Why the term Atlas Medicine?
As an orthopedic surgeon, I attended a course in 1985 led by the French physician Dr. Albert Arlen. He was known for the incredible success of achieving immediate pain relief in other areas of the body through a manual impulse applied to the transverse processes of the atlas, the first cervical vertebra.
When applying this technique manually in my orthopedic practice, I quickly realized that the manipulation of the atlas, often percei ved as painful by patients, could not be the trigger for the complex processes occurring in the body. What seemed crucial to me was the close concentration of the nervous and vascular systems in this area, which allows the therapist a high degree of information transfer into the body's biological regulatory circuits.
Deviating from the therapy method I learned from Dr. Arlen, I varied the position, direction, and intensity of the impulse, applying gentle pressure over the transverse processes in a cranial direction.
Diagnostically, the treatment method I use identifies chronic pain potentials and seeks their origins. The impulse in the atlas region, which I call the TBS impulse, is the most important step but only one part of the therapy. For this reason, atlas therapy has become atlas medicine in my practice.
The TBS Impulse (Temporary Brainsplitting)
As part of my human cybernetic treatment, which I call Atlas Medicine, it is sufficient to deliver a high-energy impulse below the earlobe. The point of application for the therapy is not the atlas vertebra itself, but rather the end of its transverse process, the mandibular triangulation. The impulse, delivered via the transverse process of the patient's atlas vertebra, travels towards the brainstem. A correctly executed energy pulse is intended to rapidly optimize the biophysical regulatory circuits in the respective hemisphere of the brain being treated, thus leading to significant relief or even freedom from chronic pain on the treated side of the body.
But what happens inside the body when the concentrated energy impulse travels towards the brainstem? I found an explanation in the work of neurosurgeon Joseph E. Bogen and Roger Sperry, who was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1981 for his research. As early as the 1960s, the two scientists at the University of Southern California conducted a series of experiments with people suffering from excessive pain – their experiments became known in the scientific community as the “California series”.
Surgical Brain Splitting (from Pain-Free Through Human Cybernetics)
To free patients suffering from extreme pain, whose excruciating pain no longer responds to any other therapy, Californian researchers used a scalpel to sever the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain in a small number of patients, whose consent they had obtained beforehand: the corpus callosum. This fibrous structure, also known as the "brain beam," functions like a data highway between the two cerebral cortices, ensuring that information can travel freely and at lightning speed between the hemispheres so that it is available virtually simultaneously in all the brain's "decision-making centers." This rigorous procedure is also a common method in some extreme cases of otherwise uncontrollable epilepsy, preventing the overexcitation of nerves from spreading from one hemisphere to the other during an epileptic seizure.
After this surgical brain splitting, the pain in the patients treated by Sperry and Bogen ceased abruptly. However, the surgical procedure had irreversible consequences: The cut through the brain hemispheres caused severe and irreversible perceptual disturbances in those affected. These manifested themselves, for example, in the fact that information was clearly not being transmitted within the body.
If a patient, for instance, was still able to identify a pen by its shape simply by feeling it with one hand while blindfolded and communicate this knowledge to the outside world via the language center in the dominant hemisphere, the same patient could no longer do this with the other hand. The impression of a "pen" no longer formed in the brain, quite simply because the information did not reach the language center when the two hemispheres switched. Where the hemispheres normally communicate with each other, the connection was severed. The pathway remained dead. Only when both hemispheres work together are they capable of teamwork; separately, they can hardly accomplish anything. This is how neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga describes it in an article he published in the journal "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" (12/1998, 84). Gazzaniga, who had collaborated with the two American neuroscientists Sperry and Bogen, discovered that the two hemispheres of the brain do not think consciously to the same degree. "The right hemisphere has little language ability, cannot solve problems, and is essentially nothing more than a recording device," claimed the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in an interview with the German weekly magazine Focus (Focus 16/2000, 171–172). In contrast, the left hemisphere constantly tries to make sense of things and establish relationships.
Split-Brain Research (from Pain-Free Through Human Cybernetics)
According to Gazzaniga, split-brain research, the science dedicated to the functioning of the two brain hemispheres, has since enriched many areas of neuroscience. For example, it has been discovered that the corpus callosum, while not the only, is certainly the most powerful neural bridge between the two hemispheres. If it is damaged, it becomes difficult or even impossible for the patient to perform even the simplest tasks such as recognizing and naming.
"Despite countless exceptions and counterexamples, split-brain research demonstrates a high degree of lateralization—that is, a specialization of the two hemispheres," explains neuroscientist Gazzaniga. "Given the strengths and weaknesses of the two hemispheres, we pondered the foundations of the human mind. Even though consciousness can be attributed to both hemispheres, that of the left brain far surpasses that of the right. Which raises a whole host of new questions," the US neuroscientist summarizes.
Reset for the Brain's Hard Drive