on holistic medicine and homeopathy for empowerment and transformation. In this episode, he emphasizes that being healthy is balancing the different energies surrounding our lives. Learn more about how he approaches various illnesses and sicknesses with his holistic approach to medicine.
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Holistic Medicine: Physical Health, Peace of Mind, And Clarity Of Consciousness With Dr. Jerry P. Gore
Dr. Gore received his Medical degree at the University of Illinois School of Medicine and then received his post-graduate education at Northwestern University’s Institute of Psychiatry while also completing a three-year program at the Gestalt Institute of Chicago. He then studied Yoga and Tai Chi and began an apprenticeship with Dr. Ballentine at the Center for Holistic Medicine at the Himalayan Institute. In Glenview, Illinois, this was the first of its kind in the Midwest.
Dr. Gore has published a book titled Holistic Medicine: Physical Health, Peace of Mind and Clarity of Consciousness. He is a frequent speaker and blogger, and enjoys teaching in the community. His vision is to help people with their symptoms of illness, educate patients so they feel empowered, and help them transform their lives using holistic medicine.
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Dr. Gore, thank you so much for joining us here. It’s great to see you face to face.
I feel the same way.
I was hoping you could start us off by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.
I got into the work over a period of time. Initially, I went into medical school and took some time off after that, and then, I got into my own therapy. I was looking for something that I wanted to do, and in my own therapy, I felt like something clicked that I could help people this way. I went in and did a residency at Northwestern University in Psychiatry. I practiced therapy for a little while but was not completely satisfied. Then, I became ill and started to get doctored up but that was not satisfying either. Through good fortune, I was referred to the Himalayan Institute in Glenview at the time and they were practicing holistic medicine. I got involved with them and I said, “This is something that I’m ready to do.”
They were practicing mind-body medicine back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was not that popular then. It was new. It struck a chord with me. I went through everything. I had already done a lot of therapy on myself. It was working but I was not that happy. They started to talk about meditation and yoga, so I started to do those things. It helped a little bit. Then, they started working with my diet and that helped a little bit and then they started using homeopathic remedies and that helped. All of a sudden, I was using all these things, the physical, energetic, mental, and spiritual techniques and I felt like, “This is what I need for myself.” I became a doctor there and started to work with patients like that. That’s how I got into it.
You mentioned it was back in the late ‘70s that you were connected with that institute.
I was connected in the early ‘80s but they were there in the late ‘70s. Believe it or not, they had five full-time physicians working in holistic medicine in Glenview with the Himalayan Institute at that time.
As a therapist myself, I understand how important it is to take a whole-person approach and think about the thoughts, the emotions, the body, the diet, the exercise, a sense of purpose in life, fitting into the community, a sense of love, etc. You cover that beautifully in your book. Your book is titled Holistic Medicine: Physical Health, Peace of Mind and Clarity of Consciousness. What year did you publish that? Was that 2015?
I would have to look in the book to see.
Homeopathy is an energy medicine.
It says 2015 was the copyright for that.
That’s probably the year.
As I read that book, one of the things that expanded things, I had heard a little bit about it in different ways because I have been turned into alternative medicine things for quite a while, but one of them was the different body types in ayurvedic medicine, the different energies, and how that connects with food. What can you give us as an overview of that?
There are a lot of ways to look at human functioning. You can look at it through homeopathic, allopathic or ayurvedic. In ayurvedic medicine, they say we are made up of earth, fire, wind and space. They call it Kapha, Pitta, and Vata. There are different constitutional types. The Kapha type is earthy solid and stolid. If they get too much, they would get inert and more depressed. They become like a human mountain.
The fire type is made of illumination. Digestive fire is an example. It’s a light in the eyes or memory. Fire is a wonderful asset and this is how we transform things in life. We transform food and ideas. Once again, if there’s too much then the person burns. They burn themselves and others. Impatience and anger are associated with an imbalance.
The last one is Vata or the combination of space in motion. Vata is like the wind. It’s the creative energy in a person that makes things move. Vata is associated with movement, creativity, and also digestion. If that becomes imbalanced then we get anxiety. It’s another window into a person. Instead of saying we are looking through the traditional psychological window, you could say is there a Kapha, Pitta or Vata imbalance in the person? Then, try to balance.
It’s fun to watch how couples get together. Usually, an earthy part would be with a fiery part or an earthy part will be with a Vata creative part. The Vata creativity will stimulate the earthy person and the earthy person will ground the creative little bit of the spacey person. They blend perfectly. There is a way to work with these things. Plus, you can work with food to help these people. For instance, if someone tends to be earthy and depressed, you can give them stimulating foods like Pitta or Vata foods. If a person is Vata and too anxious, you can bring them brown rice, basmati rice, cream, yogurts, or things that would ground them.
This was another way that we could find to work with someone’s psychology through the body, foods, and lifestyle. For instance, if someone is anxious, we have them listen to classical music. If someone is too depressed, we listen to jazz. If you get a handle on the ayurvedic Kapha, Pitta and Vata, you can work with a person’s constitution. Does that help you understand?
You had some good examples of it in the book of the idea that I can do more with people than just say, “Think these positive re-activating thoughts.” I can say, “Use this music. Try some of these foods. Pay attention to the foods you are eating that might be contributing to your imbalance.” It’s a delightful portion of the book.
Holistic Medicine: Physical Health, Peace of Mind, and Clarity of Consciousness
I know myself that certain foods can be heavy feeling and grounding if I need grounding but they can also be heavy, oppressive and feel stodgy or stuck. I occasionally get this taste from spicy foods. I know what’s going on then and I let myself have that. I don’t overdo it but I lighten it up. As I read it in your book, I was chuckling and said, “I did not even know this stuff with the words for it, from the ayurvedic but I also use it in my life.”
It’s very intuitive. It affects everybody this way. Everybody is usually 2 of these 3 doshas. They are either Kapha Pitta or Pitta Vata or Kapha Vata. The way to do it was the way you were talking about it.
In the book, you talk about things that a lot of us these days are doing with our patients, mindfulness, breathwork, spirituality, etc. One of the things that I don’t hear a lot from people I got introduced to and it’s back in the late ‘80s, myself was homeopathy. Can you tell us about that side of the work that you do?
Homeopathy is energy medicine. We are not trained to think energetically in the West. I will put it like that. When people do yoga, they are working with their bodies but it’s not physically. It’s organically when people are working with breath techniques or with energy. Other names for this are prana, chi or qi. It’s been popularized in the martial arts stuff where people would use their chi or qi, not just their muscles. They can use pranayama exercises to activate, cleanse or prepare for meditation but believe it or not, we can harness this energy in little homeopathic pellets and take it home with us. It’s quite an amazing thing.
It took me a little while to get into homeopathy and believe it because my mind was so Western-trained. What is this stuff called energy? We have all experienced energy. Someone will tell us something sad and we energetically droop. Our physiology has not changed that quickly but something’s changed in us or the opposite. We hear something and we feel happiness or joy. Homeopathy is the use of minerals or plants or sometimes animal tissues, and taking these things and turning them into homeopathic remedies that help people.
For instance, the classic example we use is an onion. If you peel an onion, you start to have burning lacrimation, burning tears. We have made a remedy out of onion and we give it to someone who has burning tears. It could be a person with hay fever, cold or flu. They have the same symptoms as onion, so we give them homeopathic onion and it clears up their burning tears. That’s how homeopathy works. It works through what’s called the Law of Similars.
There’s something called the Paradoxical Theory of Change in psychology. If someone has anxiety and you can have them sit with it and work through it, then paradoxically, the anxiety does not get forced. It goes away. It does not always happen that way but that’s the whole idea of the Law of Similars. In homeopathy, we have a whole slew of remedies that can work with the body and the mind. In my practice, I have been using both.
If somebody comes in with a sore throat and it’s right-sided, they crave cold drinks, they are salivating, sweating, and the sweating is not relieving, I give them homeopathic mercury. Mercury will clear them up. If they come in with grief, if they have had a loss in a relationship, job, or God forbid they lost a family member, we give them homeopathic Natrum Mur. Natrum Mur is sodium chloride because it’s made from salt. The homeopaths have discovered that salt has the ability to help somebody let go of the past or old things. To some people, time heals things and they let go of things, but other people can’t. Time does not heal. They hold grudges and can’t let go.
Homeopathic sodium chloride or Natrum Mur would help them release, let go and move on. I find it a tool in therapy. It’s not trying to get rid of the growth opportunity that they have. Instead, it takes an edge off so that they can grow and work in therapy or work things out themselves. Homeopathy turns out to be a wonderful tool both for the body and the mind.
You mentioned you would give mercury homeopathic, and a lot of people would jump right up and say, “Mercury is poisonous. You don’t give people mercury.” You did not quite say yet but what I want you to get into is that when you give a homeopathic remedy and it’s mercury-based, there’s no mercury in it at that point. You talk in the book quite nicely about how by the time you are done diluting it, it’s diluted so much that there’s not even a single molecule of mercury in it, but there’s the energy that was there.
You are exactly right. When I talked about the onion, we would give the onion 1/100th to the 30th in the denominator. At the ninth level, according to Avogadro’s number, the way I was taught, there’s no more possibility of molecules in there. You are giving the energy of mercury. In the old days, the doctors used to give mercury until the person was salivating. Salivating was called the end result of giving mercury. When I went to medical school, they stopped using mercurial diuretics, which were causing autotoxicity. When we give mercury, we are trying to remove that stuff. It’s the Law of Similars. We will give it to someone who looks mercurialized and try to remove those symptoms. Does that help you?
Angers are different. The depressions are different. The anxieties are different.
Yes. I keep coming back to one of the articles I read when I got introduced to this. They had given arsenic to rats and the rats would consume this. It’s not enough to kill them but it was slowly built up in their system. They were checking the rat droppings for arsenic and there was almost none there. Then, they developed the homeopathic remedy and gave that to some of the rats. They did not give it to others.
When they gave the vibrational energy of the arsenic to the rats who had consumed arsenic, they started to excrete it in the stool. Lots of arsenic was coming out of the rats who got the energy of arsenic without any additional molecules of arsenic and they were getting rid of it in their stool. The rats that ate the arsenic and were not given the homeopathic remedy, nothing came out in their stool and they remained sick. As you said, it took you a while to get into this because of your Western-trained mind to think about the body as a physical and energy system work.
I have seen arsenic work wonders on people with anxiety about their health. We gave a lot of arsenic in a homeopathic remedy, the energy of arsenic. We gave that to help people who were extremely worried about their health and obsessive and anxious about it. A lot of times, it helped them. It has that modality. Arsenic is for a person who is very anxious, chilly, and mentally restless. They may be pacing, they are better from hard drinks or right-sided. There’s a lot of stuff. Every one of these remedies has a lot of components to it, and that’s why we can have the beauty of homeopathy.
We can have four people who are anxious sitting in front of us and for each one, we individualize their symptoms and give a different remedy. Not everybody gets Lexapro, Prozac, or Klonopin. One person has Arsenicum and the other person is Natrum Mur. Another person does not have problems holding back tears and holding onto the past, but they have a problem with boundaries. They have phosphorous.
Another one is crying all the time. There are different types of crying. One type of crying where you want to hug the person and comfort them, that’s Pulsatilla. Another type of crying is so irritating you want to get rid of them and get them out of the office. That’s chamomile. Everybody is different. That’s the amazing thing about homeopathy and that’s what’s so difficult about it. It takes time to zero in on the person. When you do it and it works, it’s like magic. It’s so rewarding. Most homeopaths are very passionate about it.
What comes to me to say at this point is that I have been in health food stores where they have homeopathic remedies. It’s labeled, “Here’s a homeopathic remedy. Take this if you have got this or this,” but what you are talking about is a level of diagnostics of assessing the individual for all kinds of little nuances to help you figure it out. Here’s a crying person, which of these remedies would be right for this kind of crying, or a person who cries this way and when they drink hot drinks, it gets worse, or when they drink hot drinks, it gets better. There’s such a level of specificity in the work you do.
Arsenicum is a perfectionist remedy. You see the pictures on your wall are pretty straight. They are not crooked but if they were crooked, Arsenicum would come in there and straighten them. It lets me know right away. It’s arsenic. They walk right in. Another person is sulfur. They don’t care. It’s all thrown around. Everything is all over the place. These remedies have pictures. If you study homeopathy over the years, you get a picture, you match the picture to the person and because of the law of similars and because of the energy, you are not doing anything to anybody because there’s nothing in there physically. You are changing the energy and by changing energy, then the person heals.
The energetic medicine that they have helps them heal their cough, lower their blood pressure, have less anxiety or be less depressed. It’s the vital force of chi, qi, or prana that you are working with. That’s such a different way in the West of approaching. None of us grew up with that. We all had to seek this out and learn this, but all over the world, people are much more familiar with the whole concept of energy than we are in the United States.
The other thing that comes up as you are talking about that is when I first got introduced to homeopathy, one of the concepts that were pushed very strongly for me is I believe they called it a healing crisis. They said, “You are going to get better but you might have an exacerbation of symptoms. Your symptoms might get worse before they get better.” Is that something that you talk to people about on a regular basis? Has that been your experience as well?
There are a couple of different ways to practice homeopathy. One is Kantian homeopathy and in that homeopathy, you use higher doses and sometimes, you get an aggravation and then, you back off the remedy and the person is worse and then better. The Hahnemannian, in his latest edition of the Organon, goes for lower potency remedies where you avoid the aggravation altogether. The best possible way to do it is to avoid the aggravation altogether.
I had a person come in and I said, “Any changes?” He said, “No, everything is the same.” Then, I went through it and was like, “How’s your energy, mental clarity, heavy legs, and hot flashes?” Once we went through it, he was like, “As a matter of fact, that’s different.” There was no aggravation. There was a subtle improvement. That is the best way of doing things. The best improvement that we can have in homeopathy is to look for energy. The person feels better, their energy, sense of wellness, mental clarity, and then the rest of them usually clears up whether it’s a problem in the foot, stomach, asthma, or whatever it is.
I flashed on it because I have got several people I know. Seeing them out, they are having such intense emotional upset whether it’s rage or anxiety. I had that thought flash in my mind about you saying letting go of the past. I forget the remedy you had for that but then I thought, “If we gave it to this guy and they had an exacerbation of symptoms, that could be too much to handle,” so that’s why I asked that.
Holistic Medicine: Look for something that you really want to do. Find a way to help people and bring value to their lives.
It depends where the anger’s coming from too. Some people suppress their anger. There’s a remedy called Staphys. That’s great for people who can’t fight back, feel submissive, hurt, and humiliated. There’s another remedy called nux vomica, which is, “I’m the king of the world. Don’t get in my way. If you get in the way, I will push you away. Get out of my way. I’m frustrated.” That’s completely a different remedy. Once again, anger, depression, and anxieties are different. As I talk about it, to you, I’m like, “Who would ever do this?” It would take years to learn and take so much time with a person, but God has given us homeopathy as a gift. It’s an amazing thing.
You have had those years of studying this and working with people over this. How many years have you been doing homeopathy?
Pretty much since 1985 and 1986, but I have been studying differently now. As time goes on, you keep on studying different teachers and different people. You have to keep on learning. That’s an important part of holistic medicine. Holistic medicine is not just about getting fixed. It’s about learning and growing.
It’s not just for the doctor. This is one of the things I loved about reading your book. You get excited about teaching the people you work with and getting them curious about their own health and lifestyle.
If a person experiences something and the light bulb goes on, they become very curious and interested because they become self-empowered. Once a patient becomes self-empowered then they become a student. Once they become a student of their health, they start helping others and then become a teacher. I see a graduation from a patient to student to teacher. That’s what I see in holistic medicine. That’s what I wanted for myself. I did not want a drug just to open up my tubes.
I had asthma a long time ago. They gave me theophylline. I did not like the way it made me feel. Why do I have asthma? I started looking and it said to get rid of mucus-related foods, all the foods that cause mucus, and learn how to breathe. What’s emotionally going on in my life? The lungs are in the heart chakra. What does the heart chakra stand for? I wanted to learn all these things because I wanted control of my own body and not somebody else to control my body.
Did you end up relieving the symptoms of asthma by working at a cause level?
I did. I tend to avoid mucus-related foods. I lost a little weight. I took some homeopathic remedies for asthma. I worked on my mind. I have to tell you that I found when I went through all these different nutrition, exercise, homeopathy, and psychotherapy that everybody had their little niche but nobody wanted to do the whole thing. I needed everything. I needed a piece here and there. For me, my passion evolved to having the whole picture.
I work with my diet and exercise. I take homeopathic remedies. I use breathing techniques. I do a little meditation. I have gotten a lot of spiritual stuff. I do some personal and liturgical prayer. Everything I read about, I need it. I figured that if I need it, maybe it helps other people too. That’s the kind of practice that we have at the center.
Some people might need a diet more, some people might need energy remedies more, some people might need exercise, some people might need good affirmation, and some people might need classical psychotherapy getting into transferences. Other people need to just pray. A person is a human being. Unfortunately in Western medicine, we find an ear, a nose, a throat, or a nerve ending and try to keep the serotonin from being destroyed but we are people here to grow and learn. I feel like this kind of medicine is done medicine to help people do what they came to this incarnation to do. That’s what I believe.
You gave us the example of how you needed a whole variety of things to move past the point where you had the symptoms of asthma. I know there’s a story in the book about how you worked with your son. Can you tell us that story?
The gift that God has given us is homeopathy.
My middle son developed croup and that’s the homeopathic story. My son developed croup laryngotracheobronchitis. It could be fatal. It’s when the throat closes off from inflammation. I know the moms knew about this. When my son had croup, I was frightened because when I was a kid, my brother developed croup, and I heard him struggling to breathe.
I remember trying to get a hold of my parents. There was a party at the time and there was a lot of commotion in the house. I was shy but after a couple of times, I got their attention and they came up. They rushed him to Michael Reese Hospital, did an emergency laryngeal fasciotomy and he made it. When my son started having croup right in front of my eyes, it scared me but I knew there was a trilogy of croup remedies.
I did two things. I had my wife come to my side. I gave him spongia for when they’re barking like a seal. You can hear it. It’s a particular sound of a cough. He was lying on the floor next to his toys and we gave him a spongia. In about five minutes, he started to get up and play with his toys still barking like a seal right in front of my eyes. When things like this happen, I don’t believe what my eyes are seeing so I turned to my wife and said, “Do you see what I see?” She said, “I am seeing the same thing.”
I called the physician. The physician came out to the house about an hour later. He said, “He does not need to go to the hospital. He’s doing fine.” He was playing while breathing like that because the energy of spongia has changed him immediately. The physiology took a little while. When you see things like this, it’s like seeing miracles. That was my story with my son. The poetry of the whole thing was a ton of help towards my healing tube because I was able to do something to help somebody and then heal my own memories of what happened in my family.
That’s powerful. We have so many of those things in us that are locked in there, and when they get activated, they start to drive our behavior as adults. We don’t realize that’s what’s driving our behavior.
You don’t need a homeopathic remedy to do that. You could just recall it in a session and have the person’s memory. I like the way they think about it. Energetically, it cancels out that energy pattern and then it’s diminished or gone. You can do that with therapy or a homeopathic remedy.
One of the things that Diederik Wolsak does in his work is he says, “When you are activated to an upset, as an adult, first, you got to own that you are upset. You don’t want to blow it off and then, you want to understand that it’s all happening inside you.” Then you want to know what emotion are you experiencing. Put a name on it and then ask yourself if this is a familiar emotion. He says, “It will always be familiar because we downloaded them in our first 7, 8 or 9 years of life. When you ask, “When was one of the first times you had that emotion?” You let it bubble up and you remember. You go back and interview your younger self. You say to your younger self, “What did you make this mean when this happened?” You would be interviewing your younger self.
What did you make it mean when your older or younger sibling had the croup and had to go to the hospital and have the trach put in? What did you make it mean about you? You don’t change the history of what happened but you can change what you made it mean, or what you are carrying around inside of you as a meaning for the value of yourself, your skills and abilities, or your ability to affect the environment whether or not you are a good person or a bad person. We download these things. We don’t know they are there. Every time that resonant energy comes up and activates them, we start to experience our lives through the filter of that belief. It’s great. You can do it with the homeopathic remedy and break that energy system. You can do it with some of these techniques like Diederik Wolsak has that six-step worksheet process. It’s quite powerful when people step into using it.
I have a way of thinking about it differently. Even when we approach it therapeutically, I would say, “According to the Law of Similars, we are canceling out that energy pattern.” There’s an energy pattern that’s been living there where you can see them in layers or sheaths. You go down to that energy sheath and through the law of similars, cancel it out, clean out and recover that energy onto the next one and then the next one.
The energy is available in a different way. There are different energies there. Most of us understand that we need energy flowing through us to be able to function well in life.
Holistic Medicine: It takes time to really zero in on the person. And when you do it, and it works, it’s like magic. It’s so rewarding.
I see it as a ladder. I have experienced it like a ladder. I experienced that if I’m not eating properly, my body calls for a lot of attention. That attention gets in the way of my feeling good. The feeling bad gets in the way of the tension of my growth through the trials and tribulations that come along with everyday living. The book demonstrates that I had to go into therapy and work on some of these things that you are talking about because they were in the way of living life at a higher level.
Once I was able to eat right, work through some of the conflicts, I can start to see the light shining through and work on my spiritual self. I saw a ladder. Can you work on all these different levels at once? Yes and maybe it’s even the right way to do it, but I do think the concept of a ladder is important because people can get stuck in one area, work on that area and then move to the next area. It’s a ladder up.
We are both therapists. I felt like I needed something more than just therapy. I needed a spiritual perspective on life because therapy is great for psychology but when I see patients, I make a distinction between what’s psychological and what’s spiritual. I like to make that distinction so that the patient can permit me to get spiritual with them because I find a lot of people get stuck. Some people can’t move on, and once they open up spiritually to something greater, it’s like shifting a level or shifting gears in a car. They can move more towards who they are to the completion of who they are or the wholeness of who they are, and fulfill the destiny that I feel everybody here has.
Everybody has a unique destiny to fulfill. It’s a part of the therapy. The way we do it and I included this in terms of holistic medicine is that when somebody comes in, we are like, “Why do you want to get healed? It’s not just to avoid pain? That’s good. You want to grow.” The whole thing is about growing in an upward direction. It’s not sideways, not downwards but upwards.
What’s that question or series of questions that you ask to get permission to go spiritual with them? What’s that process like moving from the psychological to the spiritual?
I don’t know if I have a specific question. I might be doing some therapy in a session. I’m thinking of a couple’s session. I’m talking to the man and I’m going to say, “I want you to put your wife first.” He looks at me like I hit him over the head with a hammer. I’m like, “If it’s a two-way street, we can do it psychologically but this is more spiritual. There are traditions that say, “You need to give and one of the ways to give is to put your wife first.” That’s more spiritual so is it okay if we talk like that? “I want to make a distinction. If you want to just talk about how you can communicate better and why you are upset with her and why she’s upset with you, we can do that.”
I call it psychological but spiritual means there are some spiritual aphorisms, like judging another person favorably and giving charity. There’s a whole bunch of things that I would call spiritual. I would not call them religious but spiritual. Most of the people are open and they want it. They like it and are hungry for it. That’s something that I have developed over the years. I hinted at it at the end of the book too.
You talked about it quite thoroughly in the book at different levels where you were talking about spirituality as a part of the holistic approach. If you think that we are winding at a time, which we are, and there’s an area of the work you do with people or something that’s in the book that we haven’t even talked about yet, or the practice that you have that you would like us to include for people. What would that be?
Exercise is important. We have not touched on exercise. Like diet, a person has to individualize their exercise. In the book, I put down different kinds of exercise, like exercises for strength, flexibility, and aerobic activity. I find that people don’t always think this way. The great aerobic people are not always into strength and the strength people are not always into flexibility. In yoga, there’s a saying, “You are as young as your spine.” I have made it a habit. I do a little tight tai chi, yoga, aerobics and weights, but I don’t overdo any of it because I have come to see that no one thing in life is it except our creator.
Once people open up spiritually to something greater, a new level shifts like a gear in a car. They can move towards completing who they are, the wholeness of who they are, and fulfilling their destiny.
You have to develop the ability and we call it sattvic in yoga, to take the middle path so that you don’t hurt yourself. In all these disciplines whether it’s nutrition, exercise, therapy, or homeopathy, you want to develop the ability to give yourself support and work one step at a time in all these disciplines. Don’t put yourself down. Love yourself.
One of the things we haven’t touched on here is prayer. I like a personal prayer. One of the things I have learned to do is to pray with my own words. I find many patients do this and it’s very powerful. You can always turn to personal prayer if things are not working in life. I find it very wonderful myself. For certain patients, it works. It’s not for everybody. You have to ask permission. Some people don’t like it and some people have certain belief systems, so it’s always important to respect but nobody talks about it. I hardly ever hear anybody talk about it in a therapy session.
We have talked a little bit about combining spirituality with all this stuff like prayer, contemplation and meditation. Meditation is a very safe way of talking about it but what do you do when you meditate? I don’t think the purpose is to just meditate and go off on a mountain and be by yourself. That’s not what I think. The whole idea of meditation is to get clear, come back, and use what you learned in meditation to elevate the world around us. By the way, none of this is original.
I get it. I have heard it in a lot of places.
I don’t want any credit for it. It’s all from my teachers and the traditions that I have learned.
These are really old traditions. They can be thousands of years old.
A lot of it is from yoga, Kabbalah, Hasidic, Chinese medicine, and Ayurveda. I integrated a lot of them into my life.
Even the origins of what we would call the Western scriptures have the same things. They are thousands of years old and they have got the same wisdom. I thank you so much for joining us. Can you give us a website if people want to find out more or contact you?
It’s Holistic-Medicine.com or Center for Holistic Medicine Illinois. If they look that up, that’s what they have got. There’s one in Michigan too.
Holistic Medicine: Holistic medicine isn’t just about getting fixed. It’s about learning. It’s about growing.
It’s delightful to meet you. Thank you for sharing with our audience. I’m going to reread the book and then continue to follow your work and see where it takes us.
That would be great. Thank you for the opportunity.
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Dr. Gore’s training included Ayurveda, nutrition, supplementation, energy medicine including homeopathy and flower essences, and the practical application of yoga and mindfulness as it applies to general medical practice. In 1994, Dr. Gore took over the practice from Dr. Ballentine, and in 1997, he and his wife, Carol, cofounded the Center in Riverwoods or Deerfield. They have continued the tradition of mind-body medicine, as well as enjoying the collaboration of many like-minded practitioners. Dr. Gore will evaluate new patients and may treat them as well as help them find the right practitioner and the path at the center, which will help them coordinate their care.
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About Dr. Jerry P. Gore
Holistic General Medicine, Holistic Psychiatry, Author | Founder and Clinical Director, Dr. Gore received his medical degree at University of Illinois School of medicine, and then received his post graduate education at Northwestern University’s Institute of psychiatry while also completing a 3 year program at the Gestalt Institute of Chicago. He then studied Yoga and Tai Chi and began an apprenticeship with Dr. Ballentine at the Center for Holistic Medicine at the Himalayan Institute, then in Glenview, Illinois, which was the first of its kind in the Midwest.
His training included ayurveda, nutrition, supplementation, energy medicine (including homeopathy and flower essences) and the practical application of yoga and mindfulness as it applies to a general medical practice.
In 1994, Dr. Gore took over the practice from Dr. Ballentine, and in 1997, he and his wife, Carol, co-founded the Center in Riverwoods / Deerfield as it exists today. They have continued the tradition of mind / body medicine as well as enjoying the collaboration of many like-minded practitioners. Dr. Gore will evaluate a new patient and may treat them as well as help them find the right practitioner and path at the center and help coordinate their care.
Dr. Gore has published a book titled Holistic Medicine: Physical Health, Peace of Mind, and Clarity of Consciousness. He is a frequent speaker and blogger and enjoys teaching in the community. His vision is to help people with their symptoms of illness, educate patients so they feel empowered and help them transform their lives using holistic medicine.
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