New Mindbody Physician, Nisha Chellam, MD

Hopefully Forest can add this great lady to the index of professionals if he deems worthiness. I had a nice long talk with her after she reached out to ask me if I trained professionals in TMS healing. I've since been in contact with her. She's already a mindbody MD with deep knowledge and experience in healing. However, she takes it all the way to the end, in that, she doesn't want to use medicine which she sees as the problem. Her professional mantra is "stopping a million medications." She doesn't call herself a TMS doc yet but I believe she will be soon.

She is just now learning about TMS, reading the books, but she already agrees with Dr. Sarno, ie, it's about finding the cause not treating symptoms. We spoke for a couple hours and she is erudite in nutritional healing. She refers to herself as a practitioner of "functional medicine." She feels the health problems all stem from the unconscious emotional process AND from within the gut, that is what we feed our body. We also spoke about how relationships are often the problem and the solution.

Dr. Chellam is a keen diagnostician, but everything she is doing fits nicely with TMS healing with the added factor of nutrition (mainly in disease). She's one of the most compassionate people I've met, sweet personality; not in it for the cash but of course needs to keep her business ongoing like all of us. She's immediately likable, and simply wants to help people.

I'm only mentioning her as another possible source for those seeking answers. From my own experience she is spot on, it all begins in the mind. Here is her site if anyone is interested.

http://holisticicon.com/

Dr. Nisha Chellam, MD
Address:
47601 Grand River Ave
Suite A-205
Novi, MI 48374
Phone: (248) 773-8640

Good luck,
SteveO

 

Thank you Steve!!

 

I forwarded the info to the proper authorities via the 'CONTACT US" button below.

Thanks SteveO--AND when is your audio book coming out?

 

Thanks Tom and Andy, Dr. Chellam impressed me which is hard to do with a physician.

Tom that audiobook is the project from hell. People generally think it's easy but it's grindingly tedious. It was supposed to be out years ago but I hope to be done by summer. Conan Milner in Epoch Times did nice article on TMS, I may have to find it and post if it no one else already has.

Onward and sideways!

SteveO

 

Hi SteveO, haven't seen the article here at the wiki yet. looks good! I created a thread for it :

http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/steveo-featured-in-a-good-article-on-chronic-pain.14870/ (SteveO Featured in a Good Article on Chronic Pain)​

 

Sorry to be a cynic and she may well have aspects of her practice that focus on mindbody issues but (quoting her website here), someone who practices "functional medicine" with an emphasis on hormones, does "functional stool analysis" and "medical detox (gut and liver repair system)" and sells supplements is a long way from being a true TMS physician. These are all standard alternative medicine tropes which assume that some measurable physiologic imbalance is the source of one's problems. Maybe there is a way that this can be seen as complementary with a TMS approach, but I don't see it.

And her "5 Pillars of Health" are

• Nutrition
• Nervous System
• Hormones
• Fitness
• Detoxification

Again, at least in large part this sounds to me like standard alternative medicine stuff, driven by (non standard and expensive) blood and stool tests and supplements. (Been there, done that.)

 

Took a look at her web-site, it's pretty cool, lots of pics of pics, not your normal doc's site. I'm sure she will be updating it soon, she's new to TMS, I think SteveO is informing her about it. I'm sure she will be a great TMS resource in Michigan. TMS physicians are few and far between, we can use as many as we can get. She would be great to have as a guest speaker at a TMS Wiki conference call like we had in the good ol' days.

Cheers,
tt

 

It's obvious that her web-site will be updated to include TMS now that she has discovered it. I would refrain from rushing to judgment by looking at a web-site that was likely written prior to her learning about TMS.

 

My cynical guess is that at best she will end up like Alex Angelov here in the Boston area, and a couple of other doctors on the TMS list I have investigated, with one section of the website talking about TMS and the rest touting unproven and expensive (insurance won't pay) alternative medicine tests, methods and treatments to identify the "root cause of illness" meaning something physiologic, not something rooted in the emotions. It doesn't pay to be a TMS doctor, because you can't charge patients to test their blood and stool and saliva, you can't sell them "remedies" and potions and supplements, you can't "detoxify" them or "restore their balance". How many doctors have that much integrity and/or conviction? "Holistic" and "mindbody" and "functional" all sound great but have nothing to do with TMS, based on my experience seeing several people in this camp and coming away thousands of dollars poorer without a shred of relevant information.

So fine, let's keep an open mind as Tom says. But I would be shocked if this doctor jettisons her past practice.

 

True to her word Dr. Chellam read Dr. Sarno's work and is incorporating TMS into her practice. She also wrote a nice piece in MindBodyGreen.com in case anyone is interested, the goal will never change which is to spread Dr. Sarno's work everywhere:

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-28745/this-doctor-believes-the-subconscious-can-make-us-sick-heres-why.html?utm_source=mbg&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=emailafriend (This Doctor Believes The Subconscious Can Make Us Sick: Here's Why)

SteveO

 

Sounds like she has a good read on TMS:

******************************************************************************************

This Doctor Believes The Subconscious Can Make Us Sick: Here's Why
​

by Dr. Nisha ChellamFebruary 13, 2017 5:29 AM

In my 22 years of medical experience I have always been fascinated by the trust we have in our doctors. And as I've evolved as an internist—one who began her career with the enthusiasm to diagnose diseases accurately and know all of the latest drugs that help relieve symptoms—I've come to the realization that diagnosing a disease can be done by a computer. Matching a drug to a disease can also be done by a computer. Today, even surgeries can be done by a computer.

But computers cannot understand the person who has the disease. And as I journey into functional medicine, where the principle approach is to find out why a body is not healing, I am very intrigued by the idea that we may be sick because we are trying to protect ourselves from an excruciatingly painful event in our life, or even life itself.

Can traumatic experiences make you sick?
A trigger event can be something profound that changed your life in a split second or a series of events that created a lot of fear or caused pain. These triggers can cause feelings that we oppress so much, we may not be consciously aware of how angry or upset we still are. Examples of triggers are an abusive childhood, poor relationships, the death of a loved one, poor self-image, or hatred for a job.

Whatever the trigger, when we feel emotionally distressed our brain's job is to protect us, and the best way to do this is to cause a distraction. I believe that this distraction can take the form of a physical pain or a disease that we can now obsess about. This has been called TMS or tension myositis syndrome by Dr. John Sarno (who coined the term) and Steve Ozanich who continued Dr. Sarno's work and wrote the book The Great Pain Deception.

These are the symptoms to look for
How do you know if you have TMS? You've had pain for a long time or a disease that has been treated by both conventional and unconventional methods but have found no relief. Other common symptoms include:

• Low back pain or leg pain
• Fibromyalgia
• Migraine headaches
• Chronic pain
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Psoriasis
• Anxiety and depression

Sometimes I find that autoimmune diseases, cancer, and diabetes are also caused by stressors that have been left unresolved for years.

What do unresolved stressors look like?
The theory is that the brain can create a pathway of defense and repair using the immune system or the autonomic nervous system. When it affects the immune system it leads to allergic reactions, skin conditions, and decreased immunity, which can lead to other illnesses. When it uses the autonomic nervous system it creates symptoms of migraine headaches, peptic ulcer disease, inflammatory bowel disorders, and sometimes even cardiovascular disease.

To heal your body you have to heal your mind.
Understand that your subconscious mind is working all the time and you don't have a lot of control. Fear and guilt are the most self-destructive emotions we can harbor, and it may mean we have to change our environment—whether that's our relationships, career paths, or the city in which we live. Here are some other steps I provide my patients who suspect they are dealing with TMS:

• Use your conscious mind to refute any structural anomalies you may have.
• Accept that there may be a strong psychological component to your illness.
• Accept and acknowledge the fact that you have several stressors in your life and from your past.
• Spend a few moments each day to reflect on your emotions and what can be done to address them and let them flow through you.
• Trust that when you make this shift from feeling like a victim to taking charge of your mind, the healing will begin.

The lesson we all need to learn is that in order to heal our bodies we have to heal our minds. Luckily, the power to do that is mostly in our hands. We may just need to confront this reality in order to get started.


#functional medicine #health #mind body connection #mindfulness

Dr. Nisha Chellam
Nisha Chellam is an Internist who trained in traditional Internal medicine and after 17 years of practice in this field realized that sickness is an unconscious choice we make. So she got trained in Integrative and holistic Medicine and is currently getting training in functional Medicine. The outer mission of…

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Yes, as several TMS docs have said "she's one of us now." As more of those that Dr. Sarno trained retire the pool gets smaller, it's good to have another one on board who sees the truth in TMS.

 

Great, accessible article. Glad to have another doctor on board.