Dr. Larry Berkelhammer is a retired mind-body medicine psychologist. He has lived well with several chronic medical conditions since childhood. For decades he endured the frustration of not knowing the causes of his physical problems. Then, well into adulthood, he was diagnosed with two autoimmune diseases and a primary immunodeficiency disease. At the same time, he was told there were no known cures for any of them and that pharmacological treatment for some would make others worse. A long-time mindfulness and internal martial arts practitioner faced with this reality, Dr. Berkelhammer became curious about the power of those practices to improve health and well-being. He trained with several world leaders in psychooncology, psychophysiology, psychoneuroimmunology. He also trained for many years in the internal martial art of tai chi chuan under T.T. Liang and later under William C.C. Chen. Since the spring of 2018 he has been training in internal wing chun within the Chu Shong Tin lineage under Sifu Nima King at Mindful Wing Chun.
After treating patients for 19 years in private practice, Dr. Berkelhammer retired and spent his time writing, teaching and serving non-profit organizations that serve people with chronic medical conditions. Dr. Berkelhammer’s teaching appears in his two books: In Your Own Hands: New Hope for People with Chronic Medical Conditions (Self-Efficacy Press Jan. 2014, 98-0991243709) and Doctor’s Partner: The Self-Empowered Patient (Self-Efficacy Press Dec 2020).
Doctor’s Partner: The Self-Empowered Patient serves as a guide in how to take charge of your medical care. This book describes all the things that the most savvy medical patients do to receive optimal care.
Several years of presentations, interviews, and articles are available on his extensive website: https://larryberkelhammer.com.
Over the centuries, medical prescriptions included animal dung, lizard blood, frog sperm, crab eyes, and countless potentially deadly substances. Patients actually got well on these and hundreds of other useless and dangerous substances. The reason…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-03-15 09:00:222016-03-14 22:09:27Video: Inert Placebos Act Like Drugs In Your Mind
In a large study of oncologists, the doctors were all asked what single attribute among all the cancer patients they had ever treated, was most strongly a contributor to the patients’ recoveries from cancer. The patients had a wide variety…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-03-08 09:00:072016-03-07 17:39:20Video: Hope Helps Kill Cancer
In the words of psychooncologist Lawrence LeShan, PhD: “Feelings affect body chemistry, which affects the development or regression of a tumor, just as body chemistry affects feelings.” In other words, what Dr. LeShan was saying was that…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-03-01 09:00:412016-02-29 16:14:38Video: Are Your Thoughts Making You Sick?
Misunderstandings can sometimes save lives. In his book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins describes an incident that happened at UCLA Medical Center about fifty years ago. Cardiologist, Dr. Bernard Lown treated a very sick and dying patient.…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-02-23 09:00:082016-03-01 14:08:53Video: Believing You Are In Good Health Improves Your Health
Norman Cousins had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post and later went on to help UCLA start what, after his death, became known as the Norman Cousins Institute for Psychoneuroimmunology. This became one of the first centers for serious…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-02-16 09:00:382016-02-16 13:03:29Video: State of Mind Can Improve State of Health
When Deepak Chopra was a young medical resident, training in endocrinology, he had a patient with widely metastasized liver cancer. As was sometimes the case fifty years ago, doctors would sometimes lie to the patient about the seriousness of…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-02-01 09:00:272016-01-25 20:57:01Video: Mind Moves Matter
In a study from Japan, a harmless leaf was rubbed on the forearms of a group of teenage boys who were known to be allergic to an Asian version of poison ivy. The boys were told it was poison ivy. They all broke out in a rash that looked exactly…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2016-01-19 09:00:032016-01-25 20:57:59Video: What You Believe Dramatically Affects Your Health
Many of the published case studies in refereed journals describe experiments on medical students. In this one, half the students of a pharmacology class in a medical school were given placebos that appeared in every way to be stimulants and…
A belief is healthy if it catalyzes positive emotion. Negative, self-defeating or self-deprecating beliefs are unhealthy because they catalyze emotional distress and bodily stress, which is very bad for our health and wellbeing. Although negative…
https://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.png00Larry Berkelhammerhttps://larryberkelhammer.com/wp-content/images/2021/05/2105-lbphd_logo.pngLarry Berkelhammer2015-12-22 09:00:432015-12-22 18:02:51Video: You Don’t Have to Believe Everything You Think
