Irritable Bowel Syndrome IBS
The birth of the IBS Audio Program 100
In 1991 I was visited by three women in the same week at the medical centre where I am based, all presenting with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome a common gastrointestinal condition for which there is no medical cure, nor is there any real understanding of why it develops in some individuals and not in others, but there are some excellent theories and lots of medical research still going on so the hope for a cure out of a bottle is still alive.
In that week of 1991 I saw the misery first hand this condition brings to people. I didn’t know much about the condition but in that week I had seen enough to know this was something I wanted to become involved in. I didn’t work with the three women as I didn’t know enough about it to give me confidence enough that I could help. So I started researching, I started learning lots about the IBS condition.
I saw there was research being done using hypnotherapy to help IBS sufferers, I learned about that too, and after several years I was confident I could start to write my own scripts. But I wasn’t going to do it the way I had discovered in my research of others, I believed I could do it differently, but still as (hopefully more) effectively as what was already being done.
Every IBS patient that came to me I treated for free. I explained I was learning about the condition and if they were willing, so was I. And what I did made sense, I brought a structure to the learning about getting well, I could see the difference is a short time of the majority of people I was working with, physically and emotionally there were recovering, growing, getting well and enjoying taking part in their own healing. They gave great testimonials to their friends and family and their doctors. They couldn’t believe it, I was delighted and word spread.
I saw more and more people for it, and they were going to their doctors and the doctors started to send people to me. Eventually I had to start charging for the service, nothing major but there are economics in life, I had my family to keep, by his time our daughter had arrived and was eating us out of house and home along with her brother. But even then the clients and patients still came. I knew what I had developed was important.
One day I did a home visit to a chap, I recorded his session on my portable tape recorder as I always did, and he said, you need to record this professionally. I knew no-one who did recordings professionally, I had no idea about how I would go about it, and I certainly didn’t have the money to do it. So I parked the idea, but the thought never left me.
Then a few weeks later, I saw a patient who just in passing said she played the flute, and she was going to be recorded, she had a friend who did it. I was immediately interested, I asked if I could be introduced to her friend, I was and we hit it off immediately. We shared similar beliefs had similar morals and ethics and it worked well.
I had to restructure the scripts I had done, to make them more usable for listeners, I had to make sure the listening schedule was right too. It all mattered, it had to be right.
The first recording session was a nerve rattling experience. Even the slightest outside sound could be heard, the microphone was so sensitive. The recordings were getting done, but the work was taking me away from my patients and my income. It was costing more than expected. So I raised money by getting a loan and put my home up as capital. It was a nerve wracking experience, but I was so sure I was doing the right thing.
I also then had to get patients to try the recordings I had created, to follow the schedule for 100 days and to report back to me over the next three years. By this time it was late 1997 the logistics of the duplication, packaging, delivery and fabrication has been massively underestimated. But I learned, I found people I could trust and work with through trial and error I eventually had the packaging of the program done, by today’s standards it looks quite amateurish but it was the content that mattered, and to be honest at the time it looked fine.
I was sure the program would work, the results from the trials were very pleasing, and it was time to get the word out. My first decision was to contact a big Press Release company and so my labour of love, the IBS Audio Program 100 was sent off for its first commercial critique.
Tomorrow: Disaster!
The birth of the IBS Audio Program 100
In 1991 I was visited by three women in the same week at the medical centre where I am based, all presenting with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome a common gastrointestinal condition for which there is no medical cure, nor is there any real understanding of why it develops in some individuals and not in others, but there are some excellent theories and lots of medical research still going on so the hope for a cure out of a bottle is still alive.
In that week of 1991 I saw the misery first hand this condition brings to people. I didn’t know much about the condition but in that week I had seen enough to know this was something I wanted to become involved in. I didn’t work with the three women as I didn’t know enough about it to give me confidence enough that I could help. So I started researching, I started learning lots about the IBS condition.
I saw there was research being done using hypnotherapy to help IBS sufferers, I learned about that too, and after several years I was confident I could start to write my own scripts. But I wasn’t going to do it the way I had discovered in my research of others, I believed I could do it differently, but still as (hopefully more) effectively as what was already being done.
Every IBS patient that came to me I treated for free. I explained I was learning about the condition and if they were willing, so was I. And what I did made sense, I brought a structure to the learning about getting well, I could see the difference is a short time of the majority of people I was working with, physically and emotionally there were recovering, growing, getting well and enjoying taking part in their own healing. They gave great testimonials to their friends and family and their doctors. They couldn’t believe it, I was delighted and word spread.
I saw more and more people for it, and they were going to their doctors and the doctors started to send people to me. Eventually I had to start charging for the service, nothing major but there are economics in life, I had my family to keep, by his time our daughter had arrived and was eating us out of house and home along with her brother. But even then the clients and patients still came. I knew what I had developed was important.
One day I did a home visit to a chap, I recorded his session on my portable tape recorder as I always did, and he said, you need to record this professionally. I knew no-one who did recordings professionally, I had no idea about how I would go about it, and I certainly didn’t have the money to do it. So I parked the idea, but the thought never left me.
Then a few weeks later, I saw a patient who just in passing said she played the flute, and she was going to be recorded, she had a friend who did it. I was immediately interested, I asked if I could be introduced to her friend, I was and we hit it off immediately. We shared similar beliefs had similar morals and ethics and it worked well.
I had to restructure the scripts I had done, to make them more usable for listeners, I had to make sure the listening schedule was right too. It all mattered, it had to be right.
The first recording session was a nerve rattling experience. Even the slightest outside sound could be heard, the microphone was so sensitive. The recordings were getting done, but the work was taking me away from my patients and my income. It was costing more than expected. So I raised money by getting a loan and put my home up as capital. It was a nerve wracking experience, but I was so sure I was doing the right thing.
I also then had to get patients to try the recordings I had created, to follow the schedule for 100 days and to report back to me over the next three years. By this time it was late 1997 the logistics of the duplication, packaging, delivery and fabrication has been massively underestimated. But I learned, I found people I could trust and work with through trial and error I eventually had the packaging of the program done, by today’s standards it looks quite amateurish but it was the content that mattered, and to be honest at the time it looked fine.
I was sure the program would work, the results from the trials were very pleasing, and it was time to get the word out. My first decision was to contact a big Press Release company and so my labour of love, the IBS Audio Program 100 was sent off for its first commercial critique.
Tomorrow: Disaster!
