Pamela V. Brown

Write Path, an L.L.C.  

Photo by Ron Kosen / Photo-Spectrum

   

   Kauai Business Report July 2006
 

   

Natural Healer Unlocks Body's Secrets

Latifa Amdur's business is keeping Kauaians healthy

   

By Pamela V. Brown

   

  
 

Michael Patton used to dread springtime.

"I had terrible allergies for a good 25 years, for three or four months out of the year. My nose would be completely plugged. It really deteriorated the quality of life," he said.

After years of visiting doctors, trying every allergy-elimination technique he could find but having no success, Patton, 59, a custom home designer, followed a recommendation to work with natural healer and doctor of acupuncture Latifa Amdur. After a handful of sessions with her, he was allergy-free and has remained so for nine years. "I celebrate it all the time, to be breathing free at all times," he said. "To me that's a great gift."

For healer Amdur, it's a gift that the human body wants to communicate. "My experience is that the body wants to share what is happening. It's just waiting for an interpreter to come along to translate the many signs." Her gift, she said, is being able to access the body's wisdom.

Rather than simply addressing and suppressing symptoms, Amdur's approach is "healing the whole person," a common philosophy within the holistic medicine community. She combines multiple healing modalities including acupuncture, Chinese medicine, allergy elimination, Jaffe Mellor technique, Total Body Modification and vibrational healing. "My tool box is pretty full," she said. "I can access what is appropriate for each individual's unique need.”

Some of her favorite work is that as a core essence facilitator, going to the core essence of an emotional aspect that is linked with a physiological problem, allergen or substance, to transform it on all levels. "It's like getting rid of a weed. You have to get to the bottom, to the very teeniest tendril of the root so it does not continue to manifest," she said. "So we go to the initial inception of an emotional impact that led to manifestation of the physiological imbalance."

It's a very benign form of clearing that doesn't necessarily involve re-experiencing painful situations or even talking about them, she said, yet it clears the emotional impact of the experience, freeing the mind and thus the body from the effects.

"My treatment is about freedom. Certainly freedom from dis-ease and symptomatology, but more so a deeper level of freedom from self-limiting thoughts and beliefs that are linked at a cellular energetic level to the symptoms appearing as illness."

Amdur, who has been in business on Kauai for 17 years, attended naturopathic school in Guatemala where, after graduation, she operated a naturopathic clinic in the 1970s. She holds three degrees in Chinese medicine including traditional acupuncture and Chinese herbology, and interned with doctors of acupuncture of various ethnicities including Taiwanese, Vietnamese, French, Japanese and Chinese, and from whose techniques she can draw upon when working with patients.

     

 
  BECOMING THE FIRST RESORT

"Many, many people come to see me who have not had the kind of results they're wanting with allopathic medicine or are fearful of having surgery and want to see if the work I do can help them avoid surgery," she said.

Amdur jokes that she has enough material to write a book about "spending 32 years as a last resort" - a challenge she faces daily as a one-person business on Kauai where there are many talented holistic practitioners but even more skeptical patients or those who are unaware of effective alternatives.

But word of mouth is powerful on Kauai. That's how Mark Wigent first came to Amdur.

"I was raised in a very traditional American household where I was taught that Western doctors were the advanced form of medicine and anything else was really smoke and mirrors," he said. "I was resistant but finally was willing to try."

For years Wigent, 35, a systems engineer, had experienced "internal tremors," tingliness and other assorted symptoms that he was pretty sure were neurological and neuromuscular, possibly triggered by exposure to pesticides and herbicides, but that weren't severe enough to register on standard medical tests. He spent a couple of years visiting doctors, knowing that something wasn't right with his body, trying to get a read on what was wrong but was told that his test results fell within normal parameters.

"I went to Latifa out of frustration and a little bit of desperation," he said. "Immediately I was very comfortable and knew that I was in good hands." Over the course of treatments, Wigent said he eventually felt healthier, more clear, stronger and more focused, and has been symptom-free for a couple of years. As his body became healthier, he easily shed 30 to 40 pounds of weight without making a concerted effort to do so.

He now considers alternative medicine as a first resort. "It's about supporting the natural healing process that we've all been blessed with," he said.

"I consider it a gift and a blessing, and really a second chance," he said. "I really don't know where I was headed but it was to a place that is probably not as good as where I am now. I think Latifa is a very talented healer and one of the most loving people I've ever met."

Patton, the recovered allergy-sufferer, also visits Amdur as a first resort when new ailments crop up. When he developed a frozen shoulder, possibly as a result of the gout he'd suffered for some years, he was unable to move his arm at all. "I had seen other people with frozen shoulders that lasted for more than a year," he said. After one session with Amdur, "I was able to raise my arm over my head. It was quite amazing that I was able to lift my hand and wave at her when I left her that day." After two sessions, it was completely gone.

Patton said his gout is also now under control thanks to treatments and nutritional advice he learned from Amdur. "She's been a very good guide," he said. "There's no b.s. with her, either you do it or you don't. It's up to you. But you're usually better off doing what she suggests."

 

 
 

LIFE'S SYMPHONY

Keeping the body and mind in a state of harmony and balance is an ongoing process, Amdur said. She sees the human body and all of its moving pieces as instruments with which to play life's symphony, her work as tuning the human instrument.

Zak Zakour, an avid surfer, visits Amdur when he needs tuning up. In his early years on Kauai , Zakour said that Amdur "was known to all of us surfer guys that she could take care of us, our shoulders, our knees."

Zakour, 60, credits Amdur with guiding him to give up eating sugar. When his son was born 15 years ago, Zakour said he quit drinking, and though he'd never been a heavy drinker, he experienced a great mental and physical clarity from the change. When he eventually stopped eating foods containing processed sugar, he felt twice as good as when he'd stopped partaking in alcohol.

"I felt younger, stronger, more alert and way less prone to getting angry about anything," he said. "I just made 60 and I can still surf every day."

Those are the kinds of success stories that Amdur has based her business on. She loves to hear that her patients are now healthy and happy.

"What I love is when someone comes here open to explore, to experience and to have real transformation in their healing, when they're willing to change, willing to say 'I'm here, I'm open, I want to find out what this is about. Let's go for it,' " she said. "I love my work."

 

 
 

   

   

 

   

Contact Information:

Pamela V. Brown

(808) 651-3533 cell

(808) 821-1027 fax

pam@writepath.net

   

"Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art."             --- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose

   

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