Bridging the Gap to Oneness is a personal account of healing and transformation from skilled Dr. Barbara Gordon-Cohen, D.O. Dr. Barbara explains in her story-telling style how emotional healing and life-style changes can lead to better health and cures to illness. She talks honestly about her own journey, her patients, and the experiences that led her to a deep understanding of the mind-body-emotion-spirit connection and the true causes of illness. She gives us hope that we can change, heal, and cure through many practices from eastern/western medicine to food to dance! I’ve had the pleasure to dance with Dr. Barbara and experience her shining light in person. What a gift!
Toni Bergins, M.ED. Founder of JourneyDanceTM, a transformational movement practice
Founder of Embodied Transformations Method, a deep process coaching program
JourneyDance Live DVD / JourneyDance Embodied Heart DVD Singer Songwriter, Never Too Late Album 2018 www.journeydance.com
Dr Barbara takes us on a personal journey of discovery, realization and healing. She teaches that any health issue needs to be treated holistically and that symptoms are signs that point us to the underlying causes of our physical and emotional challenges. She demonstrates that there is more than one pathway to healing and, importantly, that when we take the time to stop and really listen to our bodies we are naturally guided to deep healing wisdom. Her book is packed full of inspirational real life stories, practical tips and great healing advice.
Brandon Bays.
Cellular Healing Authority and International Bestselling Author of The Journey, Living The Journey & Freedom Is
Dr. Barbara Gordon-Cohen, D. O. has written a very readable and highly personal and practical book on how to achieve one’s potential. As she describes her own quest for good health, she manages to summarize how various disciplines, such as nutrition and nutritional supplements, osteopathy, acupuncture, homeopathy, yoga, exercise, spiritual fulfillment and many others can be used to achieve wholeness and health in this very stressful and often toxic world. I highly recommend it.
Michael B. Schachter MD, Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS); Board Certified Psychiatrist; Former President of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM); Helping Cancer Patients with Alternative Cancer Therapies since the Mid-1970’s, Owner and Director of the Schachter Center for Complementary Medicine in Suffern NY (www.schachtercenter.com) since 1974.
Barbara Gordon-Cohen,D.O. after being a complete physician from the original holistic and alternative medical profession of Osteopathy for 26 years , has contributed to the vernacular this wonderful informative guide to getting answers to complex and everyday medical conditions. Kudos for trying to help the patients who hunger for peace in body, mind and Spirit.
Dr. Paul Capobianco, D.O.
Dr. Barbara teaches us about good health by sharing her own personal journey towards mental, emotional, and physical well- being. In addition she shares insights from a number of health modalities including osteopathy, Ayurvedic, acupuncture, yoga, bio identical hormones, and nutrition.
Her book is also significant for repeatedly emphasizing the mind- body connection. Not only in her reference to the work of Dr. John Sarno, but also in relation to her health journey and those of many of her patients. For these reasons I encourage you to read the book as there should be something important for nearly everyone in this book.
David Schechter, M.D.
Author, Think Away Your Pain and the MindBody Workbook
Private practice, Culver City, California
Nancy, a 45- year-old woman came into my office complaining of pain in her neck that radiated down her left arm. During the history taking I always ask if there is any history of trauma. It turned out she had fallen off her porch onto her buttocks five years before coming to see me. After the fall she had low back pain for a few days and then it subsided.
While I treated her, it felt as if her sacrum ( the lowest segment of the low back below the lumbar spine) was stuck in a forward position. It simply did not move when I palpated for the motion of the sacrum. Humans are about 80% fluid and a trained Osteopath can feel the movement of this fluid in different parts of the body. It feels like a wave turning and twisting about. The amplitude of motion varies in people from strong to weak as one palpates. This movement comes from the production of Cerebrospinal Fluid in the brain that is produced and reabsorbed and has its own rate of movement per minute which is a separate rate from our arterial pulse or our respiratory rate. This rate is called the primary respiratory mechanism.
I started slowly easing the sacrum forward into the position it wanted to be in and after several minutes of treatment the sacrum suddenly released and started to move. The patient spontaneously jumped into alertness and said, "what was that"? I was surprised at her spontaneous release as well and told her that her sacrum finally started to move, and she felt that shift.
She returned for a follow-up a week later. The pain in her neck was completely gone.
Very few people know much about osteopathy, yet osteopathic medical schools are springing up all over the country. In fact, the philosophy of treating the "whole person" approach has made osteopathy the fastest-growing segment of healthcare in the United States and osteopaths have become health care providers for over 20% of the population of physicians.
Harlem is a fitting location for the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine. Many osteopathic schools have an added mission: to dispatch doctors to poorer neighborhoods and towns most in need of medical care.
I was an osteopathic preceptor in the first class in Harlem in 2007 and I am the only one left from that first class still teaching in the hospitals to the 3rd year students. They chose me because I was board certified in neuromuscular medicine and family medicine. I had never taught osteopathic students before, but I had lectured previously to the public and educated them on osteopathy. I guess gymnasts are not quitters. I hung in there through many changes in the department in the first few years in a new school. I am so glad I pursued teaching at TouroCOM as I realized how rewarding it was and how much I learned from my students, too.
Inside, Touro seems indistinguishable from a conventional medical school — what doctors of osteopathic Medicine, or D.O.s, call allopathic, a term that some M.D.s aren’t fond of.
A walk through the corridors finds students practicing skills on mannequins, hard-wired with faulty hearts. They dissect cadavers. They bend over lab tables, working with professors on their research.
And, unlike their allopathic counterparts, they spend roughly five hours a week being instructed in the century-old techniques of osteopathic medicine which include manipulating the spine, muscles, fascia. Fluid and bones in diagnosis and treatment. In one classroom, several students lay flat on examining tables while classmates learn hands- on “Manipulative Therapy.”
It should be noted that getting into osteopathic school is still excruciatingly tough. Imagine 16,500 students applying for some 6,400 spots. Touro has received 6,000 applications for 270 first-year seats for the Manhattan school and their campus in Middletown, N.Y.
The boom in osteopathy is striking. In 1980, there were just 14 schools across the country and 4,940 students. There are now 30 schools, including state universities in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia and Michigan, offering instruction at 40 different locations to more than 23,000 students. Today, osteopathic schools turn out about 22 percent of the nation’s medical school graduates.
Whatever the reasons for choosing a D.O. over an M.D. degree, osteopathic medicine has, for decades now and increasingly so, been accepted as authoritative training by the medical establishment, including the residency programs that lead to licensure.
About 60 percent of D.O. graduates go on to primary care fields like internal medicine, pediatrics and family medicine, compared with about 30 percent of M.D.s.
Osteopathic skills were first consolidated by a 19th-century frontier physician, who returned from serving as a physician in the Civil War, had become dissatisfied with the state of the medical profession.
Andrew Taylor Still, who decried the overuse of arsenic, castor oil, opium, and elixirs and believed that many diseases had their roots in a disturbed musculoskeletal system that could be treated hands on. He founded the first osteopathic school in 1892 in Kirksville, Mo. — A.T. Still University.
In the late 19th Century, there were basically three schools of thought around healing - homeopathy, allopathy, and eclectic medicine.
Homeopathy, established by Samuel Hahnemann is based on prescribing microscopic doses of medicines that produce the same symptoms as the disease to assist the body's own healing response.
Allopathy is the most common form of medicine practiced today. Its practitioners are MDs whose therapy relies on drugs and surgery to cure diseases.
The eclectic school borrowed from many healing traditions and was likely to vary from practitioner to practitioner.
Dr. Still disliked using drugs. He had observed that whenever he found disease in a patient he also found problems in the musculoskeletal system. He thought imbalances in the circulatory, lymphatic and nervous systems caused the problems, and solved it by manipulating the body with his hands
Books:
Nutrition
1. Grain Brain by David Perlmutter, MD
2. Prescription for Nutritional Healing, Fifth Edition: A Practical A-to-Z Reference to Drug-Free Remedies Using Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs by Phyllis A. Balch CNC
3. Milk the Deadly Poison by Robert Cohen
4. Breaking the Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gloria Gottschall/ Rochel Weiss
5. Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome by James L. Wilson MD, DC, PHD
6. Nutritional Medicine by Alan R. Gaby, M.D.
7. Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness, by Broda Barnes
8. Stay Young & Sexy with Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement by Jonathan V. Wright, MD
9. Wilson’s syndrome, The Miracle of Feeling Well by Denis E. Wilson, MD
10. Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, By Christiane Northrup, MD
11. The Wisdom of Menopause, by Christiane Northrup, MD
Homeopathy
12. Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicines third revised edition of the most popular family homeopathic guidebook in the world, teaches step-by-step how to select the correct homeopathic remedy for numerous common ailments and injuries. ... Originally published: 1984
Authors: Dana Ullman, Stephen Cummings
Ayurveda
13. Perfect Health by Deepak Chopra, MD
14. Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing by Usha Lad, Vasant Lad
15. Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution by Dr. Robert Svoboda
16. Yoga & Ayurveda: Self-Healing and Self- Realization Paperback – by Dr. David Dr. Frawley
Medicine and Osteopathy
17. Life in Motion, by Rollin E. Becker, DO
18. The Heart of Listening I and II by Hugh Milne, DO
19. Touch of Life, by Dr. Fulford
20. Philosophy of Osteopathy, Philosophy and Mechanical Principles of Osteopathy. Can be purchased online: academyofosteopathy.org
