| C. Norman Shealy M.D.
Expert in stress & pain management
Founder of The Shealy Institute
Respected worldwide for its Innovative & Successful Rehabilitation Approaches
Biography
By the time he was 4 years old, C. Norman Shealy knew he wanted to be a
physician. Just how far down the road that would take him, he could never have
imagined at that time.
Now, Dr. Shealy's ideas have been the foundation for pain management
therapies used worldwide, and the ''Shealy Program'' is the mainstay of chronic
pain treatment and management sought by patients and physicians alike.
Shortly after graduating from Duke Medical School, and beginning his career
as an accomplished neurosurgeon, Dr. Shealy noted: ''The most common symptom in
the world is pain, and yet nobody specializes in it.'' At this early phase of
his medical life, he decided to look into pain, what causes it, what we can do
about it, and how it affects us as human beings.
He had not been investigating long before he recognized that the majority of
long term fixes for chronic pain did not come from the established medical
community, but from the ''folk domain.'' Shealy began a series of research and
experimental processes which included any ideas he could come across that
claimed to be able to treat chronic pain in the long term without the use of
narcotic medications.
Consulting and researching with acupuncturists, mystics, faith healers, color
therapists, folk healers, and other non-traditional therapists, and blending
this new knowledge with his medical background, Dr. Shealy came to the
conclusion that, while none of these methods was THE cure for chronic pain,
almost all of them had developed a documented history of being able to
successfully eliminate chronic pain in a good number of their attempts. It is at
this juncture that he decided that ''It is the interaction of the four main
fields of stress; the chemical, physical, electromagnetic, and emotional; that
is the cause of all illness...not some, all.''
Now, Shealy embarked on a lifelong quest to find ways to manage successfully
chronic pain. He opened his first pain management clinic in La Crosse, Wisconsin
and developed a long series of successes in treating patients who had been
otherwise untreatable. During this period, he devloped a device called the
dorsal column stimulator, which uses small electrical currents to adjust the
electromagnetic fields within the spinal column. The stimulator was so
successful in treating previously untreatable chronic back pain that it has
become a favored treatment for pain by physicians world-wide. The breakthroughs
generated by the dorsal column stimulator contributed directly to the
development and patenting of the TENS system of elecrical stimulation, a pain
treatment regimen now in demand throughout the medical community.
The cost-effectiveness of Shealy's treaments for back pain have led to a
series of breakthroughs culminating in the discovery of urgently low levels of a
chemical known as DHEA in almost all patients suffering chronic pain. Shealy's
further research developed a procedure that could effectively raise these DHEA
levels in humans, without the use of medications, and his studies documented the
cessation of this chronic pain in almost all subjects studied. His now patented
system for curing chronic pain is used by traditional and non-traditional
practitioners in nearly every specialty today.
While conducting all of this research, Dr. Shealy noted an abnormally large
group of patients he was treating for chronic pain were also clinically
depressed. Wondering if there was some connection between this chronic pain and
their clinical depression, he sought and gained a Ph.D. in psychology. Further
study did show, in fact, that with or without chronic pain, depressed persons
also showed a low level of DHEA, and so he began a course of highly successful
treatment of chronic clinical depression, again by naturally raising the
patients DHEA levels without the use of drugs or medications. Current studies
are underway by Shealy and many others to try to determine to what extent other
illnesses may or may not be associated with abnormal DHEA levels, and may be
treated non-pharmocologically, by adjusting those levels therapeutically.
In 1999, Dr. Shealy retired from actively seeing patients, and spends his
time now dedicated to further research and teaching. Having begun his career by
alternative forms of treatment for patients, he now desires, through research,
teaching, and writing, to blend what he and others have learned via his
discoveries with the more traditonal approaches to medicine, allowing his
approaches to benefit patients in all medical specialties.
Norm and his wife of 40 years, Mary-Charlotte, live in Missouri, where Chardy
is also known world-wide for her Success-Centered Riding and Training. When Norm
and Chardy aren't ''horsing around'', they enjoy visits from their three
children; Brock, an attorney in Kansas City and Atlanta; Craig, a clinical
psychologist teaching in Virginia; and Laurel, an attorney in Springfield, MO.
They also dote on their five grandchildren.
C. Norman Shealy entered Duke University at age 16 and Duke Medical School at
19. He was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha honor societies
and became the permanent class officer of his graduating medical school class.
He interned in Internal Medicine at Duke and then had a year of General Surgery
at Banes Hospital, followed by a five year residency in Neurosurgery at
Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Board Certified in Neurological
Surgery. In 1961 he spent 9 months working with Sir John Eccles, Nobel Laureate,
at the Australian National University. In 1977 he earned a Ph.D. in Psychology
from Saybrook Institute, the leading Humanistic Psychology school. And he
received a Doctor of Science degree from Ryodoraku Institute.
He then spent 3˝ years at Western Reserve Medical School, where his research
led to both Dorsal Column Stimulation and Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve
Stimulation (TENS™), both now used worldwide to help control pain. In 1966 he
became Chief of Neurosciences at Gundersen Clinic, one of the 10 largest clinics
in the U.S. In 1971 he founded the first comprehensive pain and stress
management clinic in the world. The Shealy Institute was recognized for several
years as the most successful and most cost effective pain clinic in the U.S.
Over a 30 year period his clinic treated over 30,000 chronically ill patients
with a remarkable 85% success rate.
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