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Deepak and NLP

  I was at the annual convention of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in 1988 in Memphis, Tenn. and there was a workshop on NLP by two PhD psychologists. I had never heard of NLP before. In the workshop, one of the presenters said if your child falls down and hurts his knee, do not pick him up to comfort him. I was shocked. Do not comfort a child who is hurt? The presenter went on to explain that holding him would set an anchor so that whenever you went to hold your child again, the child would feel that touch as painful. This is why so many adults cannot stand to be touched by their mother. Every time you were hurt as a child and your mother went to hold you and comfort you, she set up herself and her touch as an anchor for pain. What the mother was supposed to do was distract the child away from their pain and then you could hold them and comfort them.I started checking around for an NLP training program and found the 3 week training program of NLP Comp in Boulder, Colorado. I registered and then realized that if I took off for almost a month I would decimate my private practice and the contracts I had for on-going services. I called NLP Comp to cancel and they said I could come for one week. OK, I can get away with being gone one week I thought and I went.The training was being held at a ski resort in the summer in Winterpark, Colorado. It was a beautiful day, the group had not started yet, the ski lift was still running, and on impulse I jumped on for the ride. I forgot I had a fear of heights, acrophobia. About half way up the mountain, the ski lift stopped. My god, the chair I am sitting on is swaying front and back and the tops of the trees below are swaying side to side and my legs are dangling in the air with no firm ground beneath. Feelings of fear come flooding into my system and I close my eyes and grip the bar so tight my knuckles are turning white. When the thing moves again and takes me to the top, I walk back downGroup started. The first day they showed us these pictures in our mind and how the mind works. I was shocked. I had been studying psychology for 26 years, had been certified as a school psychologist for 17 years, had been licensed for private practice for 8 years, and I didn’t know about these pictures in my mind. The first technique they showed us was the Phobia Cure. It was a simple process of making a movie of the fear in your mind and then running the movie backwards really fast. There was no pain and one did not have to relive the fear. I didn’t believe anything had changed so during lunch I rode that ski lift up the mountain again just to test the process. It worked! I actually enjoyed the ride and the view. I could see forever the peaks and valleys of the Rocky Mountains. I was impressed. It is called a ‘convincer’. I was so impressed that I stayed the full three weeks and learned everything I could. Sure enough, when I went back to my home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I had lost most of my major contracts and half of my clients. That is the problem with the modern world. One doesn’t have the time to take a bowel movement, much less learn something new and revolutionary.I continued with the NLP training with every moment and every dollar I had free. I spent two years traveling to Florida, Alabama, Texas, Colorado and California and I bankrupted myself doing so. In-between every training, I had college students and mental health center clients and private patients to practice the techniques. They were working and they were working incredibly fast. ‘Miracle cures’ were happening and I myself was wondering how I did that. There were very few other licensed psychologists in these trainings. The ones who were professors did not make enough money to be able to afford the trainings. The ones in private practice had the money, but they didn’t have the time to go to the trainings. It was a Catch 22.I had already been trained in group therapy, individual Freudian psychotherapy, individual Rogerian active listening, Axeline’s play therapy, behavioral modification and schedules of reinforcement, clinical biofeedback, stress management, and Ericksonnian hypnosis. NLP (neurolinguistic programming) was faster than all of that and more effective and painfree to boot. I was teaching college full time and had a private practice on the side. In half the time with private practice I was making twice the money I made as a professor. I knew professors living in trailer houses on the edge of town because they couldn’t afford anything better. The assistant produce manager at the grocery store made as much money as the intellectual cream of society. So much for society.I had a 10 hours a week contract as the psychologist for the psychiatric ward at the local state charity hospital. One day I am in the staff lunchroom and I strike up a conversation with the head of the hospital. There is a patient on the top floor who has terminal lymphoma and is constantly complaining about chronic pain and the drugs don’t seem to work. Would I see her?, he asks. I go up there and introduce myself and give her an nlp hypnosis session and it works. For the first time in months she is pain free. When that happens, all the energy that is locked up in the pain is released and there is a flood of feelings of relief and even ecstasy. She spontaneously came over to give me a kiss on the cheek dragging her IV bottle on rollers that was sticking in her arm. I heard from her counselor later that she had had a ‘spontaneous remission’ and they couldn’t find evidence of the lymphoma anymore. Two months later the lymphoma came back and she died. I asked her counselor what happened. I was told the lady had seen me smoking and thought hypnosis must not work. Ouch.In my private practice, the police chaplain came to me for counseling and was so happy with the results that he started sending police officers to me with problems. That is a rough job and they have a lot of problems. One officer had been the victim of a bad guy who had jumped on him out of the dark, grabbed his gun and shot him with his own gun. He was traumatized, could not sleep without seeing the trauma happening all over again, and was on sick leave from the department for disability. I tried the Trauma Cure with him, but it did not work because he could not visualize. I was stuck until I figured out to run the trauma backwards kinesthetically instead of visually. It succeeded and he went back to work, but it took 3 sessions. Usually it would take only one.Sometime later I meet a lady ‘accidentally’ who said, ‘Oh, you are the man the police chaplain told me to go see, but I don’t believe in psychologists.’ It turned out the year before, her boss, an alcoholic with whom she was having an affair, had one day come over to her and put his arm around her and with the other arm blew his head off in her face. Her job was answering the phone for him and now when she heard a phone ring, or an ambulance siren, she reacted with terror all over again. It took one session.The spectrum of human suffering must be limitless. One man came who had been gang raped in the Texas State Penitentiary. I used the Trauma Cure. A woman came whose 12 year old son had died in her arms from an asthma attack. I used the Grieving Process. A man came who was a child molester. I used Submodality Cross-mapping with the experience of something he has done before he will never do again. A woman came with a phobia of driving over bridges. Her husband had to drive her everywhere or she was effectively stranded at home. Where she lived was surrounded by bridges. After the session she went out to the pickup truck and told her husband to move over, she was driving home.One day a man brought his wife over who was having panic attacks. She was covered up in a coat and all I could see was her peering at me through these shiny little spectacles. Was she animal or vegetable I wondered? She was having panic attacks 5X a day. They had been to see over a dozen doctors and was on half a dozen ‘medications’ and she was still having panic attacks 5X a day. When the first tranquillizer didn’t work, they doubled the dosage. When that didn’t work, they added another drug, and another, and another. She was near zombie, was still having panic attacks, and their medical insurance had paid nearly quarter of a million dollars.Luckily, I had just been given a technique for panic attacks from a psychologist by the name of Dr. Zink living in a small town near Sante Fe, New Mexico. He was one of these beautiful people who shared his knowledge freely. It is his technique that he invented and he deserves all the credit for it. It worked and it worked wonderfully. After the first session, her panic attacks were gone. The next week she came back with generalized anxiety about not having panic attacks. She had been so busy with them that, now that they were gone, her life was ‘empty’. After 3 sessions, she was off the drugs that nearly killed her and was symptom free. I was working myself out of business. The joke is that the richest therapists are the ones whose techniques don’t work. They keep their patients forever. Patients of formal psychoanalysts (or any form of ‘chit-chat’ therapy) can talk about their problems and explain their problems, but they still have the problem. After all, the chit-chat therapist will say, it took a lifetime to make the problem, and it will take a lifetime to cure the problem. If the patient complains about the lack of progress, the so-called therapist (psychiatrist, social worker, counselor) will blame the patient saying they ‘don’t want to change.’ They don’t seem to notice that their techniques are not working. After all, they are using their notes from their professor who used his notes from his professor and so on. They are doing what they are ‘supposed’ to do. This seems to be the definition of ‘professionalism.’I had a 20 hour a week contract at the mental health center as director of in-service training and supervisor of psychologists. Every Friday afternoon I would give an in-service on some aspect of diagnosis or therapy. I demonstrated the Phobia Cure by curing 3 of them that had phobias and they didn’t seem curious or impressed. I didn’t understand it. Treatment of Choice (TOC) was systematic desensitization and it took six weeks and a little suffering to get it done only with partial results. I was doing it in half an hour with 100% results and no one seemed motivated to learn. It seemed like because they already had their degree, that that was enough for them.I tried it another way. I offered the staff that had a patient stuck and not making progress to invite me in and I would work with the patient right there in front of their eyes to show them how to do it. They took me up on it. One of the patients was grieving over the loss of her dead father and could not bring herself to even visit the grave. After the session she visited her father’s grave and seemed to have no more problems with this issue. During discussion of cases in the weekly staffing, the therapist said, ‘Yeah, Dr.Vidmar worked with her and she seemed to be in a kind of trance.’ The next day the director of the mental health center, a social worker, left a memo on my desk to the effect of ‘the use of hypnosis in Region V is hereby prohibited.’ I couldn’t believe it. I went to her office next door and said, ‘Linda, you cant do this. Hypnosis has been approved by the American Medical Association since 1955 and it would make you the laughing stock of the entire therapeutic community.’
‘ Are you threatening me?’ she defensively said and all rapport was broken and my contract was not renewed. Oh well.That wasn’t the end of my troubles. The psychiatric ward at the hospital turned out to be a snakepit. That kind of disappointed me because I was on the advisory committee that got it funded. It was medical model and it was drugs first and chit-chat therapy by social workers last. There were half a dozen full-time social workers and they were too busy with paperwork to spend much time with the patients. The psychiatric nurses, who were being paid more than a doctorate psychologist, locked themselves in the nurse’s station and would not interact with the patients. The patients were left to themselves to do the ‘zombie walk’ up and down the empty halls.The psychiatric ward had about 30 patients, one-third classic schizophrenics, one-third manic-depressives who didn’t take their lithium, and one-third normal neurotics suffering from a temporary stress overload. The normal neurotics, I could do something for. The others I didn’t have time to try. One day a patient was referred to me who had been in there 3X for attempting suicide. There were scars all over his wrists and there was talk of putting him on IV because he was anorexic and wouldn’t eat. It turned out he was working out of town and his wife and child were driving in the car to visit him and they had a crash and died. Whenever he thought about them, which was all the time, he would see a picture in his mind’s eye of them trapped in a burning car calling his name to save them. Sweet Jesus, if I saw a picture like that in my mind’s eye, I would suicide also. The day after the session he came to me with a plate full of food just shoving it down his mouth saying he was ravenously hungry and asking if there something wrong with him. Another session and he was discharged and we never saw him again.I had to try it with a paranoid schizophrenic. I just had to try. This woman took me over to the window and said, ‘You see that red car in the parking lot; they are watching me. Everyday it is there and they are watching me.’ I found out who owned that car, which belonged to one of the nurses, and asked her to park it on the other side of the building. Then I took the woman to the window and said, ‘You see, it is not there any more. They have completed the surveillance and found that you are o.k. and they left. No one is watching you anymore and you are free.’ She looked kind of confused and even a little anxious. The next day she called me over to the window and said, ‘You see that blue car in the parking lot; they are watching me.’ She got me. We could go through every color of the rainbow and she was going to find someone watching her. I failed. She didn’t fail. I failed.
The psychiatrists were good honest sincere caring people trying to help with what tools they had. The only tools they had were drugs, drugs that sometimes relieved the symptoms, but with terrible side effects. The top ten selling ‘medicines’ in America were all psychotropic drugs for emotional symptoms and they prescribed them mercilessly as a matter of faith. It was also a mega billion dollar business. If a person was caught in Arizona with a seed of marijuana, a non-addictive substance that made people giggle, the compulsory sentence was 7 years in prison with no chance of parole. However, any physician with or without any training in mental health (usually without) could prescribe drugs. It is one of the many ugly hypocracies of American society. America, the land of the free, has more people in prison than any other society on earth. 70% are in prison for ‘drugs’ and half of those for marijuana. It is o.k. to be alcoholic, which is 100X more harmful than marijuana. It is even o.k. to be President of America having been a wet alcoholic for 22 years and still functioning as a brain damaged dry alcoholic while holding office. I have given psychological tests to hundreds of alcoholics in the addiction ward of a private hospital and they are horrible people full of anger and denial. One time I was given the assignment of testing an elderly poor black man to see if he was retarded or not. Half way through the testing I figured out he wasn’t retarded, just severely depressed. I also figured out I could cure him of that depression right then and right there. My dilemma was that my assignment was to test him, not to cure him. I had a choice to make and I made it. I discontinued the testing and went to work. He responded beautifully and from then on was walking the halls smiling and in good mood. No one seemed to notice that he was better and didn’t belong there anymore. The overpaid psychiatric nurses paid to observe patient behavior didn’t notice it. The social workers masquerading as therapists didn’t notice it. Finally, I mentioned it to one of the nurses that Mr. Jones looked much better now. She thought a minute and said, ‘Yeah, the medicine must be working early.’I received recognition and professional respect from the psychiatrists. They were a doctor of medicine and I was a doctor of psychology. Even though it was medical model and they occupied the front chair, they were glad I was there. I knew testing and therapy and they didn’t. During intake staffing for new patients I would see someone with a problem I could help and then I would nod my head to the psychiatrist and he would add, ‘And see Dr. Vidmar for counseling.’ The psychiatric nurses were another story. According to them, I was not a ‘real’ doctor and I had no place in the medical (engineering) model. Their job was on the line with the medical doctor, not with me.One day during intake staffing, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker calling ‘Code 9, Code 9.’ Everyone jumped up and ran down the hall. What the hell is Code 9 I asked. It means there is a patient acting out aggressively and for all able bodied personnel to come help. When I got there the room was full of staff and there were two big male orderlies on top of a woman on the floor and she was crying, ‘Please let me go, let me go.’ It was the same woman who I had seen crying in her room all morning and no one was giving her any attention. Finally, when an orderly came in, she threw a waste basket at him and he called a Code 9. My god.I told the two big guys to get off of her and then I got on the floor and established rapport. It is the first thing they teach you in NLP but obviously medicine never got the message. I breathed with her and paced her physiology and then did a process called leading and step by step I got her up and standing and calm again. I am asking her, ‘Is this getting you what you want?’ and she is agreeing when I hear a big, loud voice saying, ‘Get out of the way, got to give her a shot, doctor’s orders.’ I look up and there is the head nurse with a big needle in one hand and a strait jacket in the other. I tell the nurse that the patient is calm, she is with me now, and she doesn’t need a shot. The nurse is not even looking at the patient and keeps insisting, ‘Got to give her a shot, give her a shot, doctor’s orders.’ I tell her to go ask the doctor again because the patient is calm now and if you give her a shot, it is a form of ‘pharmaceutical restraint’ and the hospital can be sued. In no way was I going to let her give that patient ‘a shot.’ She was terrified looking at that big needle.The next day I am called into the administrator’s office, a social worker, and given the riot act because I interfered with the medical model and I threatened to sue the hospital. Needless to say, I lost that contract too. Good riddance, but the patients hated to see me go. I had been sitting in the lounge smoking with them and joking with them and now they were alone and vulnerable in a horrible place that treated them like things. I doubt if any thing is much better now. Once a bureaucracy gets off on the wrong foot, it is nearly impossible to change, and the definition of a professional must be someone who doesn’t learn anything once he gets that degree.NLP is not only a system of therapy, it is a system of communication also. It is perfect for teachers, even necessary. I was interesting as a college professor before nlp and now I was at my creative peak. The first thing I began to notice was that in the hall before class, students were juicy and alive, but when the bell rang and they filed into class, they turned into a sort of numb state of zombie as soon as their butt hit that seat. The first step before lecture was to get them into a state of curiosity and alertness to receive the lecture. Before class started, I took 3 one dollar bills and taped them underneath the writing tops of 3 different desks. During the introduction I tell them that if they listen carefully they may find a hidden treasure buried ‘underneath.’ When I say the word ‘underneath’ I roll my eyes at the student in the first desk and keep rolling until out of curiosity he looks underneath. He excitedly holds the dollar up into the air and now everyone is looking underneath. The second desk holds his dollar up into the air and says, ‘I found one.’ The third one does the same. Needless to say, now the whole class is curious what is going on and what is going to happen next. They are awake. The ones who didn’t receive a dollar were in an expectant mood anyway.Another time the lecture was going to be on eye witness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. To illustrate that fact I had a student from another class come into the room in the middle of the lecture and get angry at me for giving her a bad grade and to crumple up the test paper and throw it at me. It was so realistic that some of the students got up to throw her out just before she left. I told them to sit down and to take out a piece of paper. Then they knew it was one of my tricks. I asked them to write down how tall she was, how much she weighed, and what color shirt she was wearing. My good, she was from 5’2 to 5’8, she weighed from 110 lbs to 150 lbs, and she was wearing a shirt that was red, yellow or orange. Poor police.In another class there was a student who was constantly falling asleep while sitting up. She was doing it everyday. I was more curious that someone could fall asleep in my class than offended. One day I am standing by her desk and she is nodding in her sleep and on impulse I lower my voice into a hypnotic tone and make a suggestion in her direction that her arm is feeling lighter and is lifting up like being pulled up, up by a helium balloon on a string. It is called arm levitation. Her arm lifts up a little. I continue the lecture at the same time I am interspersing hypnotic suggestions to the girl that her arm is getting lighter and lighter and rising higher and higher into the air. The other students are not even listening to the lecture anymore. They are transfixed watching with fascination each time her arm lifts higher into the air. I keep shifting back and forth between lecture tone and hypnotic tone and with each suggestion her arm is lifting higher into the air. The room is silent with fascination. Finally, the arm is all the way up into the air and then the trance is broken when someone in the back of the room giggles. The poor girl looks around at all the people looking at her and notices her arm in the air and quickly pulls it down. After class she comes up to me and apologizes for falling asleep in my class but she is carrying two jobs and cannot keep herself awake. She would never sleep in my class again she said. No one did.I shudder when I think about that incident now. It was an act of spontaneity that could have gotten me in a lot of trouble. If the director of the mental health center thought hypnosis was the work of the devil, my god what the local administrators, judges would have thought. I was in Bible Belt country that was right wing to the max. When I left Louisiana a few years later, one of the candidates for governor had been a member of the American Nazi Party and a Grand Wizard of the KKK. He got 35% of the vote. When I left town, there had been vandalism at the graveyard, probably by teenage thugs, and everyone was abuzz about ‘devil worshippers.’I became popular with the students and many times they would crowd into my little windowless closet of an office to have coffee, cigarettes, chit-chat, and joke. I handed out my own Teacher Evaluation form and 80% of my students thought I was the best teacher they had ever had in their life, 15% thought I was their best teacher that semester, and 5% thought I should be hanged. I asked them why they loved me so much and they said it was because I was so unpredictable and they didn’t know what to expect next. I should have been happy, but I was bothered by that 5%.So of course I was fired. I had been there for three years and it was time to give me tenure or let me go. Tenure was denied for various reasons unstated and I was given one more year to teach before I had to go. Paradoxically, they were willing to hire me as half time adjunct professor at one fourth the salary. When the students found out about this, they organized a protest, the first protest in favor of a professor in Louisiana history. Every student who was currently in my classes or had been in my classes came together and made a protest in front of the administration building with signs and everything. There were hundreds of them. The local newspaper came, the local television came, I was interviewed by the college paper. It was a scene. Administration never even talked to me. I found out later from a friend in the administration building that people were running around asking, ‘Did we cover our butt?’ ‘Yeah, it is all legal,’ was the answer.This and that and it was time to go. I sold everything and went to the Ashram in India where there were thousands of spiritual seekers. My first roommate was an Englishman having panic attacks. Lucky guy. I cured them in one session and in gratitude he gave me initiation as a Master Reiki. I didn’t believe in it and never used it.Another time I was walking around the Ashram and I noticed this older woman looking very elegant woman with very rigid physiology. When she smoked she made very precise movements like it was some kind of military drill. She had a face like a rock and I assumed the inside of her was like that too. I was wrong. One day she was digging in her purse looking for her lighter and I gave her a light. She smiled at me in such a way that her whole face was shining with light. It made me curious. I sat down and I asked, ‘You are from Germany, yah?’ ‘Yah,’ she nods her head. ‘You grew up in Germany, yah?’ ‘Yah,’ she nods her head. ‘Did you see any bombing when you were growing up?’ I asked. Her face turned into terror.I don’t know why I asked her that question. Maybe it was intuition because she was about that age. Maybe it was some kind of instinct. It turned out to be true. When she was a little girl, the Americans had bombed her town and she had seen her house destroyed and her little girlfriends with their heads blown off. That was 47 years ago and she had repressed the fear all her life. That was why her physiology was so rigid. When she saw on t.v. the Americans bomb Iraq in the first Gulf War, all of that repressed fear had come back and now she was tortured in her sleep. I asked her if it was o.k. for her to let go of that now and she agreed. I went around looking for someone to translate and a Dutch guy volunteered. We were in a quiet spot in the bushes behind the smoking temple and so we did the Trauma Cure right there on the spot. 30’ later when it was over, I tested it by asking her what about bombing? Her eye movements went up, down, left, right looking for the trauma. She couldn’t find it. It was gone. For the first time in 47 years, the trauma was gone. All the life’s energy that had been trapped by the fear was released and went rushing up her spine. She had to move. She kissed me on the cheek and then apologized for leaving because she had to move, she just had to move. I looked over at the Dutch guy and he had moved into the chair she had been sitting in. Ah, he wants something I thought.I got letters of gratitude and love from that woman as she traveled all over the world for almost a year. I appreciated, but I never answered. It turned out she was Baroness somebody and was the 10th richest woman in Germany. I didn’t even ask for money for that session. It was my work, but it was not a job. It was an offering. There was a Multiversity attached to the Ashram and thousands of people from all over the world were taking groups and therapy sessions in-between their meditations. I joined the staff of the Center for Transformation and gave hundreds of nlp/hypnosis sessions to people from almost half the countries in the world. After a few years of working for free, I was offered to write the astrology horoscope for our monthly magazine. It was a fair size with over 25,000 circulation worldwide and the horoscope was very popular. They ran my picture and I got ‘famous’ as an astrologer. People started asking for sessions in astrology. At first I refused thinking it was just a bunch of chit chat that had no therapeutic value. I discovered that with nlp language, it had a lot of therapeutic value. It was of enormous benefit to peoples’ lives.The Ashram changed over the years into a cashram and I left to go out on my own. I gave sessions to Western meditators in Goa in the winter and Dharamsala in the summer and sometimes was invited to Europe to do my work. NLP has been of use to me spiritually as well as professionally. It has shown me how my mind works, both consciously and unconsciously. I have been able to amplify one year’s meditation into ten and progress at a quicker rate. I have been able to tolerate other people’s suffering by taking it away from them sometimes in the blink of an eye with a simple reframe. Yeah, people can book a session with me, but sometimes I don’t wait and just do it on the spot just because I can. They don’t know what to do with their suffering so I might as well take it away. It is not a job with me that I have to wait to get paid. It is my work and a part of my life and it is a joy. I have become a guerilla therapist and I travel the world and I watch. Sometimes I do.This winter, 2004, I am in Goa and I dress up in my wizard costume with tall pointed hat and everything and go walking around the Saturday Night Market just to see what would happen. All the kids of Western parents are going gah gah and saying, ‘Harry Potter, Harry Potter.’ One Western artist with a booth comes running over saying what a great costume I have and how real it looks. The Indians and Kashmiris in particular are impressed. They think I am a real wizard because I am dressed up like a wizard and they believe in wizards. I catch one Kashmiri young man standing close by with his mouth open and I say if you touch this star on my sleeve, you can have any wish you want. His eye movements go all over the place as he thinks about what wish he wants to ask for. Finally, he says he wants to be very rich. I say o.k., but it is going to make you suffer. He looks at me in surprise and he asks why. I say think about it: your uncle needs an operation and he is going to ask you for the money, your sister wants to get married and is going to ask you for the money, your cousin is having business trouble and needs money from you to bail him out, every relative you never knew you had is going to ask you for the money, and they are going to do it all day, day and night, and if you get tired of it and refuse, they will hate you and attack you.He thinks about all of that and says, ‘Yeah, you are right, but this is my first year in business and I am afraid I will not make it, that’s all. But if I fail, god is with me.” I asked him, if you succeed, is god with you? He said, yeah. I said then god is with you whether you fail or succeed? He said, yeah. ‘Then you are rich,’ I said, ‘You have your wish.’ It was a simple reframe. He got it and the joy came rushing up into his system and he put out his hand thumbs up and said, ‘I’ll remember you.What NLP actually is, in academic terms, is an advanced form of cognitive behavioral therapy, invented by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s before cognitive behavioral therapy ever got known. Because Bandler and Grinder were not psychologists, their system of knowledge never got included in the field of psychology. It is still not included. In 1993, I went to visit the famous Professor Hans Eysenck at Maudsley Hospital in London. I told him about the NLP Trauma Cure and he promptly introduced me to the Chief Psychologist in charge of the trauma program at the hospital. When he tells me they are getting great results in only a couple of months, I tell him (possibly with an overinflated ego-driven competitive smirk on my face) I can do it in 40 minutes. He looks at me, his jaw drops open, his face turns red, he clinches his fists, and then he promptly gets up and leaves the room without a word. So much for scientific curiosity.