Ralph: A lot of people I’ve talked to already look at the fire fighters, the military troops and people like that that are getting paid to put their lives on the line; and of course every one of them is a hero for doing their job. Do you believe that heroism can also be defined as people that constantly do the right thing when nobody’s looking & do it in times when they are not getting credit for the wonderful things they do for others?
Dr. Howell: Oh, absolutely! Remember that what I said is when it takes courage to defy the odds & go through & accomplish this goal, the idea of being shunned by society for your actions. Or just to receive no recognition, in a sense is overcoming adversity as well, just to accomplish those goals is heroism. Yes I think it does. There’s quality of intellect & feeling that’s important to be true to in one’s life.
Ralph: What is your perspective on goodness, ethics and moral behavior?
Dr. Howell: I view those as inter-linked concepts. It depends on your spiritual background as to what constitutes good & bad. There are many commonly accepted concepts of god & bad. Good generally being helpful to people, including yourself, and being bad is when you’re taking advantage or damaging people either accidentally or willfully.
Dr. Howell: Then in terms of the ethics I think it’s important to establish rules of behavior that would be the ethics that are consistent with the concepts of goodness. Then finally their moral behavior is making sure that in their everyday actions they follow their own ethical plan, so that they maintain goodness in their actions. So to me those are inter-linked concepts.
Ralph: What principles are you willing to sacrifice your life for?
Dr. Howell: I suppose it would be if or when other people are confronted with losing their lives. I like to think I’d be willing to sacrifice my life for someone I didn’t know. I haven’t been in that situation yet.
Ralph: Is it useful to take a positive view of setbacks, misfortunes and mistakes? Did they help you achieve a different vision & set a new course for your life?
Dr. Howell: It was crucial. It was only because of the attitude of accepting & determining what to do from that point on to make things work for the best. That was the only reason I persisted & survived. Otherwise I’d just have been a loser.
Ralph: So basically it opened up a world that helped people heal their own bodies through using what you now call neuro-cranial restructuring. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Dr. Howell: Sure. What I had been confronted with by my experiences following the therapies that I had been taught by physical medicine. I had been taught bone manipulation, deep muscle massage, the strain counter strain techniques to try to release muscle spasms. What we always focused on was the location of the symptoms. So if someone had neck pain, we focused on their neck. If they had leg or hip pain we focused on their hip or their leg.
Dr. Howell: We learned to be very precise with that. We could use x-rays to analyze & all types of physical analytic techniques & what they always did was to figure out how to remove that symptom at the time. What I found was that people in that situation had to come back a week later, or 2 wks later or 6 wks later to get the same treatment again & again because we didn’t deal with the cause as to what was going on.
Dr. Howell: So my work with neuro-cranial restructuring came out of my search for “ how does the body get damaged “ with these different injuries so that we can then unwind those injuries so that they are no longer in the structure. If we do that then the person doesn’t have their symptoms return again & again.
Ralph: Is optimism valuable? Is it important in fighting against the mold?
Dr. Howell: If I hadn’t been optimistic I assure you I would have never gotten this far in my efforts. I had been called so many names by other doctors. Repackaging old concepts, remarketing old concepts, and you know, outlandish claims. But you must persist when you see results. I knew in my heart & mind that I was on to something. I wasn’t about to give it up just because other people didn’t like it.
Ralph: Do you maintain your sense of humor in the face of serious problems?
Dr. Howell: I certainly work hard on maintaining my sense of humor, because otherwise if you take yourself so seriously it can kind of sour you.
Ralph: Do you have the courage to pursue new ideas & your dreams?
Dr. Howell: I guess most of the courage came about from my own frustration & what I couldn’t do because of my own ethics & morality, I couldn’t lie to people. So when they came in & they wanted me to work on them, and they want to know if it’s gone now, I couldn’t say yes it’s gone now. I couldn’t say to them that” your permanently injured & you are a permanent patient.” It was wrong. So as I said it was my frustration with this. Somewhere in my heart I knew there was a way to get them better. I just didn’t know what it was.
Dr. Howell: So out of my own sense of obligation I was forced to try to go out and figure out what was the solution. I knew it was out there.
Ralph: Were you willing to experience discomfort in the pursuit of your dream? How important was it to have a belief that your dream would actually become a reality?
Dr. Howell: I think it was the foundation of everything.
Ralph: How were you able to overcome your doubts and fears?
Dr. Howell: It was essentially prayer, meditation & faith. I just knew that it had to work out in the long run if I persisted and achieved those goals. So I just kept slugging away.
Ralph: Do you readily forgive those who upset, offend and oppose you?
Dr. Howell: Yes, it’s fundamental. Especially if you are going to work as a healer you have to have your energy in the right place. Holding on to those negative feelings just taints your whole energy & your whole ay of being. So it’s an ongoing process to always forget & forgive and to release those kinds of feelings.
Ralph: When was the lowest point in your life and how did you change your life path to one of victory over the obstacles you were facing at that time?
Dr. Howell: I think the lowest point in my life was when Washington State took away my medical license for giving B-12 shots. I didn’t harm anybody but despite that the naturopathic medical profession in Washington State & everyone viewed me as the way lepers were viewed a couple thousand years ago. People wanted nothing to do with me, I was horrible because I had been following normal guidelines for giving B-12 shots, & the state had taken away my license.
Dr. Howell: My marriage fell apart at that time. I realized that what I had been doing was trying to be successful in the ways that everyone else told me that I should behave. My father was a dentist. I followed his concepts in how I established my practice & how I obeyed the practice rules I was taught in school. I tried to all the things my now former wife wanted to do. I realized that not only did it eventually bring me to this dastardly end where I’d lost my license & my means of making a living was severely damaged. On top of that I didn’t feel good about the way that I was living.
Dr. Howell: So I decided that I was going to change my way rules. I changed my, not my ethics or my moral behaviors, but instead I tried just changing my courage. I decided I was going to be more heroic and stand up for myself.
Dr. Howell: By the time they had taken away my license they had already legalized giving B-12 injections for naturopaths in Washington. So they prosecuted me for having done it earlier when it hadn’t been legalized. It was a very political action. The main point was that I decided that it was important for me as I am a naturopathic doctor my belief is in the healing power of nature. What I had been doing was more like a drug approach to healing.
Dr. Howell: I was prescribing many different types of supplements. There is nothing wrong with supplements, but it was more focused on eliminating symptoms so people would grow dependent on their supplements. If they choose to do that & they know that and understand it I think that’s fine. But I don’t view that as a cure.
Dr. Howell: I ended up in becoming more & more involved in physical medicine & what I changed was that most physical medicine was also symptom oriented. It’s like if you can find a herbal pill that takes away your hay fever, that isn’t a cure for hay fever. Similarly finding a physical medicine approach that illuminates your symptoms for a while isn’t a cure either.
Dr. Howell: So what I wanted to do was refresh my life, go back into natural healing & instead of the symptom oriented allopathic kinds of naturopathic practices I’d been involved in before. So it was my lowest point in a sense but in a way it was the time of greatest potential. I looked up & could see that everything was in front of me now instead of all these limitations.
Ralph: Was there anyone who helped give you the willpower to change things in your life for the better?
Dr. Howell: I For the most part it’s been the acceptance of my entire family and my friends. Everybody has known that I had a screw loose all my life and they’ve accepted me for being that kind of person. So that when I was floundering everyone has always been very helpful to me & encouraging me to keep on keeping on.
Ralph: What is your definition of heroism?
Dr. Howell: I think that a heroic action is any action that a person undertakes when it creates fear for them. So you are foolhardy if you go ahead and do anything. You are a hero if you realize the dangers and decide to do it anyway.
Ralph: Who are the HEROES in your life now?
Dr. Howell: When I was a boy I suppose it was at that time my parents, my father & mother both. When I got into medical school, John Basteer who they named the medical school for I looked up to him and also his assistant William Bresnan. I learned a tremendous amount from them.
Dr. Howell: I learned a lot of information from other doctors but those two, their morality & their ethics and their whole behavioral approach, I really learned a lot from them. As I’ve gone along it’s the different spiritual people that I will meet. Sometimes it’ll just be that you look in someone’s eyes & sort of get a glimpse of their hurt for a moment & I find that really inspiring. I get to meet a lot of interesting people like that in my practice. So for me on any particular day I might meet someone that’s really inspiring. It just takes that little flash, that little moment of recognition & it starts anew for me.
Ralph: Who do you feel are the real heroes in our society today that are not getting the recognition and rewards they deserve
Dr. Howell: I think the real heroes of today are the ones that have courage to maintain their faith & convictions in everyday life.
Ralph: How does it feel to be recognized as a health hero?
Dr. Howell: It feels like a validation. I’ve been working hard for many years. I decided to go in to medicine in the 1970’s. It feels like I’m getting to reap all those seeds that I’ve sewn for many years.
Ralph: How will being recognized as a health hero change your life?
Dr. Howell: I hope that what it’s going to do is bring more people to neuro-cranial restructuring information. My current goal is to get 500 doctors trained well enough to perform the therapy well. I think if we have 500 doctors out there it will be enough to tip the scales so that physical medicine will become a type of healing instead of a type of symptom treatment.
Dr. Howell: Right now most physical medicine, like massage, manipulations and so forth, most of them are very little different than taking drugs. I don’t like that. I’m a naturopathic doctor. I am supposed to help to cure by treating cause. Neuro-cranial restructuring to me is the only one I know of that consistently works. Neuro-cranial restructuring is a low technology. For about $100.00 & the appropriate skills a doctor can go to work. There are no quarter of a million dollars machine or expensive devices or elaborate drugs are required. It’s wonderful.
Dr. Howell: I’ve worked on people in back seats of cars before and been able to help them. If people are interested in more information about neuro-cranial restructuring I have a few web sites to go to. My site is drdeanhowell.com. The site maintained by the NCR research institute, which is a non profit research organization which publishes some of our studies, showing how effective NCR really is. Our major website is: ncrdoctors.com.
Ralph: I appreciate your genius and creating a technology that solves the problems at their foundational core, and helps people heal up permanently.
Dr. Howell: Thank you Ralph and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with people some more.
Dr. Dean Howell received his degree as a naturopathic physician from Bastyr University in 1982, after earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Dr. Howell brought a mathematical perspective to medicine that created the quest for simplicity and empirical certainty in healing. Having taken very seriously the Hippocratic oath (not taken to modern medical doctors, osteopathic physicians, or chiropractors)—which included the injunction to treat the cause rather than the symptoms of the disease or condition—Dr. Howell has striven to discover more and more precise methodologies that lead to permanent and cumulative beneficial results.
NeuroCranial Restructuring® (NCR®), which Dr. Howell has been developing for over 30 years, is a powerful and dynamic new approach to physical medicine with broad application. Its effectiveness continues to increase as he incorporates more cutting edge strategies into its operation.
Dr. Howell, the developer of NeuroCranial Restructuring, is a licensed naturopathic physician. He divides his time between SanDiego, California and Tonasket, Washington. He has four children. His daughter, Selena Eon, ND, the mother of a son and a daughter, treats patients with NCR and family medicine in the NCR-01 offices in Bellevue, Washington.
She also co-teaches with Dr. Howell in the professional NCR courses and is one of the authors of the Online NCR Course. Nathan Howell is a gifted software architect and works in San Jose, California. Derek Howell, the father of one daughter, treats patients with NCR in SanDiego CA, Los Angeles CA and Boulder, CO.
Dr Howell’s assistant and son Brandon is also an inspiring acting and model in Hollywood CA. When Dr. Howell is not teaching or performing NCR® and developing it further, Dr. Howell bowls, plays golf, hikes, bicycles, watches movies, cooks, travels extensively and reads avidly.
http://www.drdeanhowell.com/