Eduardo Castro, M.D.
Mainstream Medicine Psychiatrist Hardliner to Practitioner of Alternative Medicine
Upon completion of his Residency training, Dr. Castro worked for the next eleven years as a psychiatrist, practicing well within the confines of mainstream medicine.
In 1993 he came across intriguing information about the usefulness of a form of biofeedback, called neurofeedback, for treating a number of the conditions that he was
then treating with medications. Fully inculcated in mainstream medicine thinking, he dismissed it as likely insignificant until he found several other such
references to neurofeedback. He eventually sought out and discussed the treatment with experienced neurofeedback practitioners, and interviewed patients who had been
treated with neurofeedback. It was at this point that he took his first tentative step outside of mainstream medicine, and signed up for intensive training in
neurofeedback. It proved to be a professional rebirth for him, and it changed the course of his life.
Like many other mainstream physicians, he assumed that alternative medicine practitioners were essentially unscientific in their approach, basically "flying by the
seat of their pants", and making up things as they went along. He was surprised to learn that not only neurofeedback, but several other treatment modalities
considered to be non-mainstream had professional organizations headed by rigorously scientific clinicians with peer-reviewed journals that had been in existence for
decades. The main difference, he learned, was that virtually all the treatments not FDA-approved were either not patentable, such as any naturally occurring
substance, or if it was patentable, it had expired, such as the case with EDTA chelation. It only then became quite obvious that if a treatment cannot be patented,
no one will invest the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to obtain FDA approval. He had simply assumed, like most physicians do, that if a treatment were
effective, it would be properly studied and subsequently approved. So, the assumption would then follow, if a treatment is not approved, it must not have been found
to be effective.
Upon completion of his training in neurofeedback, Dr. Castro began to treat his psychiatric patients with it. He was amazed at the burgeoning success rates he was
having in treating a range of illnesses he was struggling to treat with medications, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, attention deficit disorder,
learning disabilities, obsessive compulsive disorder, and alcoholism. It was not that he had limited knowledge of the medications available, but was considered to be
quite competent, and on one occasion, was asked by the department chairman of psychiatry at a university to treat his mother. He noted how in addition to improving
the target symptoms his patients presented with, but that neurofeedback was promoting healthy changes in all areas of their mental lives - physiological, behavioral,
cognitive, emotional, and spiritual.
Dr. Castro soon shifted his practice from general psychiatry to general medicine, and began to use neurofeedback to treat patients with migraine headaches, tension
headaches, seizure disorder, irritable bowel, sleep disorders, and traumatic brain injury. He became aware of what is now so obvious to him, that mainstream medicine
treats disease, and has little knowledge about how to promote health. He decided to expand his practice to include other well-established treatment modalities that
promote health, so he set about becoming trained to administer those treatments.
Dr. Castro sought training in chelation, which has a long history of safety and success, and has substantial scientific support for treating atherosclerotic disease
despite being misunderstood by mainstream physicians as useless at best and more likely, dangerous. He sought out training under the supervision of Elmer Cranton,
M.D., internationally renowned, and perhaps one of the two or three most knowledgeable physicians in the world regarding chelation therapy. After studying chelation
under Dr. Cranton's tutelage, Dr. Cranton hired him to run Mount Rogers Clinic in Trout Dale, Virginia. There, Dr. Castro added training in hyperbaric oxygen
treatment, other intravenous treatments in addition to chelation, and anti-aging therapies. He soon learned how Dr. Cranton is revered by his patients for his
clinical acumen and wide ranging knowledge of both mainstream and alternative medicine. He heard countless stories from patients of how their lives were transformed
from successful treatments of serious and of chronic, debilitating conditions. Dr. Castro regards those years working under Dr. Cranton's supervision as by far the
most fruitful of his medical career.
After working for Dr. Cranton for four years, Dr. Castro bought Mount Rogers Clinic, and for the next four years, retained Dr, Cranton as the clinic's Consultant to
assure continuity with his approach to treatment. One of the important things he learned from Dr. Cranton was how to discern whether new treatments being touted had
validity, for he had learned there were many unsound and worthless treatments be touted by misinformed or greedy clinicians.
When patients ask Dr. Castro about his experiences and how he got interested in alternative medicine, he often tells a few stories. One occurred when he was in his
first year of medical school. His mother, who had severe peripheral vascular disease, called him and asked him about chelation, a treatment her friend had
recommended. Dr. Castro asked his professors at Dartmouth Medical School, and promptly called his mother back and informed her that chelation was dangerous and it
didn't work. She nonetheless did twelve treatments and was experiencing some relief, but could not afford to continue and her symptoms returned. Over the next ten
years, Dr. Castro helped his mother by finding her excellent vascular surgeons, and she had six surgeries to unblock her carotid and femoral arteries. In the past
nine years, since she has done chelation regularly, she has required no further surgeries and is a healthy active 85-year-old who takes no medication.
Another story Dr. Castro tells is about when he started doing neurofeedback. His younger daughter was in high school at the time, and an excellent good student, but
she only got C's in math. The discrepancy in her grades had been persistent, so she received a battery of testing to see if she had a learning disability. The
testing found no such problem. Two months after doing a course of neurofeedback, she got her first A in math, and continued to get predominantly A's throughout her
remaining high school and college classes. Clearly, she had had a small learning disability of sorts that the neurofeedback corrected, no doubt helping her graduate
Summa Cum Laude from college.
Regarding the changes that occurred in his life after he became an alternative medicine practitioner, Dr. Castro describes his experience in medicine over the past
ten years as being a realization of the hopes and dreams he had in medical school about what his medical practice and his experience would be like. Those aspirations
had dimmed even before he completed medical school when faced with the realities of medicine based on pharmaceuticals and driven by business decisions. He feels the
costs of becoming an alternative medicine practitioner, largely the misunderstanding from his colleagues in mainstream medicine and the diminished financial rewards,
are far outweighed by the deep fulfillment and delight of having the tools to help people regain and maintain health. He feels that finding his way to alternative
medicine has been one of the greatest blessings of his life.
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Copyright © 2005
by Eduardo Castro, M.D. All Rights Reserved.
Mount
Rogers Clinic
Trout Dale, Virginia
Phone:
(276)
677-3631
