Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
Today on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Paul Dieppe, a British physician and professor who spent much of his career in conventional medicine before turning his focus to healing in all its forms, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Dr. Dieppep is a former rheumatologist and academic at the University of Exeter and Bristol, and he’s the co-author of Healing and Medicine, A Doctor’s Journey toward their integration and our conversation. Today, we’re going to explore how his personal experience and research led him to believe that true healing goes beyond conventional medicine and how we can begin to bring those worlds together. Paul, welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Paul Dieppe:
Thank you.

Lorne Brown:
Now you’re a physician medical doctor rheumatologist. You’ve taught in medicine. I think it’s fair to begin with your story. How does somebody go from that profession to when I’ve been learning about you gone into really the world of healing where maybe your peers have think you’ve lost your mind. So there must be some personal experiences where you’ve had this transformation. If you’re willing to share with our audience.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, of course. It’s a complicated story. I had a healing experience when I was a boy before I started at medical school, and I thought I went into medicine thinking that it would be about caring and healing and it wasn’t. It was about being a body mechanic, like a calm mechanic, and I was sort of disillusioned by that. But I found that without wanting to sound too pleased of myself, I was quite good at it and it came easily there being a body mechanic. And I got caught up by the whole business of medicine, which of course is huge and allowed myself to be seduced by it. And of course medicine does a lot of good for a lot of people, so one shouldn’t really apologize for that. But I became seduced completely by the ethos of medicine, by its story about itself, by the research.
And I was successful in that. I sort of forgot about my earlier life experience and my wish to have gone into a caring profession rather than science. I got on with it and I enjoyed it and it was all going fine until when I was 44, I was taken a hostage in Iraq and Kuwait, and I had some strange experiences there, which kind of rekindled my old interest in not only healing and caring, but in paranormal events, which I’ve been interested in against since a young man. And when I got back into my career, I found I was no longer excited by it. I was no longer convinced that this was the right way forward or the only way forward I should say. So rather gradually through a difficult period of transition and getting over PTSD and the rest, I gradually changed my focus to caring and healing. So that in short, is it.

Lorne Brown:
And if we can unpack a little bit of that, I have some curious questions. You said as a boy, you had an experience later when you went into medicine, you wanted to go into the healing and caring and you got caught up into the signs of it, the mechanics interesting. In Chinese medicine, we see ourselves as gardeners. So you’re the body mechanic trying to fix all the different parts. And in Chinese medicine, and I guess in many healing traditions, the body’s seen as an ecosystem and you’re creating a healthy environment by pulling weeds, nourishing the soil, adding water, knowing that the organism in this case, the plant or the body will take what it needs to do. Its healing. So it’s interesting that you saw that you were playing like a body mechanic versus a gardener.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, absolutely

Lorne Brown:
To highlight, you said, don’t apologize for medicine. I want to hear just about your boyhood experience and did you have a paranormal experience while you were as a hostage? You mentioned you had some PTSD afterwards, but I’m curious, were there any non-ordinary states that you had as a child or during that hostage that started to shift who you are today?

Paul Dieppe:
Sure. Well, let’s start with the childhood one. So sport was very important to me as a child, and I was okay at that. And we have a strange game in this country called Rugby Union, which is sort of our equivalent to your American football. It’s a very physical game, a very tough game. And when I was playing that at school, I got a severe kidney injury which destroyed one of my kidneys. I was taken into hospital, I was told I’d probably need the kidney taken out the following day, and I guess I was quite ill. I’d lost a lot of blood internally. The strange experience was the following day when the team came around to see me preparing to take me to an operating theater to take my kidney out. And I was not, well, I was in a lot of pain. I was a bit shibby and all the rest, but I was a naive 16-year-old boy.
I didn’t know what was going on. And this team came up to my bedside and asked me how I was. And something completely extraordinary happened at that moment. I suddenly knew that I was fine and everything was fine with the world. They were looking worried, and I knew they didn’t be worried. I knew it was all fine and my pain went and I sat up in bed and I told them, yeah, I’m fine thanks. I feel great. Which caused a bit of consternation amongst the medical team. And they asked me a few questions and they prodded me a bit and the rest, and I was just in this extraordinary euphoric state. It was almost an out of body experience. I was almost looking down on the whole thing, wishing that they’d stopped worrying about me really. And they did after a bit and they said, well, okay, well we won’t operate today. We’ll see how he does and we’ll have another think about it tomorrow. And they went away and pretty much straight after that I was slumping back in bed and I was in pain. But it was a most extraordinary experience, the sort of thing that’s sometimes called a noetic experience. It was pretty much an out of body thing. I never had the operation and I got better. I still have one kidney of course, but that’s fine. Interesting.

Lorne Brown:
So you had a glimpse of that experience, that non-ordinary state, so that

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, but there’s a caveat to it as well that I’ll share with you that I didn’t know this, but at the time that was going on, I heard later that my parents had organized a prayer meeting for me which was going on, and they told me that they were sure that I’d been healed as a result of God’s intervention and their prayer meeting, that’s pretty hard thing to hear as a 16-year-old. And I found that very difficult in indeed did

Lorne Brown:
To hear that they were praying for you.

Paul Dieppe:
Yeah, well, I was okay about the fact that they were praying for me. I found the concept that God would want to intervene in my punitive life, a pretty strange concept. And I had a lot of trouble believing in God anyway. And still, do

Lorne Brown:
You have a sense now, many years later, what that experience was just our audience, we’ve had quantum physicists on here, they talk about Tony so they’re comfortable for you to get what, we’ll use the word weird. It’s only weird because it goes against conventional, but feel free to share if you want, what you think was happening then as a,

Paul Dieppe:
Well, I think it was one of these nerd experiences, I suppose my current kind of explanation for it because although I’m happy with weird as well and I’m happy with quantum weirdness, although I don’t understand it, I’m happy with all that. But nevertheless, I can’t stop myself wanting an explanation and rather than it being an intervention by a God, my explanation would be that the goodwill and the conscious effort to allow me to heal by a group of people probably helped facilitate this strange experience and strange event. So that that’s my current way of processing what happens to me.

Lorne Brown:
And you’ve had other NOIC experiences. I remember learning about one regarding your father, if you’re willing to share. I want to kind of set up what you’ve had these glimpses or experiences that have led you to do what you’re doing today. So you know what I’m talking about with, I call ’em non-ordinary states or noetic experiences. I was

Paul Dieppe:
A hostage in AWAI in Iraq for some five months with a group of other men. It’s a strange story. We were taken off an airplane that was refueling as Iraq converted Kuwait. And I spent quite a lot of time in a small two bedroom flat with seven other men. Conditions were bad, we weren’t fed well, we weren’t allowed out. Things were pretty grim. But the flat had been owned by a university professor of Wai University. So there were good things there like some books and some papers and pencils and some of the others used the paper and pencils to try and keep a diary of what was going on and sort of became a ritual that I’d write a paragraph or two of my diary each morning. But I was doing that one morning about six or seven weeks into this difficult period, and I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss that was huge and overwhelming and so much so that I stopped writing kind of mid-sentence.
And I had a feeling that it was something to do with my father, but I couldn’t understand what it was. But it was very, very distressing and I never picked up that diary again. So I know exactly when this happened because I’ve been keeping date and time in the diary. And it was only as I was coming home some three to four months later that I learned that was the day that my father had died. I didn’t know he’d even been ill. And he died on that day. That’s what in the literature called as I’m sure on a shared death experience, that my father was reaching out to me as he was dying. And that was another very profound experience and was part of my reawakening, I guess.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, and key keyword is reawakening. They do say suffering can lead to awakening. And it must’ve been challenging for your trained mind as a conventional physician. This is kind of outside that box, especially back then was this start of that process that there’s more to this world than we can measure on the materialistic level. Did you start or did you shut it down right away?

Paul Dieppe:
I’m not sure I completely know the answer to that question. I shut it down to begin with because it was too difficult and I had a lot of things to deal with though my family were very traumatized by the whole event. My father had died. I had a lot to try and process and deal with when I got back home. And I didn’t dwell on that moment. But what I did do as I slowly got better was I started reading about such things. I didn’t know the concept of a shared death experience when this happened to me. I didn’t know anything about near-death experiences. I didn’t know this stuff existed. And I started reading and I learned that actually, yeah, this thing happens to not a lot of people, but a number of people particularly shared death experiences are probably a lot commoner than we think because most people won’t admit to them.
So that helped me in the sense that, well, I’m not mad other people have these experiences. It wasn’t complete madness. And similarly with some other experiences I have there. So slowly I started to understand that I had been privileged, and I use that word deliberately. I’ve been privileged to experience some of these other types of phenomenal that occur in our world that are not easily explained by our Newtonian physics understanding of the world. And of course all of my medic profession is entirely based on materialistic thinking, based on Newtonian physics alone. So I had to start slowly to rethink where I was and what I was doing.

Lorne Brown:
What kind of work or research did you do in near-death experience? And I want to get into the medical placebo and you said something about the conventional medicine is still the Newtonian physics and we had a all new physics, quantum physics, and I often think of it as what it must’ve been like in the day of the scientists when they felt the sun rotate around the earth and they’re saying, no, no, actually the earth goes around the sun. The earth is spinning and we’re round off flat. And the scientists that were ruling the nest were like, look in the sky, you can see the sun move, look out. You can see how making them look like they were crazy. And there’s this whole new science trying to emerge. I feel like when we talk about conscious and the stories you’re sharing, your peers, our modern day scientists are like one of their weapons is to shame you. Look at this, it’s ridiculous. Look at all the evidence we can show you that it doesn’t make sense. I’m curious though, because change happens from part of that aspect is those that are ruling the natural a monopoly on medicine. It’s those people that have to change the rules. So what did you learn from, and did you do work in NDEs? And I’d like to talk about placebo as well. Usually the word they throw around when somebody sees somebody who’s not a conventional medical doctor.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes. Well, there’s a lot of things in what you just said. So first of all, I agree with you totally. We need a paradigm shift. To use another phrase, I think the paradigm shift that is needed is to understand which many quant physicists have been selling for a very long time, that consciousness is a fundamental property and not something that’s generated by our brains. And conventional medicine clings very tightly to this idea that somehow the neuronal circuits in our brain generate consciousness. I think the evidence against that is absolutely overwhelming, but they still clinging to it. But I believe things are changing. I’m actually quite optimistic that the paradigm shift of that understanding will occur moderately soon and that’ll change everything. And that’ll be akin to your analogy of realizing that the is around the sun rather the other way around. It’s similarly big, and I think things like near death experiences, shared death experiences are reasons of course for knowing those of us who’ve been lucky enough to experience them, knowing that consciousness is not isolated to our brains. So what did I do? Well, I’ve not done research directly myself on any of these death related phenomena. I’ve simply read other people’s research and books. Well, I suppose that’s a form of research, secondary research. I’ve not done any primary research on those phenomena that I experienced, but I’ve read quite a lot of the literature.

Lorne Brown:
What is your take or explanation of placebo? We had a conversation with Bill Bankston. I don’t know if you know Bill Bankston?

Paul Dieppe:
Oh yeah, sure. Well, I know his writing.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. And just for our listeners, because it’s recent, he just passed last month at the time of our recording. So he passed in April or early May, 2025. So heartfelt out to his family and to bill, but placebo, can you kind of define what we’re calling placebo in the west? And then from your literature’s review and the work that you’ve done, do you have an understanding not from the ian level, but from the quantum level of what could be happening?

Paul Dieppe:
So I have done some primary research on as well as secondary to it. And perhaps for me more intriguingly what’s called placebo’s evil twin, no sibo, the phenomenal of getting much worse as a result of being given no intervention.

Lorne Brown:
Apologize to interrupt, you said No sibo. Our listeners that are looking to grow their families, often they’re told by their doctor, when women have shared with me when they’re younger, you have a condition. PCOS, you’re not going to get pregnant, it’s going to be hard to get pregnant. Or they come and they’re 40 and they say you can’t get pregnant because of the age. So a lot of women come in and they’re not aware of, but when the doctors are trying to give them statistics on their chances so they can decide whether to follow treatment or spend money, a lot of the things that they hear is you can’t get pregnant. And because the doctor has a nice white coat, it has a big impression on them and they can take that on as a truth versus a opinion. So I just wanted to share because maybe you can tie that in when you talk about no sibo.

Paul Dieppe:
No, I understand what I was just saying fits in with that. But I think doctors are incredibly good at inducing no SIBO effects. So I have done quite a lot of research on placebo and no sibo and as a result of which I don’t understand them. So they’re powerful big effects. And as you were saying, often much, much bigger than any standard treatment. So one of my particular interests in medicine has been osteoarthritis. And the problem for most people with that condition is pain. And placebo is a lot better at treating the pain than any other intervention we give. So all the drugs and so on are outperformed by the placebo, which is very interesting. So what is happening with placebo? I don’t know. I think the medical profession has got itself into a terrible muddle here by confusing how and why. So we know quite a lot about how, but that isn’t the same as why.
So how we can sort of explain with our clever to is like FMRI scanners functional MRI scanners on the wrist and we can see changes occurring in the brain and the neural pathways that control pain. And we can say, oh, well that’s what’s happening. That’s it. Well, that’s how, but it’s not why. And I don’t know why placebo and nocebo effects are so powerful, but I think it’s akin to healing. So I think that it’s part of these sets of phenomena that are not explicable with our classical disease centered approach to understanding the body and mind and how much of healing is placebo and vice versa. Doesn’t matter to me at all because as long as we learn how to use these effects for the benefit and we can learn how not to induce no SIBO effects, that’s fine. I don’t mind that I don’t understand it.

Lorne Brown:
Have you seen a pattern of what can help induce placebo? And maybe we can define the western, what they’re calling a placebo in western terms. And then I’m curious if you found there’s ways to elicit that innate healing in the body?

Paul Dieppe:
Yeah, well, okay. Well first of all, your first question about how we think of it and define it within the western model. So that’s become dominated by the thinking around trials. So particularly drug trials where you test whether or not a drug is helpful for a particular condition. And the classical way of doing that is to make up a dummy tablet with nothing in it but looks exactly the same as the real medicine, presuming this is tablets. Of course it’s more difficult, as you say, with things like acupuncture, but there are various ways around those things. But so you have a dummy pill looks exactly the same as the real pill, and you compare the two and you only think that your new drug works if it does better than the dummy tablet. The problem is that the dummy tablet generally does extremely well. Now that’s the placebo effect and traditional trialists hate it and have tried to dismiss it as nonsense, but they failed to do that. It’s real. So that’s what we call the placebo response in conventional medicine. That was your first question and I have now forgotten what your second one was.

Lorne Brown:
What are ways to support, we’ve given it a bad name placebo, like, oh, let’s take it away. Let’s take it away. We want just the drug to be doing it. And
Again, from my background, the training that I have is we have this understanding that the body has an innate ability to heal and we want to support and engage in that healing. And so that’s where western medicine doesn’t think it does it, but ritual, the doctor puts up his hand, he washes it, somebody else has to put on his gloves, there’s big lights, and that’s all part of ritual. I think that has a bit of a placebo effect, if I opinion the ritual behind it, what you learn in your research that can support that innate healing, which we’re calling the placebo impact.

Paul Dieppe:
Yeah, no, I completely agree about ritual. I think the ritual is important and I think having a vehicle is important. So you need something in addition to yourself. You need to be able to give something to have some form of intervention and the ritual around that. But I think the more important component is compassionate, caring alongside the administration of the ritual or the medicine or the whatever or the acupuncture or whatever it is, doesn’t matter. I think it’s compassionate, caring. I use the word compassion deliberately. A lot of people talk about empathy, but I think that’s saying dangerous for reasons we could discuss but probably won’t because it’s a rather arcane argument. But I think compassion is the key one, compassionate caring about the other person.

Lorne Brown:
I’m going to go with the compassionate empathy. I’m going pull that card. I’m curious your thought on it. You brought it up and I thought came through me pretty quickly In my practice, my intention is to have compassion, not empathy
And to not sound cruel to our listeners, this is how my experience is and people are hearing not seeing this, but I’m doing a visual. If we have somebody running at a level seven, the practitioner and the person who’s suffering is at a level four empathy would be me going down to meet them at level four. So now we’re both at a low vibration that doesn’t serve anybody. I want to stay at a level seven and bring them up to level seven. So that’s what compassion is, not dismissing how they feel, understanding and letting ’em know I get how they feel, but without me needing to go down to where they’re at to raise them up is to stay at a level to bring them up. That’s my best way to explain it.

Paul Dieppe:
I’m very excited because I totally 100% agree with that. And most people just don’t get it. And we continue to teach in medical schools about the need for empathy, but empathy is very dangerous because as you say, you go down to the level of the patient. When I came back from my bad experience in Iraq, I was finding it very difficult to treat be with my patients in the way I had before. And I realized after a while I was being too empathic. I had become empathic in a way that was damaging to me and I think to them. So I learned the hard way about this lesson. I think you need a compassionate carer and an empathic carer. So the person who’s been careful can be empathic because then they can come up to your level seven with you rather than you both going down to your level four.

Lorne Brown:
And in some of the literature I’ve read, my understanding is kind of like when there’s a healing happening between the heal and healer. In some of these studies, like you talked about with the F MRIs, they see there’s a change in the brain, a parasympathetic linkup. It’s kind of unconscious that the healing happens. And so when somebody’s suffering, my intention is through breath work and other things to keep me in a nice calm parasympathetic state because I feel like I’m wifi. And if I get into their story too much and I go into sympathetic, then we’re amplifying that suffering, that stress. This is just how I think about it. My left brain needs to

Paul Dieppe:
Understand things again. I totally agree. Can I tell you a short story please? I like telling stories. So when I started my sort of changed career, started to work on healing and associated phenomena academically, I LinkedIn with a wonderful colleague who is a drama teacher and she thought that drama might help us teach medical students about communication. So I was a bit skeptical, but she said, well tell you what, come to join me and one of my colleagues and we’ll do a workshop to show you the sort of thing we can do. So I was sort of a bit nervous about this drama, people doing a workshop, I’m a doctor, what’s going on? Anyway, I went along and there were these two quite senior drama academics and they had arranged a huge room in the drama department and we went in there and I sat down and got out my iPad as he just check my emails and they started doing a whole of strange breathing exercises and they started doing odd movements.
They were sort of warming up for the 800 meters or something and they were moving around in odd ways and stopping and breathing. And they did this for about 10 minutes or something. Well, I checked my emails and then they stopped and said, we’re ready now. And I said, well, what were you doing? And they said, well, we were just preparing ourselves. And one of them said to me, so what can you do before you see a patient to prepare yourself? And that hit me like a blow in the guts because most doctors, up until that point, I did nothing. I may again have checked my emails or eaten a sandwich before I called the patient in, but I had not prepared myself and my state of mind in order to be able to be the compassionate companion that the patients needed. And that single event changed my practice and hopefully changed it for the better.

Lorne Brown:
And it sounds like you become present before you see your patient.

Paul Dieppe:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
That’s exactly it.

Paul Dieppe:
Yeah.

Lorne Brown:
So I’ve heard you say healing and love as well. So I kind of want to talk about this, but I want to give you something you said that I want to tie in that I think where I get optimistic for my patients and it ties into being present when you see your patients and it comes from Gordon Neufeld work. He’s a local psychologist in my city of Vancouver’s, written a book and he’s big on attachment theory. And he says, every human being wants the same thing to be seen and heard. And when people feel seen and heard, it equals love. He said, so when you shared about warming up and before you see your patient and when you’re in the patient again holding compassion for them, not dismissing them. And I’m just curious from your work and you’ve used the word love and healing and then what I just shared with you from how I kind of tied in neufeld work, if you feel seen and heard, you feel loved and you can do this for yourself, there’s inner work. When you do inner work, you are seen and hearing that part of yourself. So to me, that’s why people can do their own healing. But I’m curious from what I just shared and then all the stuff that you have worked with and you have shared, I’ve heard you share love and healing. Can you elaborate on that please? If that’s not too big of an ask?

Paul Dieppe:
Well, that’s the simple little questions I have to say. I’m honored to be on a same podcast as people like Dean Radden and Bill Bankston, all whose works I am familiar with and bold in great respect. So I’m going to answer that question. It was a bit more than a question really. In a slightly strange way. I think love, yes, and I have sort of concluded that a way of thinking about healing is love in action, but that begs the question to our analytical minds of what is love? And it also begs the question of what is healing? And I don’t think we have any satisfactory answer to either of those questions. So I dunno what healing is. I dunno what love is because they are not things that are things that you can break down, dissect, analyze, define. They defy language, they defy our understanding.
I mean all popular songs are about love and the many different forms of love. I have many different experiences. Love my love for my children is different from my love from my football team, but I love the football team as well as my children. But it’s a different form of love. And because it’s experiential, it’s an experience within ourselves, it’s not a thing. And I think healing’s exactly the same. And I think healing and love probably are linked, but I don’t know what either of them are. And what I do know is that they can both take many, many different forms within our world and within our experience of it and our being. So that’s a convoluted answer to your challenge.

Lorne Brown:
I appreciate that. It’s one of those things where when you’re having that experience yourself, it’s a feeling, it’s an experience.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, it’s a feeling. It’s not a thing.

Lorne Brown:
And it’s hard to put a label on it.
They’re calling it love. It’s the best word we have. But again, pretty can be big. Let’s go into your book and just this integration. I want to tie that part together here with our time. And again, I’m really enjoying our conversation. I love your stories by the way. So does medicine need healing itself and what do you see or what would you hope for a medical system? So I see massive transformation in these 25 years where we’ve gone from two types of modalities being practiced parallel to each other, not communicating to each other, and patient sharing that they’re seeing other people to both know they’re seeing both and often will be communicating to where I see people like you trained in both. So I’m pretty optimistic of what I call integration. So I’m curious, what do you see as the present future of medicine?

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, I’m actually less optimistic about the change than you are. I’ve not seen much change in attitudes in my 50 years in medicine. Don’t remind me of my age all the time. I think if anything it’s worse now. And it was when I trained in terms of the attitude of the hierarchy of medicine and maybe the difference is between those who are in charge as it were of medicine, the big cheeses in medicine and the practicing Joe on the ground. But the big cheeses are desperately in my experience and in this country, desperately anti almost any alternatives. And I had a lot of trouble and I still do from colleagues when I tell them I’m interested in healing. And I think it can go alongside western medicine. I don’t see it getting better, at least in Great Britain, although there are a lot of individual practitioners who are open to integration.
I don’t think the body politic is open to integration. And actually I don’t think it’s open to integration in your country either from my limited experience. So I’m not that optimistic in that sense unless we have this shift of understanding of consciousness which will change everything, which I hope we might. So as far as bringing the two together, I think it’s got to be bottom up, not top down. I’m not optimistic about those in charge of medicine, being able to cope with the idea of integration and healing. And part of the reason I think is money. I think medicine’s been ruined by becoming so commercialized. Now this is a hell of a lot worse in America than it is in England, but it’s pretty bad everywhere. And the drug companies and the device companies are completely in charge. They’re in charge of policy, they’re in charge of research, they’re in charge of everything.
They don’t want alternatives because that might mean we stop taking their tablets and using alternatives instead. So I think that’s a huge burial that’s very difficult to break down. So I think it’s got to be bottom up. So it’s got to be from people like you and me and it’s got to be from people going to their doctors saying, no, I want to mix and match. Thanks very much. Why don’t you know about acupuncture? Why don’t you know about homeopathy? They work. What’s going on here? Why aren’t you taught about that? I’m all for a bottom up movement rather than top down one

Lorne Brown:
That usually moves things anyhow because when the public wants it, they change from the reproductive fertility world. That been my focus. That’s how pretty much most IVF clinics have acupuncturists that go on site for IVF transfer days. And that wasn’t because the doctors wanted it. The public kept on demanding it and it became a competitive thing that if you didn’t have acupuncturist or work with an acupuncturist, the patient would find a clinic that did. So you’ve trained in energy healing. So you’ve experienced it. Was your first experience of energy healing with your knee, was that your experience?

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, yes.

Lorne Brown:
Fair. You mind sharing that? I have some questions around that

Paul Dieppe:
Story hearing another story. Yeah.

Lorne Brown:
And I love the part after. Please bring that because your daughter’s a physician, right? Just can imagine. But if you could share the story you like telling stories in our audience really loves to hear these stories. So to your knee story, I think you’ve worked with horses too. I love your story. So if you’re willing to share, please do.

Paul Dieppe:
Okay, well the background briefly is that I was an academic rheumatologist for the first half of my career and I had a special interest in osteoarthritis, which is one of the most boring diseases in the world, but very common and a big problem. And I remained quite interested in it and I thought I knew a lot about it When I was starting to research healing, I started getting real problems with osteoarthritis at one of my knees. It was really quite painful and quite difficult and I didn’t think it was supposed to be that bad or that difficult, but I was experiencing it in a completely different way as a patient as it were, rather than a doctor. And I realized I didn’t really understand it and I didn’t know what to do about it. And I went to one of my trusted orthopedic colleagues and said to him, look, I’ve got a bad knee.
Can you have a look at it and see what you think? And he had a look at it and he x-rayed it and he said, oh, it’s a terribly bad knee, Paul, you need it replaced. I’ll tell you what, I could probably fit you in next week if you like. And I thought, I mean this is a bit quick and a bit sudden and do I really want to do that? And I said to him, well thanks very much. I’m actually a bit busy next week. Can I come back to you? And he said, sure, just let me know when you’re ready and I’ll do it for you. And I went on my way, try and get the sequencing right here. Just before I saw this surgeon, I’d been to stay with my doctor daughter and I couldn’t get up and down her stairs at the home and she’d said to me, oh, for goodness sake, go and get your knee replaced.
You’re full. You don’t want to be stumbling around like that in pain. And she’d say, get it replaced. The surgeon said, get it replaced. And I was thinking, well, maybe I should get it replaced. But then the following week, one of my assignments was to interview a healer in her own home in the west of England who I’d been given a contact with and said she was happy to be interviewed. This was a fairly, how shall I put it, mature lady who similar life and who’d only taken up healing later in her life and she was delightful. She asher me into her home, she gave me a cup of coffee, she sat me down on my recording machine ready for the formal interview, switched it on and she looked at me. She said, the only way you can really understand the healing is to experience it if you’ve got anything wrong with you that I could have a go.
And I said, well, I have got this bad knee. And she said, oh yeah, okay, well I’m happy to take on a knee. I said, roll your trousers up and we’ll get on with it and we’ll try healing. So there I was sitting in the front room of a elderly lady who I didn’t know rolling my trousers are with my recorder humming away in the background. And I was thinking, this is just crazy. What am I doing? Anyway, I went with it. She put her hands on my knee and the next bit’s hard to explain, but she disappeared from the roof. She left it. She didn’t leave it physically, she was still there. Her hands were on my knee. But somehow she wasn’t present. She wasn’t there in a strange way. I dunno how else to explain this physically there or she physically

Lorne Brown:
Really did leave.

Paul Dieppe:
No, she was visibly there. She was physically there. I could feel her hands on my knee, but her essence was not there if you like. Her soul was not though. And I was very aware of the fact that part of her was not in the room. And this went on for a while and my knee felt very strange and hot and weird and I was dealing with skepticism and disbelief. So I was a jumble of what is going on here, what am I doing? But I didn’t disturb the process. After a while, she came back to the room, she took her hands off my knee and she looked completely drained and she said, well, it is a very bad knee. I’ve made some progress, but I can’t get it completely better. But I’ve made some progress and I didn’t know what to make of this.
And I thought I knew about osteoarthritis and I thought, this is just silly. But my knee had felt very strange. And after I left her, it did feel a bit better. And over the next few days it got a lot better. And I didn’t go back to the surgeon because my knee was pretty good. And I went to see my daughter a couple of weeks later. Again, same house, got up the stairs, no difficulty. She didn’t notice. We decided to go out for a drink that evening together, went out for a drink. We walked briskly across a park to get to a pub where they called pub that she fancied took me to. And she suddenly looked around and she said, you’re walking properly again. You snuck off and had your knee replaced without telling me, didn’t you? And she’s a skeptical young lady and trained in modern led.
And I looked at her and I said, no, Claire, no, I haven’t had it replaced. I had it healed. And she’s got a look. When she looked at me as if to say, I know my father has completely lost it, I know now that he’s gone mound. And she gave me that look. And then she stopped herself and she said, you’re serious, aren’t you? I said, yes, I went to a healer and it’s better as a result of that. And she said to me, so have you had it X-rayed to see if the x-rays got better? And I said, no, I’m not interested in the x-ray, I’m just pleased that the pain’s gone. And her response was, if you have it re x-rayed and the x-ray shows that the osteoarthritis has gone away, we’re all finished. We, she actually used a nastier word than that. But what she was trying to say was that medicine would be completely undermined by that. And I sort of had to agree with her. And that’s the story I’ve never had my knee replaced. It troubles me a little every now and then. I did have another x-ray a few years ago and it flared up a bit and it’s not nearly as bad as it was on the most recent x-ray.

Lorne Brown:
There’s more to this world than that’s taught in medical school I guess is what you learned.

Paul Dieppe:
I don’t think my daughter accepts that.

Lorne Brown:
And you’ve gone on to train in energy healing. So you are trained and you do energy healing. And have you seen experiences with the people you worked on to see a shift in physical, spiritual, emotional?

Paul Dieppe:
I don’t actually practice it. I have trained in it. I have been told by the trainers that I’m a powerful healer potentially, but I don’t do it. I don’t practice it. I can give you other excuses of why I don’t do it, but I think they’re probably excuses. But I don’t see patients anymore. I’ve retired, I’m 78, I don’t know medicine anymore. Haven’t kept up with the feel. So integration would be tricky for me. I don’t know my old side of it, so I’ve lot of excuses, but there are excuses of them.

Lorne Brown:
So the last part I wanted to ask you is for my own curiosity, and I want to be sensitive because you talked about when you were taken as a hostage and you had PTSD and talking about these things. For somebody who’s experienced it, I don’t know how you re-experienced it or we talk about it. So if you’re not comfortable talking about it, please don’t. I’m curious about the experience you had when I think you thought you were going to be executed because it sounded like a beautiful experience that you had. And so it’s a little confusing for me and I just wondering if you know what I’m talking about and can share a bit about that.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, absolutely. I’m quite happy talking about that. And it was a beautiful experience. So this was right on day one. So what happened was I was going to Malaysia to do some teaching with an ex trainee of mine who’d set up rheumatology in Malaysia. And she’d asked me out, they had to do some lecturing and teaching of her trainees, but I got on a flight that was bound the sho Kuala Lumpa, not knowing that it was going to refuel in Kuwait and it refueled in Kuwait as Iraq and Brady Kuwait. And we were bundled off, everyone was bundled off the plane very quickly into the terminal building and how we had the strange experience of watching the runway we’d arrived on being bomb bombed a bit, which kind of made you realize that probably we wouldn’t be moving on immediately. And that was all very surreal.
And then after several hours, it was in the middle of the night, we were told that we were going to be put in buses and taken to the airport hotel to get some rest and refreshment and not to worry, everything will be fine. Just need a few days to get this sorted out and we’ll get you back home or where you want to go. All very reassuring. So we get into buses to drive across the tarmac of Kuwait airport to airport hotel. I was sort of at the typical airport bus with big doors on the side. I was brand up next to one of the doors and with a lot of other people. And we were driving across the tarmac and some soldiers rushed up to the bus and stopped it. The doors were opened and there were a couple of young men carrying knik coughs pointing at them a us and they said they cried at passports.
Passports. And I didn’t know where my passport was, but I had my boarding pass, the pass that I’ve been given when I got off the plane. So say to get me back on again. So I gave them that and they spat on it and threw it on ground and hustled me out of the bus with about I think five others who couldn’t immediately lay our hand in the passport. And they marched us across the tarmac engine open space, lined us up next to each other and then raised the niks pointing the ladders. Someone next to me said, oh my God, they’re going to shoot us. And indeed it did seem that that was what was going to happen as I realized that I was probably going to be shot. I had the most wonderful experience of beauty and love and light and all being well with the universe.
And I was not the slightest bit anxious about being shocked. I knew everything was absolutely fine and it was a beautiful experience and I’ve no idea how long it lasted. I was sort of aware of the fact that some other shoulder rush soldier rushed up and made the boys put their clash off down. We got back on the bus and got to the airport hotel and this was another life-changing moment. It was beautiful, it was wonderful. And again, I parked it for a long time because what do you do with an experience like that? I was a 44-year-old successful medical scientist, and what do I do with something like that? I didn’t know what to do with it and I didn’t talk about it or share it for a long time. So that’s the experience.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, it’s the beautiful part of it. And why I wanted to share it, and again, I wanted to hear the story to understand it better, is just there’s more to this world than we think. And if we can learn to tune into that aspect, maybe more peace within. And then if the external world is a reflection of our internal world, we’ll see more peace in the external world. I get the sense from you that healing is what we call love and action. It’s hard to describe what love is in action, but one of the messages that I really resonate with your work is in your writing. It is not what you do, but it’s the way you do it. And that’s one of my big takeaways from your works and things that you’ve shared. So I want to thank you for that. Do you have anything? I want them to know how they can connect with you. I’ll mention your book again, is Healing and Medicine, a Doctor’s Journey Toward the Integration? Anything you want to share with our audience before we wrap up today?

Paul Dieppe:
Well, I’d like to thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation as well. The only other thing I would like to just add to for balance as it were, and I think it’s appropriate balance, is that we mustn’t throw out the baby with the passport. The modern Western medicine is extremely good at a lot of things. So it’s integration we need. It’s not either all. And I think you said that earlier. Well, I just tell you another very brief story and it will be brief. So my way of illustrating this when I teach medical students is to say to them, look, I’m an elderly white male a bit overweight, so there’s a sporting chance I’ll have a heart attack during this lecture. If I do, I want you to get me to the hospital and to its primary care unit as fast as you can. I don’t want you to talk to me or ask me any questions. I want you to get me the best clock buster according to the latest, best evidence quickly and sort me out that way. And if I survive, I might well come and see you as a doctor six months later, not feeling very well. And you’ll find then that your medicine and your evidence can offer you absolutely nothing but will help me. But you can.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, thanks for highlighting that. The integration, I had a patient once come to me with back pain and I asked her what she thought was going on and she goes, well, I’ve been told I have a kidney infection. So I said, well, I want you to take the antibiotic that your doctor recommended and then we will work on replenishing all of the good microbiome and bacteria that the antibiotic is going to destroy. And she goes, well, I want to take medicine. I go, well, our first step is that you live. I can treat you later for any chronic or imbalances. So first you got to stay alive, then we’ll do the other thing. So please go get the antibiotic because a hundred years ago you died right now that we have western medicine, you could live and then see me afterwards. So I think we’re aligned with that as well. There’s a place for both, right? That’s the integration. There’s sometimes where you need a mechanic

Paul Dieppe:
And

Lorne Brown:
Then there’s sometimes you need the gardener, right? Like you said, don’t throw the baby without the bath water, just call it medicine rather than you’re practicing this way or that way. It’s just, and you know what different strokes for different folks. I find that the way I practice it does require an effort as in you got to move your body, got to go to bed at night. Nothing I can do can override staying up to four in the morning. Excessive alcohol, drug use, abusive relationships. You do have to have some foundation pillars. I don’t think there’s too many pills in conventional medicine that overrides that, but it can keep you alive even though you’re suffering, I guess. Whereas, so integration is the message here. I appreciate

Paul Dieppe:
That.

Lorne Brown:
You said you’re in your seventies. I don’t know, are you on Facebook, Instagram? Is there weight? How do people connect with you?

Paul Dieppe:
So I don’t use social media at all because I think it’s evil and a force for evil in the world. So I don’t use social media. I do have an email address, which I’m happy to share with you now if that’s appropriate.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, if you’re okay, people emailing you and we’ll put it in the show notes too if you’re okay.

Paul Dieppe:
Yes, I’m happy with that.

Lorne Brown:
Alright, let’s hear your email.

Paul Dieppe:
It’s [email protected]

Lorne Brown:
Thank you. We’ll put that in the show notes and your book is for our listeners, healing and Medicine, A Doctor’s Journey toward their integration. Paul, thank you very much. I really enjoyed our conversation today.

Paul Dieppe:
Me too. Thank you, Lorne. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne_Brown_official. That’s Instagram, Lorne_Brown_official, or you can visit my websites, Lornebrown.com and acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.