Dr. Korman had the temerity to diagnose his daughter’s environmental illness with electro-dermal testing and treat it with bio-resonance methods developed in Germany
The first time I met Dr. Irvine Korman in 1990, he remarked: “The best thing that ever happened to me was that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) took my medical license away.” I was amazed and asked, “How so?” He replied, “That gave me the freedom to treat people properly and without drugs.”
After being freed from the CPSO’s restrictive and doctrinal attitude, Dr. Korman spent a quarter of a century helping thousands of patients. The trigger for this painful yet liberating transformation was his daughter Lucinda – she had become seriously ill in the late 1970s while studying art at York University, from which she graduated in 1980. At the time, she didn’t know (nor did most people) that toxins (like heavy metals and VOCs) in art materials could make her ill by causing her central nervous system and immune system to become dysfunctional.
We now call that Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or Environmental Illness (the medical protocol for its treatment was developed by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine). But at that time, doctors who recognized this condition and treated such patients were attacked throughout North America by their regulatory agencies. One reason given for this harassment was that some of the doctors tended to use “unorthodox” diagnostic tools such as the Vega or Interro testing machines and the Bicom treatment device. These bio-resonance measuring machines were more sensitive than anything known to standard allergy practice. Dr. Korman used these techniques with much success.
The fact that regulatory agencies rushed to denounce doctors who took these conditions seriously, and used new methods to treat them successfully, is a recurring phenomenon with a long history in medicine. For example:
• In the mid-1800s, resistance to change in established medical practise began with denouncing Dr. Semmelweis’ proof that handwashing prevented childbed fever – critics asserted that doctors are “gentlemen and have clean hands.” Also denounced was Louis Pasteur’s bacteriological theory, despite proof by microscope.
• A bitter controversy raged in the 1950s over the use of vitamin E for cardiovascular disease. Drs. Wilfrid and Evan Shute were at the centre of this storm because they were among the very first medical doctors to clinically employ large doses of vitamin E in place of conventional drug therapy. Almost all of the criticism came from medical doctors who were resistant to even try the Shute’s approach. Yet their unwillingness to test the Shute’s high-dose, natural vitamin E protocol did not seem to prevent them from dismissing it.[1] The Shute brothers eventually came under disciplinary investigation by Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons but the charges were dismissed.
• The founder of environmental medicine, Dr. Theron G. Randolph, had to relinquish his tenured professorship at the Northwestern University Medical School in 1949 due to pressure from agricultural lobbyists. This came after Randolph found evidence that many physical and emotional disorders could be traced back to underlying food and environmental allergies, mostly commonly to wheat, corn, sugar beets, and petrochemicals. Dr. Randolph first documented the effects of food, chemicals, and other substances on human health in 1951, and he treated more than 20,000 patients in a six-decade medical career. These findings were recorded in his books, Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment (1962), An Alternative Approach to Allergies (1989), and Environmental Medicine – Beginnings and Bibliography of Clinical Ecology (1987).
• In 1988, a groundbreaking trial commenced after the CPSO laid charges against Dr. Jozef Krop for the crime of practising environmental medicine, including electro-dermal testing, detoxification therapy, and vitamin and mineral therapy. That trial ended in 2003 and resulted in Dr. Krop being reprimanded.
• Even outright infectious diseases ran afoul of the authorities, such as Lyme disease which until 2014 did not officially exist in Canada. Now it is a reportable disease, but we still don’t have the proper diagnostic tests available in this country and suffer from a lack of Lyme-literate doctors to address the increasing spread of the disease.
• And then there was the war on doctors who found that conventional testing methods were not adequate for the wide range of food and environmental allergies manifesting in modern society. For example, conventional testing for ragweed allergies by using the ‘scratch’ test is useless for detecting food and chemical-related allergies.
That’s where Dr. Korman entered the scene. Not only did he recognize that conventional ‘scratch’ tests were not reliable diagnostic procedures for his desperately ill daughter, but he had the temerity to diagnose and treat her illness with electro-dermal testing and treat it with bio-resonance methods which had been developed in Germany after World War II. This approach is based on Chinese medicine and the electrical properties of matter.
The developers of electro-dermal testing and treatment methods were Dr. Reinhold Voll, a medical doctor and engineer, and Dr. Helmut Schimmel, a medical doctor, dentist, and doctor of homeopathy who later became a professor of medicine at Baden-Baden University. Both men had survived Nazi concentration camps and had vowed to develop their pre-war discoveries if they survived. In Germany, alternative medicine generally is protected by a Supreme Court order of the late 1970s and electro-dermal testing and bio-resonance treatment received court protection in the 1990s.
In the early 1980s, a group of doctors in Ontario, under the leadership of Dr. J. McLennan (trained by Theron Randolph, Linus Pauling, and Abram Hoffer), founded a group dedicated to helping patients recover from environmental illness; they called themselves Clinical Ecologists. Dr. Korman and Dr. Krop were among the founders. Their successful patient outcomes (carefully documented and published) were nothing short of spectacular. Nevertheless, the CPSO went after them.
The good news is: Dr. Korman restored his daughter’s health using these new approaches. This was just one success story among many. But this collided with established medical norms that, from the regulatory perspective, had to be protected at all costs. The CPSO had offered to nix the entire trial and restore Dr. Korman’s medical license, provided he agreed in writing to never again use electro-dermal testing. He refused, and lost his license in 1991.
The same deal was also offered to Dr. Krop in the late 1990s, almost a decade later. He had endured two decades of disciplinary investigation for essentially the same “charge” (i.e. diagnosing and treating environmental illness with unconventional methods). He, too, refused to stop using electro-dermal testing. For this courageous refusal, thousands of patients and their families are and will continue to be deeply grateful to both doctors.
In Ontario, and Canada generally, the right to use new methods of diagnostics and treatment is now protected by the famous Brett Decision of 1993 and by the Kwinter Bill (named after its originator, then MPP Monte Kwinter). Ontario adopted this legislative change in the year 2000 and most Canadian provinces have followed our lead since. In 2007, the Canadian Human Rights Commission issued an opinion (which has the same force as a Supreme Court Decision) on environmental sensitivities, multiple chemical sensitivities, and electromagnetic field sensitivities. The decision stated that these conditions are real and must be accommodated and treatment should be covered by Canada’s health insurance plans.
Today, electro-dermal testing and bio-resonance therapy are readily available in Canada; in fact there are about 44,000 such practices in North America – most are run by naturopaths and homeopaths.
Dr. Korman continued working to the benefit of thousands of sick people in his Korman Lifestyle Counselling clinic in Sharon, Ontario until retirement at the age of 86. He was justifiably proud of his “drugless medical practice.”
The families of Dr. Irvine Korman and his wife Frances Helper came from Northern Russia and the Ukraine; they were Jewish refugees who made a life for themselves in Canada. Young Irvine, born in Canada, had a curious handicap: he found it virtually impossible to read anything in regular black on white print, but he was perfectly able to read in colour. Consequently, his family believed he would not make it far. However, once he attained puberty, this odd visual handicap disappeared. He excelled in school, obtained an Honours B.Sc. in biochemistry, then an M.D., and in 1955 earned his Fellowship (FRCP) in internal medicine. His personal experience with his temporary developmental handicap, his daughter’s multiple chemical sensitivity, and finally his own 10-year battle with Lyme disease turned him into what the ancient Greeks called “a wounded healer” – someone who was able to heal because he had been through the fire of personal experience.
The search for healing led him to bio-resonance medicine. Interestingly, in Germany where it developed and is taught and researched with government funding in several excellent institutes, this type of testing and therapy is called Erfahrungsheilkunde, translated into English literally as “experiential healing”. In Europe, the traditions of homeopathy, naturopathy, and acupuncture are also known as methods of experiential healing because they are founded on the concept of bio-individuality, and they all function holistically by addressing the whole body, not just a target symptom. This is based on quantum physics which has shown that all matter has the properties of both particles and waves simultaneously. Indeed, Einstein proved that all matter is fundamentally energy. Therefore, every substance has its own electromagnetic signature or wavelength which becomes visible as a characteristic wave pattern. Bacteria, viruses, toxins, pollen, and every human cell type possesses its own characteristic wavelengths or interactive frequency patterns.
Bio-resonance devices interact with these frequency patterns to restore balance and wellness in the organism. On the other hand, classical Western medical science only addresses invaders such as exterior pathogens, or assumes faulty building blocks (DNA). Harmful invaders (e.g. bacteria, viruses, parasites) are targets to be eliminated or altered. That works up to a point.
But that conventional medicine doctrine is now being challenged by the discovery of the human microbiome which consists of trillions more organisms than we have cells in our bodies and whose job it is to orchestrate all biochemical activities and the deployment of our immune system’s and DNA’s repair work. This enormous interactive symphony certainly beats the old dogma of “one cause – one disease”. It also partly nullifies the old belief held in toxicology that “the dose makes the poison”.
Most often, tiny amounts or even just the energetic signature of something can have huge effects and change an entire system in totally unpredictable ways. In standard medicine this shows up in the side effects of drugs targeted for a specific attack or action making a mess in ways beyond belief and prediction. So drugs meant to control blood pressure can cause heart attacks, for example.
Through the non-invasive methods of energy medicine the aim is not to treat a symptom but to interact with entire biological systems and bring them back to cooperative functioning. Indeed, only the vocabulary of music seems to be useful, namely the idea of resonance. So, computerized electro-dermal testing, for example, is a non-invasive and pain-free method of finding energetic imbalances, or the body’s reaction to various substances including offending chemicals or foods for which the necessary metabolizing enzymes may not be present in a person. Bio-resonance treatment then restores the balance within these systems.
What happened to Dr. Korman was the shock of realizing that he had been trained in a sort of medical stone age. Modern people have fantastically complex arrays of problems and reactions to things nobody thought of before as being a problem. The outdated status quo of conventional medicine became of little use to him. True medical detection was his successful journey into the unknown.
Most important is the observation that bio-resonance therapy works well on animals and children – both groups known to be outside the influence of the placebo effect. To dismiss the positive effects and outright cures achieved with bio-resonance techniques as “merely” placebo effects won’t wash. I know this from personal experience. In medicine, there is no returning to an old Newtonian paradigm once one has realized that matter is energy and the paradigm has shifted.
Dr. Korman passed away on August 23, 2018, at the age of 89, surrounded by his wife and family. He was a great medical pioneer for whose courage and integrity we are deeply thankful.
RESOURCES
Clinics where bio-resonance therapy is currently available:
REFERENCE
[1] www.doctoryourself.com by Andrew Saul; Vitamin E, the real story
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