Erasing Scars: Herpes and Healing

ERASING SCARS

Herpes and Healing

James D. Okun, M.D.

and

Evangelita Goodwell, O.A.A.C.

ERASING SCARS: HERPES AND HEALING

Copyright © 2016, 1997 by James D. Okun. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

We dedicate this book to Eli Siegel and to our children Charlie, Jane, and Jeremy, because without the beautiful good will of Eli Siegel these children would have never been born and we would never have worked together to have things known.

We are grateful to our editor, Ed Roberts, for the title to this book and for his professional editing and assistance in making this book possible. We also want to thank Charles Wenk for believing enough in this project to help raise it off the ground.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

The Psychobioimmunology of Herpes Virus Infections

CHAPTER 2

Transcript of a Consultation Session with Steve

CHAPTER 3

Transcript of a Consultation Session with Sabrina

CHAPTER 4

Transcript of an Aesthetic Realism Lesson

CONTEMPT CAUSES INSANITY

by Eli Siegel

APPENDIX

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

My education and training were fairly conventional up until 1985. I graduated from Glen Cove High School on Long Island in New York and went on to attend Duke University for my premedical education, graduating from there Phi Beta Kappa in 1978. Early in my studies at Duke, I became interested in the effects of stress on the body and discovered during my freshman year the work of Dr. Edmund Jacobson, who had developed therapies and techniques for Progressive Relaxation after his studies at Harvard. I became so interested in Dr. Jacobson’s work that I visited him at his laboratory in Chicago to study with him, returning to Duke to found the Duke University Center for Tension Control in order to help my fellow students deal with stress, which was certainly high among the highly motivated and competitive Duke students. The organization sponsored many workshops for students and brought in outside speakers who specialized in stress reduction. I supplemented my studies of stress by taking an engineering class with Dr. John Artley, who had a special interest in biofeedback; during the course I participated in research projects dealing with the effects of biofeedback in treating stress and disease.

After graduating from Duke, I attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, where again, as time permitted, I began to delve into alternative therapies such as hypnosis and to study the importance of a patient s cultural background in terms of both physical and mental illness. In my fourth year of medical school, I had the opportunity to study acupuncture while taking a neurology elective course from Boston University Hospital. I went on to spend the last six weeks of medical school in London at the Moorfields Eye Hospital, where I was exposed to British views on eye disease and preventive medicine. At the end of my training, I went into my internship at Framingham Union Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, home of the famous Framingham Heart studies. At Framingham, I and my colleagues were exposed to the latest views on preventive medicine, as Framingham at the time was a mecca for these studies.

It was at this time that my own health suddenly became an issue, and my interest in alternative medicine was sharply revived. I had been accepted by and felt very honored to be in training in ophthalmology at the prestigious Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans, under the direction of Tom Zimmerman, the inventor of the Timoptic eye drop, a revolutionary advance in the treatment of glaucoma. Ophthalmology as a discipline itself requires great acuity of vision, perhaps the most acute vision possible for any medical specialty. Before my arrival at Ochsner, I was diagnosed with keratoconus, a progressive disease of the cornea in which the cornea gradually thins and often perforates. The only known treatment at the time for keratoconus was a prescription of rigid contact lenses, until such time as the vision deteriorated so much as to require a corneal transplant in one or both eyes.

As the time drew near for me to begin my ophthalmology residency, I began to panic, not only from the stress and sleeplessness that came with being an intern, but also because I could not get fitted with a pair of contacts that I could see out of or which I could wear comfortably. I went to a Harvard specialist, the inventor of the Boston Lens, who was supposed to be such a wizard with contact lens prescriptions, but I left his office in tears because the lens hurt so much and I still couldn’t see properly. My anxiety over my studies in ophthalmology grew, and I again embarked on a search for relief and help from alternative practices. I went on to try acupuncture, palming of the eyes for relaxation, meditation, and other exotic forms of therapy. One of these was a stint with Dr. Leslie Salov of White Water, Wisconsin, formerly a high-powered ophthalmologist and eye surgeon, who was then almost blind himself from macular degeneration. He had found no help from traditional medicine, so he’d developed a program for treating eye disease consisting of a study of nutrition, anatomy, and the effects of light and radiation, supplemented with studies of religion and miracles and a regimen of exercise, walking, and sunning, all in a farm-like setting for a two-week period and a cost of about five thousand dollars. Some of what I got from my studies at Dr. Salov’s was in harmony with what I’d learned back at Duke about Transactional Analysis, while other aspects of Dr. Salov’s program hearkened back to things I’d heard about back at Einstein.

But after one year, in 1985, with the unfortunate encouragement of my parents, I decided to leave the ophthalmology residency program at Ochsner. It was at this low point that I intensified my search for something that would finally help my eyesight and the genital herpes that I had contracted back in 1982 while in medical school.

I began to devote my days to stretching, working out with a personal trainer, following a diet of totally organic foods, and investigating other alternative practices. I took up crystal therapy, tai-chi, massage therapy, zero balancing, visualization and imaging techniques; I visited mud baths and flotation tanks in California, went through more biofeedback, tried chiropractic adjustments, and submitted myself to many different types of New Age body work, including Rolfing.

As I was on my way out of the ophthalmology residency program, though, I had met the beautiful young woman who later became my wife and the mother of our sons Charlie and Jeremy and our beautiful daughter Jane, and during the course of getting to know her, she introduced me to a philosophy that she had discovered when in her late teens and which she had been studying for over twenty years. The philosophy is called Aesthetic Realism and was developed by the poet and critic Eli Siegel beginning with his award-winning poem Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana in 1924 (and ending with his death in 1978). With all of the training I’d had and with all of the searching I’d done, I was at first skeptical that here, finally, was what I had been searching for for so long. After thousands of dollars in expenses and travels around the country in search of real help, here was something that had been right under my nose when I had been studying in New York; but I hadn’t heard of it—it had been ignored or made fun of during the course of the previous four decades. I couldn’t believe it at first—but here it was.

My wife told me that she had seen Aesthetic Realism work with students with a wide variety of ailments—migraines, seizures, digestive problems, stuttering, for instance; it had even been instrumental in over a hundred men changing from homosexuality. She told me that she didn’t know whether Aesthetic Realism could be of any help with either keratoconus or herpes, but she confided that it was something that had saved her life and made her whole, and she wondered whether it could do the same for me.

I felt that I had nothing to lose; nothing else that I’d tried had helped in any significant way. I began to study aesthetics, which taught me that the structure of the world and of myself is aesthetic, as are my everyday problems. There are aesthetic solutions to disease, I learned, and I discovered that what I was trying to do was to put together opposites in myself; and everything else that I had studied seemed to fall beautifully into place. As things fell more and more into place, as everything I had studied began to take on a much deeper integrity, my corneas tightened up, becoming flatter and flatter until my vision became better and better. As I studied Aesthetic Realism, I discovered the link between deep psychological pain and its relation to both my vision problem and my herpes infection. In due course, I became able to drive and work with good sight, not only with contacts but with glasses (which is unheard of in cases of keratoconus). My corneas eventually became entirely normal, with my vision crystal clear in contact lenses and in glasses. I attribute this medical miracle to the release from and the lessening of internal stress and pain, which I attribute to the former views that I held, an inaccurate and contemptuous way of viewing the world that Aesthetic Realism laid bare. And not only was my keratoconus dealt with successfully, but through my studies of Aesthetic Realism, I was able to determine the cause of my herpes outbreaks and since this discovery, I have been entirely free of herpes outbreaks—not only that, but my wife never contracted the virus, and our baby girl was born alive and healthy, not dead or deformed.

Over the years since I was introduced to Aesthetic Realism, my wife and I have worked with over fifty patients with genital herpes, one of them with severe herpes scarring on the face, and every one of them, just like me, has been able to determine the cause of his outbreaks.

As a physician who has himself suffered the debilitating effects of herpes attacks, I feel obliged to share what I have learned for the benefit of other sufferers. My willingness to share this news has earned me the ire of many in the medical establishment, however; the Louisiana State Medical Board moved to suspend my license, for example. I am convinced, though, that Aesthetic Realism teaches people an accurate way of dealing with the stresses inherent to life, and its role in alleviating stress, I am convinced, is directly connected with the body’s own immune responses, such as are called into play in fighting the herpes virus.

CHAPTER 1

The Psychobioimmunology of Herpes Virus Infections

Herpes viruses infect the human being of every race, in every country, and in every part of the world. Infection with Herpes Simplex Virus Type I (HSV I) or Herpes Simplex Virus Type II (HSV II) viruses devastates millions of patients around the world without regard to race, color, creed, gender, or income or education level. It is estimated that in this country alone there are at least forty million Americans infected with Genital Herpes, with 500,000 new cases being reported each year,¹ and approximately one hundred million patients infected with both HSV I and HSV II in the United States, according to statistics from the Burroughs Wellcome Company s Research Division.

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC),² initial visits to physicians’ offices in the United States for Genital Herpes infections, between the years 1966 and 1993, rose from approximately 15,000 in 1966 to approximately 175,000 in 1993, with a peak of approximately 230,000 initial patient visits to physicians’ offices for Genital Herpes Simplex virus infections in 1990.

Here, I will summarize the current state of knowledge about HSV infections and will attempt to update the public on the newest advances in a relatively new area of research now called psychobioimmunology, psychoneuroimmunology, or neuroimmunomodulation—all three terms refer to a new discipline that deals with the relation of stress to disease and the effect of various stresses on the immune system and the body’s ability to fight off disease.

Herpes Simplex Virus Types I and II, which are members of the Herpes Virus Hominis family, cause many different diseases in human beings. These include gingivostomatitis, herpes keratitis of the cornea, herpes labialis (cold sores), and herpes infections of the male genitalia.

The herpes virus particle is made up of protein, DNA, lipid, and carbohydrates. In general, there are twenty-five parts carbohydrate to one hundred parts DNA and 320 parts phospho-lipid for every one hundred parts of protein. The herpes virus DNA is what is known as double-stranded DNA, with a molecular weight of the virus