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Dec. 25, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:38
Edition 100 - Dr Ian Rubenstein

Hear London medical doctor and Medium Dr Ian Rubenstein's surprising story...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the 100th edition of The Unexplained.
I can't believe I'm saying those words.
It seems like only yesterday that I was trepidatiously, if that's the right word, sitting outside Yuri Geller's home in the Thames Valley, waiting to do my first face-to-face interview for the show, for the online version of it.
And Yuri, I'd known for a number of years.
He'd been a big supporter when I was on Capitol Radio in London and various other things I'd done.
And I can remember going into his home and we sat down in his sitting room to record the interview.
And he was amazingly supportive.
He completely got what I was trying to do and believed, as I've always believed, that the future of all of this material is going to be online and that more and more people like myself will emerge to do more diverse kinds of content.
And that is how it's gone.
That's how it's transpired.
Even at times when I doubted it, the momentum was always there.
So if we look at things now at the end of 2012, there is much more material available online.
It's not unusual for people to listen to shows, this show, for example, on a phone or some kind of mobile device.
I've got people who listen on iPhones and every kind of mobile device.
And people who listen to this show virtually in every country on the planet.
I've had emails lately from New Zealand and Australia.
And a guy in Sweden, you know who you are, I will mention you and your girlfriend in a future edition when I do some shout-outs.
But he's been banned from listening to the show because he listens on an iPod in bed late at night.
His girlfriend's not having that.
She thinks he's addicted.
Good addiction to have, I say.
But that's just a measure of the kind of emails we're getting.
I feel that I can reach out to you and that I know you.
And that is the way I think this kind of media is starting to work.
We really can do it.
This is just 100 shows.
We're going to do 100 more.
We ain't going away.
And let's see how we can develop this.
Together we can.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, who's been with me for at least 75 of those shows.
Amazingly talented webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
And without Adam's foresight, I don't think we could have begun to go to the places that we're now going to with this show.
But we have an awful lot more to do.
And together, you and I, we can show them all.
Let's try and do that in 2013.
Let's make a point and let's prove that a show like this can do it.
Because I think we can.
We can bat on equal terms with the big boys.
In fact, I think in some cases we can do better than they can do because we don't have production departments and huge infrastructures.
There's only me.
So if you have a suggestion for a show, you can make it to me and I can carry it right out.
That's how it works.
But I'm not going to go on too much about that because I know I've done that before.
Just to say, I wish you everything that you would wish for yourself in 2013.
If you're hearing this before Christmas, I hope you have a nice, warm, and loving Christmas and let's see where we're going to go with the unexplained in 2013.
If you'd like to make a donation to the show, this has been a very challenging year and any donations will be very gratefully received.
Go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can make a donation there.
And you can also leave me any feedback you would like to leave me.
I love to get your emails.
I've got a big backlog of them.
I see them all.
And we are going to do in a future show a great big long list of shout-outs to people.
I love to read what you have to say.
And you are full of surprises.
Keep them coming.
Right.
The guest this time is a man who is highly unusual.
He contacted me, and I guess I should have heard about him, but I hadn't.
He is a London-based medical doctor who is also a medium.
And he uses that mediumship as part of his medical work.
His name is Dr. Ian Rubinstein.
He's got an amazing life story to tell, and we're going to hear it on this edition of the show.
So it just remains for me to say thank you very much for the support.
Keep the support coming.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
And like I say, let's see where we can take this in 2013.
Okay, let's cross to Enfield in London.
To medical doctor and medium, Dr. Ian Rubinstein.
Dr. Ian Rubinstein, thank you for coming on the 100th edition of The Unexplained.
It's good to be here.
Ian, I'm delighted to be having this conversation.
And I have to say, and I hope you don't mind that it was at your suggestion.
I had heard nothing of you until you got in touch with me.
And then I started researching you.
And I thought, this is an amazing story.
Here is a man who is a medical doctor working in our public health system here in the UK, which is hard-pushed enough as it is.
And he's also a medium.
What an amazing story.
Well, I thought it was.
And of course, eventually I wrote a book about my experiences because I had a series of what to me were startling experiences that led me to training as a medium.
In fact, I was told I was going to write a book about it when the very first time I went to a spiritualist church.
And eventually I did when I broke my knee in 2007.
And I thought, well, this is an interesting story.
Someone in this country is bound to want to publish it.
Could I get a publisher?
Not one person.
It took me four years.
And I was just about to think, oh, I think I'll self-publish this.
What the hell?
And I thought, hang on a minute.
There's an awful lot of people on the other side of the Atlantic who speak English.
And the very first publisher I approached in the States said, yeah, we like it.
And they published it.
I then had to rewrite it for the American market because they don't know what GPs are and they don't know what there's all sorts of Englishes.
I mean, we talk about two nations divided by a common tongue.
It's quite hilarious.
Well, if you're listening in the States, I've got a lot of listeners in America, Ian.
GP is general practitioner.
Or physician, as you'd know, as they call me.
And what are they called?
MD.
Aren't they MD medical doctors?
They just call me a physician.
I mean, it's like a family physician.
They tend to use the term physician.
But I bet they really grabbed hold of your story in America because I can almost hear the radio and television promo now.
Ian Rubenstein was trained as a medical doctor, but there is more to his story than, you know, it's a great story for the media.
Well, I've done coast to coast and I've been interviewed on a few little radio stations.
There's an awful lot of little radio stations, internet radio stations in America.
But the interesting thing is, of course, there's a few of us coming out that would work.
Now, I don't know if you've heard of Eben Alexander, the Harvard neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience.
He's just published a book.
And this is a guy who was a standard pillar of the medical establishment who had a very severe bout of meningitis.
And during his coma, he had the experience of meeting his spirit guide and going into what spiritualists called the summer land.
And even sensing he was in touch with the divine and then came back saying, look, we've got it wrong.
You know, materialism is, you know, it's just, we're wrong.
You know, the brain does not generate consciousness.
It sort of picks it up.
It's a receiver of consciousness.
And I think he was on the front cover of Newsweek because, I mean, he's a very eminent guy.
I wouldn't put myself at his level, but it does seem to be that there's a group of medical men around about the same age who seem to be coming, look, you know, let's talk about this.
Let's try and discuss this because obviously people have these experiences and obviously they're very meaningful for people.
But I mean, I wouldn't have got into this if it hadn't been for what happened to me in 2003.
Because up until then, I was just an ordinary family doctor.
In fact, most of my time was spent writing medical software.
So what happened in 2003?
Well, a family row, basically, Howard, which caused me to fall out with my parents and my sister.
And then I realized that I come from a rather loud, disputatious family.
Then I realized, because I'm interested in counseling and family therapy, that my cousins had the same problem with their parents.
And I interviewed my uncles and aunts about this.
And I realized actually the problem was my mother's father, who was a self-made man.
He was a baker in the East End, but he was rather fond of the horses.
So he was a man of rising and falling fortunes.
And I think that led to some sort of distrust of certain male characters in my family.
So I was thinking about my grandfather, who I'd never met.
He died before I was born, and feeling really quite miserable over the whole situation.
And then one day I was sitting in surgery and the very last patient of the morning was late.
I knew this guy very well.
This guy called Keith Bishop.
I'd known Keith for a long time and he used to work at the BBC.
He was a security guard there.
And he looked after lots of VIPs.
And when he left the BBC, he had a pocketbook full of contacts.
He set up his own PR agency called Media Celebrity Services.
Do you know something?
I have a feeling I've come across this guy somewhere.
Everybody in your field, he's well known.
But he's a lovely guy.
And he always comes in and he always entertains me with stories of famous people that he knows I will never meet.
And I was just about to get up off my, because, you know, after morning surgery, we have to do our home visits and then I like to sort of go for a swim at lunchtime.
So I tried to get up off my chair and couldn't get up off my chair.
So he made me sit down.
And as I sat down, my phone rang and it was my receptionist, Carol, saying, oh, Mr. Bishop's PA has just phoned.
He's at the station.
He'll be there in five minutes.
Can you wait?
So I said, I'm not going to wait forever, but yeah, I'll hang around.
Anyway, he came in breathless and panting and he's a great schmoozer.
Hello, top man, top man, your top man, best doctor, lovely.
And then I had to check his blood pressure.
So I was, I got to give him time to calm down.
So I had a chat with him.
And suddenly he looks at me and said, I've got this man here.
I said, what?
He said, he says he's your grandfather, the one you never met.
I thought, oh my God, he's mad.
I'm going to have to section him.
There's no way I'm going to go out and do my business and go for my swim tour.
I'm stuck with this guy all day.
And I said, what do you mean, kid?
He said, look, he said, I see spirit.
I said, spirit?
Don't you mean spirits?
No, I see spirit.
I've always seen spirit.
I said, Kid, I've known you for 20 years.
Why have you never told me this before?
He said, well, it's hardly the sort of thing you tell your doctor.
He'd think you're mad.
I'm thinking, yeah, absolutely.
He said, look, he's going to come through me and he's going to tell me he wants to speak to you through me.
Whatever he says, it's him, not me.
So please don't be offended.
I said, oh, okay.
He sort of seemed to shift gear.
And then for about 20 minutes, told me in his voice just about every single thing that happened to me in my family.
After a while, he sort of seems to sort of come back to normal and said, was that okay, Doc?
I mean, I didn't upset you, did you?
And I said, no, Keith, that was amazing.
What was this all about?
He said, well, I've always seen spirits, but, you know, I'm not a medium, he said, but I mean, I do sometimes give people messages.
And by the way, my spirit guide, I said, what's the spirit guide?
He said, well, my boss at the BBC, William, when he died, he became my spirit guide.
And I'm thinking, oh, okay, fine, you know.
Anyway, he's saying that you should be doing this.
Doing what, Keith?
Listening to spirit.
And with that, he left.
He also said that I had a brother in spirit who would be visiting me at 11 o'clock that night.
I said, I haven't got a brother.
But he said, yes, you do.
Your mum had a miscarriage before you were born, which she did.
And so at 11 o'clock that night, I sort of lay up in the loft, in the loft conversion, waiting for my brother to come.
He never came.
I thought, this is a load of rubbish and left it at that.
But soon after that, my wife and I experienced a series of very peculiar events.
The first event was just a dream, which was neither here nor there.
But in the dream, I was sitting at a table speaking to one of my cousins.
And all of a sudden, I heard myself saying, I'm not psychic and I can't see auras.
And then to my left, there was a little Indian cockney guy sitting at the end of the table.
And he said, of course you can.
And with that, he turns around, flicks a switch on the wall, and a light behind him starts shining out all these lovely blue rays of light.
And he says to me, what do you do with all that blue?
And it was as if I knew what I did with it.
And I said, I give it to people, of course.
And it was as if I'd forgotten what I was doing, but I Suddenly remembered and I woke up sort of crying.
And I thought I was going mad.
Woke my wife up and she said, Well, you've always been mad, but don't worry about it.
Nice to have support, eh?
Exactly.
Absolutely.
So I thought, well, if I'm on a funny journey, she's going with me.
So that was odd.
But I mean, that was just a dream.
But then very soon after that, I had a very peculiar experience.
I mean, it's a series of synchronous events.
I mean, I'll tell you the story.
So it was my son's GCSE day.
It was a Thursday, and we were due to get his results.
So I thought I'd go into the surgery, pick up any home visits that came through before the surgery started, so I could do my surgery, go home for lunch and get his results.
So I went into my room, threw my keys on my desk.
I realized that there was a visit.
I already checked there was a visit in the road next door to the surgery, so I wouldn't have to take my car.
So I threw my keys on my desk.
As I left my room, I felt a blow to the back of my head and I heard a voice very distinctly saying, pick up your keys, they're going to get stolen.
I remember thinking, this is nonsense.
Now I'm hearing things.
Forget it.
This is, so I'm busy, you know, forget it.
I left the room, went to do my visit.
Actually, went to the wrong house.
I was in such a state.
Finally went to the right house.
When I came back just in time for my clinic to start, my receptionist Anne said, Ian, have you got a blue corsair?
I said, yeah.
She said, well, we just chased two boys out of it, but we think they've run off and locked your key.
Locked the car, locked the car and run off with the key.
So I said to her, Anne, oh my God, I knew that was going to happen.
She said, well, why didn't you take your keys?
I said, good point.
So I was left with a surgery full of patients waiting to be seen.
A locked car, which may or may not have had controlled drugs taken out of it, which I couldn't get into.
So, I mean, what do you do?
Well, I phoned my insurance company and they said you need to get a crime reference number from the local police station, which is across the road.
Fine.
So I have to go.
So I tried to phone them, no answer.
So in the middle of my surgery, I just ran across the road to go into the police station.
And when I get into the police station, it's changed.
I mean, it really had changed.
The last time I was there a few years ago to report a crime, it was like a hard-edged place, you know, with men with uniforms and all sorts of stuff.
But they downgraded Ponders End Police Station.
And it was now staffed by a civilian guy who had decorated it according to his own tastes.
And he decorated it with religious imagery and spirit drawings, little Buddhas on the desk, and all sorts of interesting things.
At a police station.
At the inner police station, yeah.
So this is weird.
I'm queuing up behind a guy who turns out who's also waiting to be seen.
And this guy is one of my patients.
As I realized when he turned around and said, oh, hello, Doc, look what the bastard did to me.
He'd been in a fight.
He then took off his t-shirt and showed me he was covered in bruises.
I thought this is getting very, very surreal.
So he reported to the guy behind the desk.
It was my turn.
And this guy looked at me and his name was, I think, Kieran.
He said to me, what's your date of birth?
So I gave it to him.
He said, oh, you're a Leo like me.
And I thought, why are you saying this?
This is all very bizarre.
Did you believe you were in a dream?
I know you'd just come out of a dream, but did you believe that you were in some kind of weird dream at that time?
I thought I stepped into my own personal twilight zone.
So I said, are you into all this new age stuff?
He said, yeah, actually, I'm a nurse at Chase Farm Hospital from the psychiatric department.
I'm actually doing a degree in comparative spirituality.
I'm just working here in a civilian capacity to earn some money.
I said, oh, well, I'm a doctor across the road.
You'll be interested.
I knew my keys were going to get stolen.
And he said, we were meant to meet then.
I said, really?
He said, yeah, I'll give you a reading.
And with that, he stood up, took some cards out of his desk drawer, which I'd never seen before.
They're actually Native American medicine cards.
They're divination cards.
Spread them on the counter in front of me.
He said, choose a card.
And I thought, what?
He said, yeah, choose a card.
Think of a question.
Choose a card.
So I thought, okay, and ask a question and see what the card says.
So the only question that came to mind was, would my software be successful?
So I picked the card, gave it to him.
He turned it over, looked it up and said, in a little book, I said, oh, the card's saying the world is not yet ready.
And I thought, well, that's a bugger.
Seven years of workout.
Do you think the spirits were letting you down gently?
Gently, I think so.
Yeah, I never forced out the software.
So was the world ever ready for your software?
No, no, no.
Well, you had other things to do.
I thought they had other things planned.
No, exactly.
So I got my crime reference number, go back to the surgery.
And when I told my receptionist what happened, they all started laughing and whistling the Twilight theme music, you know, and laughing.
And I had this feeling if I'd gone back there just to see, take a peek at the police station, he wouldn't be there.
And it'd be what it was a few years ago.
But I thought, I'm not going to risk that.
So that was very, very bizarre.
And then the next day, I was at a party in Seven Oaks in Kent.
And the first person I met there was an occupational therapist who insisted on telling me about her, that she grew up in a house that was haunted with the poltergeist.
Now, by this time, I was getting really spooked by all this.
And I left her to talk to my wife, went somewhere else in this party through a kitchen and into another garden.
And the very first person I bumped into was my cousin Rose, who was speaking to a man, a gentleman, about how she actually was a spiritual healer, but had to give it up when the kids were born.
At which point my jaw hit the floor and I said to her, what's this all about?
I keep on bumping into this stuff.
She said, well, they want to work with you.
I said, who?
She said, spirit.
Spirit, spirits?
Why?
Because the truth is, there are two ways to look at it, aren't there?
You know, from one side, you could think, well, maybe this stuff is much more common than ever.
I knew that's interesting.
And the other part of it is, well, maybe somebody up there is trying to steer me in a particular direction, which seems to be what happened to you.
Well, I mean, yeah, well, up there or, I mean, remember, I mean, I've trained in science.
I mean, I have a degree in biochemistry as well as medicine.
I program computers.
I mean, I like science, you know, that this is bizarre.
And it's as counter-scientific as you can get.
You can't get more woo-woo than this, but it was happening.
She said, look, you know, the spirits want to work with you.
And I said, this is bonkers.
This is medieval thinking.
this can't happen.
She said, Well, you know, if they want to work with you, they'll work with you.
So I just laughed.
A couple of other things, I mean, there were a few things, some of them which I can't remember, but I mean, I was getting quite edgy over this.
And I've got a patient called Dave Godfrey, who's who was an ex-science teacher who gave it all up and became a healer.
And he's a very solid sort of guy who's very logical in his thought processes.
And I said to him, Dave, I'm getting these interesting experiences.
You know, what do you think is going on?
He said, well, you know, the only way you're going to get a handle with it is if you train to sort of develop yourself.
So I said, well, how?
He said, well, it's very hard to.
The simplest thing is to join a development circle.
And I said, well, where are they?
He said, well, they're normally at spiritualist churches.
I said, look, you know, I'm a lapsed Jew.
My wife's Hindu.
There's no way I'm going to go to a spiritualist church.
He said, well, you know, if spirit, and use that term, spirit, wants to work with you, they'll find a way and left it at that.
And how exactly are you supposed to fit that into your work as a GP?
Because we know that doctors in this country, well, in every country, but doctors in this country have more work than they can do in any day, don't they?
Absolutely.
I mean, it's at that point, it wasn't intruding into my work.
I mean, it did intrude into my work, but at that point, it was like just little intimations that something odd was going to happen.
And can I tell the next part of my story, I need to go back to when I was 19, if you don't mind.
Let's go there.
Because when I was 19, and I was at my first year of medical school, I actually witnessed what spirit is called transfiguration.
I don't know if you have heard of transfiguration, but it's, well, I'll tell you the story.
My friend Nick had a girlfriend called Felicity, and my sister and I and Nick and Felicity were sitting in his house in Oakwood the very first summer we came down from university, summer 1974.
So we were all 19 and my sister was 15.
Now, Felicity had long dark hair, nice looking girl, but she was darkly complexed, dark eyes.
And we were having a perfectly ordinary conversation with her and all of a sudden I found myself looking at a blonde-haired snow queen.
And it was a mature face with sort of shoulder-length blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and strangely thick, distorted lips.
And I sort of got a couple of messages from it.
The first one was keep back from Felicity because she had a thing for me and I had a thing for her and that was probably wasn't very healthy.
So stop, keep back.
What you're doing is wrong.
The second thing was mark this.
And the third thing was, was one day you'll understand.
At that precise instant, my sister started, just jumped up out of her chair and started screaming at the top of her voice, my God, can you see those lips?
And I turned to look at my sister and she'd witnessed exactly the same thing.
So your sister has something as well.
Well, my sister, well, we both saw this.
And so we both witnessed what I now understand to be a form of physical medianship on behalf of Felicity.
But at the time, I hadn't got a clue.
I mean, we just.
That's a hell of a thing to go through at 19, isn't it?
Three or four seconds it lasted and she was back to normal.
She didn't feel anything.
Nick, who was sitting next to her, didn't see anything.
It was just my sister and I just went bananas.
Jumped into my car, my dad's car.
It was now two o'clock in the morning.
We all went back home, knocked my parents up.
They weren't best pleased, you can imagine.
Of course, the next day I phoned all my friends in a state of high excitement.
And one of my friends, Steve, said, oh, you must have a chat with my next door neighbor.
He's a medium.
He's called Keith Hudson.
Come round and you can tell him what happened.
So we went round to Steve's house and Keith said, oh, yes, you saw her spirit guide.
It was protecting her.
I thought, yeah, presumably from my unwanted attention.
It would seem that way.
Yeah, obviously.
But I mean, the trouble was, I mean, he was convinced it was a spirit guide.
And that didn't fit in with my philosophy.
But the only other explanation was a shared hallucination.
Now, that didn't fit in with any scientific philosophy I was aware of either.
So I was left with this thing that happened that we'd both witnessed that I really couldn't explain.
First year at medical school, heavily into science.
They were still landing men on the moon in 1974.
So I was really heavily into science.
And this did not fit in with anything.
And how do I put this?
But, you know, this is the 1970s and it's a few years before my time, but I do know that substances were around and available.
Was anybody imbibing there?
Could you have perhaps breathed in somebody else's smoke?
No, no, no.
We never ever, my circle were never into that.
We were quite serious, geeky people.
I mean, they hadn't invented geeks in those days, but we weren't into that.
You were geeks before geeks?
No, all we were doing was drinking coffee, not even Red Bull.
So, I mean, no, I mean, it was done with a clear head.
The interesting thing is, of course, is that with my future knowledge, the thing about the face that I saw was these thick, distorted lips.
Now, this had been described in Victorian times.
And what Victorians said was that an ectoplasmic mask is formed by spirits over a person's face, and they impress their face into this mask.
But often the lower half of the figure is distorted.
Now, I don't know about the explanation, but certainly the lower half of the figure was distorted.
It's little things like that that make me think, oh, yeah, maybe their explanation is right.
So anyway, so that's Keith Hudson.
That's how I met Keith.
I hadn't seen him since Steve got married in 1976.
So Dave Godfrey, my patient, now going back to 2003, had just told me that spirit would find a way.
And the next day, my wife's reading the local newspaper and she sees a little ad for the local spiritualist church, the Beacon of Light Spiritualist Church in Enfield.
And she said, oh, Ian, she said, Keith Husser's giving a talk there.
Is that the guy that you spoke to over Felicity's face?
I said, yeah.
She said, we've got to go.
So I said, no, I'm not going.
I'm not going to go into these funny places.
She said, no, we must go.
I said, okay, we'll go.
Well, that had to be a sign, didn't it?
I mean, short of sending you down an illuminated neon sign, that was about as clear as you could get, wasn't it?
It was like a yes, but it was, but I was still very sort of wary of it all.
So we went there and we sat at the back of the church.
Now, the very first time Keith met me when I was 18, he said, Ian, you've got a lot of knowledge around you.
Sorry, when I was 19, he said, Ian, you've got a lot of knowledge around you.
You don't know you know it, but you will one day.
And of course, I thought, well, I'm at medical school, he would say that, wouldn't he?
So I sat at the back of this spiritualist church and I look entirely different.
I mean, I've lost my hair.
I used to wear contact lenses.
I mean, I just don't look like the same person.
He obviously didn't recognize me.
And he pointed to me at the back and said, sir, you have a lot of knowledge around you.
You don't know you know it, but you will very soon.
And they're telling me you will be writing a book about it.
So I thought, oh, God, I bet he says that to everyone.
Actually, he doesn't.
Anyway, at the end of the service, the president of the church stood up and said, Mr. Hussain hasn't got a car.
Can anyone give him a lift back to Walthamstow, which is where he lives?
So I stood up and said, yeah, yeah, I'll give Keith a lift, but only if he comes back to my house for a cup of tea first.
At which point he jumped back a mile, because you do get some very strange people at spiritual services sometimes.
He plainly didn't recognise me, but when I said who I was, he remembered me.
And he came back to my house and we had a cup of tea and I took him back to Walthamstow.
And he said, oh, by the way, Ian, he said, I run the largest open development circle in North London and you're welcome to join.
So on the way back from there, my wife said, Ian, that's the sign you want.
So that's how I ended up going to a spiritualist development circle.
Now, over the years, a few people have suggested this to me.
And I've heard and read about these development circles, but I've got to tell you, I have no idea what happens in them.
What do they do?
Okay, well, yes.
So there I was.
I pitch up in a rainy February 2004, absolutely, you know, thinking, I shouldn't be here.
I shouldn't be here.
And it's very interesting.
There are loads of ordinary people.
Waltham Stowe is quite a working class area.
So people like my patients are very comfortable with people.
I understand.
I come from Tottenham, so I come from that background.
So these are my people.
So the image that you might have of, I certainly would have had of a lot of ladies there wearing coats and glasses like Dame Edna Everidge, that's not true.
First guy I met was a guy who looked like Gollum Joe.
He's got a shaved head, outsized glasses, tattoos on his arms.
Says, hello, Doc.
What are you doing here?
He said to me, listen, Doc, we were sitting there trying to meditate one day.
He said, for God's sake, Doc, loosen up.
We're not going to eat you.
A bunch of really interesting mixed people.
And you're a very open kind of guy.
You didn't have any problems.
Clearly, you didn't have any problems with the fact that there were going to be people at places like that who would know what you do for a living.
No, it's quite, I mean, I'm quite happy to talk about what I do.
It doesn't bother me at all.
I've reached the stage in my life now where it's become so much a part of me that it's what I am, you know.
So I'm not one of these guys who says, I don't ram me down people's throats, but that's what I am.
And also, of course, Keith knew me.
Keith introduced me.
He said, this is Ian.
He's a doctor.
The last time I saw him was when he was 19.
Some weird stuff happened to him.
So, you know, that's how I was introduced to the circle.
So what happens in a spiritualist circle is quite interesting because basically it's held in a spiritualist church hall.
And spiritualist churches are like, they're like scouts.
I mean, scout huts, village halls.
They're nice, cozy places.
They're not very well off.
They have a hand-to-mouth existence.
And they made me very welcome.
So this isn't a service, but there's chairs in a circle.
And there are about 20 people on average would attend the circle.
And so we'd all get together at first and have a chat, maybe a cup of coffee in the kitchen.
And then eight o'clock, the circle would start.
The doors would be locked because you can't have people wandering in when it started.
And we'd sit in a circle and the Keith who'd run the circle would just say a brief prayer for protection, you know, infinite spirit or God, you know, please protect us whilst we do our work here in development, that sort of thing.
And then we'd go, we'd do various exercises.
So just to stop you there, protecting you from what?
Well, I mean, spiritualists, if you take the spiritualist philosophy, then obviously there are spirits, there are good spirits, there are spirits with not very good intent.
Spiritualists believe that when you die, you sort of go to what they call the summer land, a sort of holding area, what we call heaven, which is sort of a couple of planes removed from the earth plane.
They talk about the earth plane.
These are sort of dimensional, I suppose, different dimensions you could consider it.
And the dimensions closer to the earth, what they would call the astral plane in spiritualist terms, tend to be sort of less developed spirits who can't, who when they die, they are more bound to their earthly existence.
So the prayer is insulation against them.
Yeah, against them.
I mean, so that you don't attract anything untoward or unhealthy.
I'm not saying I entirely buy into this, but this is working within the spiritualist framework, that's how they work.
So, I mean, when you go into this field, you need some framework to hang your hat on.
Otherwise, you're all at sea.
So as the spiritualist framework had been given to me, although I'm not a spiritualist, it seemed a very useful, convenient framework in which to develop myself within.
So I went along with it.
Now, so the bedrock of a spiritualist training is to stimulate your imagination.
So the idea is that spiritual communication occurs via your unconscious mind, through your imagination, which is a faculty.
So we Think of imagination as being something we use for fantasy, but actually, it's an imaging faculty.
So, the idea would be that you stimulate your imagination, you get to play with your imagination, you enrich your imagination so that when you try and do spirit communication with spirits, you become aware of how your imagination works and images that may come up from there, which give you an idea of what you're trying to pick up.
Because believe me, medioship ain't easy.
Sometimes it flows, but often it's very, very difficult.
So do you have to put yourself into a relaxed state to do this?
Yeah, so you'd close your eyes.
And the other thing that they do is modern spiritualism buys into the Arya Vedic, the Indian concept of chakras, which is a very new age system.
So the idea is we have seven psychic energy centers in our body from the base of our spine up to the top of our head.
And these correspond with, meant to correspond with various nerve plexuses or endocrine glands in the body.
And the idea is that you open these up by degrees from the base of the spine to the top of the head to sort of tune in, raise your vibrations, if you like, adjust your frequency, I think of it, so you can tune into sort of more subtle energies.
None of this makes scientific sense, of course.
Subtle energy, what are we talking about?
I mean, I don't know, but these are just useful concepts.
So you sit there, you're trying to open yourself up.
I mean, you'd imagine that you have some light at your feet and you're pulling the light up your legs.
It goes up the back of your legs, up your spine, and then up to the top of your head.
And when it comes out the top of your head, then you're open.
Now, that's interesting because I can remember years ago, I had a problem, I think probably at work.
This is right at the beginning of my career.
And I know I've told this story before on this show, but my sister, who lived in London and I was still up in Liverpool, my sister took me to somewhere in North London and we ended up in an old lady's front room.
She was some kind of medium.
I didn't really understand it.
Maybe I was 22, perhaps 23.
And she put her hands on my head.
She made me close my eyes.
And I saw around my head, around my eyes, a halo.
And I mean a halo, a ring of the brightest, whitest light you can imagine.
And when we'd finished, she said, that's okay.
Whatever it was they'd put on you has gone.
So it seems to me that you've just talked about light and bringing this light up.
Well, that light for me was around my head.
And she said after this, whatever it was that had been there had exited and presumably the light had chased it away.
How does that mean?
I mean, light image is very important in any of this work.
It really is.
And I don't know if you've heard of Gary Schwartz, who's done some research in the States on this.
He's a scientist who's actually a cybernetician.
So he's interested in how information is stored in the universe.
And he talks, his theory is you don't need new physics to explain this.
Actually, that light in some way encodes information on the fabric of the universe.
It's way too complex for me to understand.
But he explains the reason why the symbolism of light is actually that photons can do a hell of a lot more than we're aware, regardless.
I don't know.
So these training circles plugged you into the light, or they helped you to access this light.
Once you've opened up, you're then considered to be in contact with the benign spirits or guides that you're working with, because spiritualists believe that you're working with one or more guides.
And to develop as a medium, you have to develop a relationship with guides.
And the way I look at it is this, that it's all to do with frequency.
So you've got spiritual beings who exist at a high frequency, which is way higher than we normally can, like a radio dial, a high radio frequency.
We exist at a lower radio frequency.
And a medium can adjust their frequency slightly and they raise their frequency and the guides help by lowering their frequency.
So they act as a sort of intermediary.
Wow.
So you meet in the middle, exactly.
And then you can have information transferred.
I mean, whether or not that's physically real, I don't know, but it's a useful concept.
I mean, it makes sense.
And if someone is trained in science, I mean, I can understand that.
I can go with that.
So, Ian, when and how did you get to the position where, you know, you passed your driving test and you knew that you were fit to go out and use this?
Ah, right.
Well, you go through various exercises where you stimulate your imagination.
And then what you do is you start to give messages to other members of the group.
Now, the way Keith did this, so having gone on, they call going on a journey.
So the going on a journey is when you stimulate your imagination.
So you might go on a path, you might go to a medieval fair, you might experience things.
It's a guided group meditation.
And afterwards, we all come back, open our eyes.
And then the next job is to give a message to various people in the group.
Now, the way Keith did it was that he'd pick one person and go clockwise from that person.
So the first person he picked would be a number one.
And of course, the last person would be the last number of how many in the group.
But he wouldn't tell us what that number was until the end.
What we had to do was to give a message for a number.
We wouldn't know which person the number would represent, but he assured us that his guides and our guides would know.
And eventually the messages would get to the right person.
And at the end of the evening, he'd collate the messages and then go through each number, say, well, that was Jenny, number one.
Number two was so and so.
These are the messages.
Can you take them?
So no personal factors could intervene.
You know, you couldn't look at the person and think, okay, well, that person must be having a problem with X, Y, or Z. Absolutely.
Now, that was ideal for me because coming from a sort of scientific background, I thought, well, I can run with that.
And I found a couple of interesting things.
First of all, I found I was giving messages that were really quite – And I saw this guy in my head with a moustache and sort of brilliant creamed hair saying, tell her to check the holiday arrangements.
So when that was decoded, she didn't know what it meant but the week after she came back and said that was my uncle George you've had a photograph of the guy and it was actually the guy I saw that was my uncle George and I checked the holiday arrangements I'd booked a holiday on the internet and the money hadn't got through and it was going to be cancelled so thank you you couldn't have begun to know that unless you'd been talking with her about holidays before that session then how could you have known that plus the fact is i didn't know she was number four until the end and the other thing was the numbers would change each week because we'd all sit in different different
positions and Keith was a different person.
And I found I would track certain individuals.
So I tracked Jenny pretty much weekly and gave her pretty good messages on a weekly basis for a few weeks.
And then I go on to somebody else.
And did you find that the better you got to know a person, the less of this you can do because you then start to build in factors of their personality and things that you know about them?
Well, not with this method, because you didn't know who you were giving the message to.
But of course, after a while, we then changed.
And then of course, then we started what's called, you know, where you're trying to give clairvoyance directly to someone.
And that's when it becomes difficult.
And that's when everybody's scratching their heads thinking, well, we knew that anyway, we knew that because I always thought spiritualists would be very credulous and they'd be, oh yeah, yeah, I can take that, I can take that.
But actually, they're the most critical bunch you could possibly meet.
They're always on the lookout for ways you could have done it.
Or you could have known that or that means you could have known that.
There's always a bit of one-upmanship.
So they're not going to let much through.
So if that's the way you do it in training, how do you ever get out of training?
Because if they're always finding flaws in things, then, you know, it's going to be very hard to graduate, isn't it?
Well, this is quite a big circle.
There'd be quite a turnovers.
There'd be new people coming all the time.
So they mean you've got fresh people coming in, you know, everybody try and give them a message.
And that was quite interesting.
You know, everyone would scrabble, see what you could pick up.
But eventually, of course, you then have to go up on platform in spiritualist churches as a fledgling.
So the idea is you go out, they have fledgling services.
So you're up on the platform and you're giving messages to whoever you think needs them in a congregation.
And that is scary, I can tell you.
I can well believe it.
And what was your first experience of that like?
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
I mean, I have to say I'm not that good now, but I went through this phase of it all seemed to happen like I was being led by the hand and be shown, look, this is real.
And I stood up on platform and I could see in my mind's eye, but almost quite clearly, a woman standing behind her mother and daughter.
And the woman was showing a bangle.
And I described this and the daughter looked at the mother and she actually took the bangle out of her pocket and said, I've just bought this from the market today.
I saw the most interesting one was actually I saw this boy standing in the aisle of the church, again, in my mind's eye, but he was trying to shake two women.
And I was trying to say to this woman, I said, I can see this boy here.
I could describe what he looked like.
And the women are just frowning and crossing their arms saying, no, no, no, can't take it.
No, no, no.
And I felt awful.
I just sat down.
And in the end, after the service, I went up to this woman and said, I said, what was the problem with the, with that message?
She said, oh, that was her son.
He died.
And she just didn't, you know, she didn't want to receive that message.
But I'd given a good description, but she just couldn't, couldn't handle it.
She, you know, hadn't adequately prepared herself for the possibilities of getting a message like that.
And I actually saw someone's aura, which was quite interesting.
There was a woman sitting in the congregation and I saw this heat haze rising up above her head to the point where the fire exit sign behind it was sort of rippling in.
I remember looking around thinking, what on earth is that?
Because I thought auras were going to be brightly coloured things.
But apparently when you first start seeing them, that's what they look like.
And it went about a good eight, 10 feet above in the air.
So that was my experience.
And that was interesting.
And I started going out with, with, with mediums.
I started doing these things.
Sometimes you give some good messages.
Sometimes you give some absolutely useless messages.
It's very variable.
But you must have around that time thought, okay, why this?
Why me?
And I'm a doctor.
So they must have picked me because I'm a doctor.
How do I integrate that with what I do for a living?
Well, at first I thought maybe they want me to become a healer.
And I actually looked into sort of going to healing groups, but that really didn't appeal to me, to be honest.
It's all a bit sort of, I'm quite sort of energetic at work.
And it was all sort of quite sort of soft and gentle, which is nice.
It's lovely, but it wasn't my style.
And it is from what I've seen about a completely different art, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Also, of course, spiritualists say that if you're a doctor, they believe you're working with healing guides anyway.
So I think, well, if I've got these purported guides anyway, it doesn't matter.
What I was most interested was the instant feedback you get from mediumship.
You've either got a message and it's either right or wrong.
And, you know, if you heal someone and they get better, you can always say, well, it could have got better anyway.
But, you know, feedback from an instant message is really quite interesting.
So I found myself being more intrigued with that.
But I did keep it separate from my work.
But at least I tried to.
did you have to because bear in mind if you work under the nhs rules and guidelines for doctors you have to be very very careful about what you do absolutely yes well this is this is this is the problem and um the thing is that you get a certain unfortunately or fortunately i a little bit of shall we say bleed through occurred in a quite spectacular fashion the very first experience i had was in 2000 actually i can tell the date the 6th of december 2004.
so this woman came into our room lucy and she's absolutely inconsolable she will not stop crying now i know lucy and she's a nice she's a she was 66 at the time very bright bubbly lady never had a problem with her nerves before but she was she said look you've got to give me something doc you know i can't carry on like this this is dreadful and i couldn't find out why she was depressed or whatever and in desperation i have to admit that i actually printed a prescription for an
antidepressant, which I don't normally do after a first consultation but she was she wanted you know She said, You can't let me leave here without something.
And as I took the prescription out of my printer, I felt a blow to the back of my head.
I heard a voice behind me saying, Ask her about her father.
And over her left shoulder, I saw the misty outline of a man I could describe.
And I heard myself saying, Lucy, tell me about your dad.
And she looked at me, stopped crying and said, he was killed on the 8th of December.
That would be two days' time, 38 years ago by the IRA.
Do you think that's why I'm depressed?
And I said, well, sounds like a very good reason.
Did he look like and describe the man?
She said, yeah, how do you know?
I said, Lucy, I think I've just seen him over your left shoulder.
She grabs my hand, my arm, squeezes it tight and says, Doctor, you don't know what this means to me.
And the story is she was in service in Manchester.
She's from rural Ireland.
Was going back from Manchester to Ireland to see her dad.
Her father, although he's a Roman Catholic, was quite outspoken against the IRA.
And he was found sort of killed and shoved in the drain.
She's always thought it was the IRA did him in.
Now, she'd always felt that he was around her.
But of course, coming from a Catholic family, when she told people that, I said, well, you're not meant to believe that.
You're not meant to believe that.
So when I said, look, your dad's around you.
This sort of validated her experience.
She said, you don't know what this means to me, Doc.
And I said, look, Lucy, I'm not saying he's there.
She said, you can think what you like, Doc, but as far as I'm concerned, you've told me all about my dad.
I now know why I'm depressed because it's the anniversary.
I won't need your pills anymore.
Thank you very much.
Which is a great far better service for her than giving her pills that she could end up depending on for a long time, I guess.
So she left my room.
My jaws hit the floor.
I'm thinking, what the hell have I done?
She goes out and starts having a chat with my essentialist Carol about what I'd said.
And then a month later, she comes back to see me, all smiles.
So I said, Lucy, why have you come to see me?
I said, what's wrong?
She said, nothing.
So I said, well, why have you come to see me?
She said, well, I've come to tell you a story.
So she sort of sits down on the chair, smiling.
And said, she said, two weeks after I saw you, I went to an Irish social due and there was this creepy guy there who's with the second sight.
And he was following me.
He was saying, Lucy, Lucy, I've got something to tell you.
Come into this room.
I've got something to tell you.
She said, well, I'm not coming into any room with you.
You can tell me here.
So he said, well, Lucy, did you know that you've got a man over your left shoulder?
I think he's your father.
She puts her hands on her waist and said, well, of course I knew that.
My doctor told me that two weeks ago.
She said, you know what?
That sure took the wind out of his sails.
That's the comprehensive answer to that, isn't it?
Listen, the hardest thing I've always thought in my life for somebody who's a medical person to deal with is death and dying.
If you get somebody in your surgery who is going to die, who has a terminal condition, does the mediumship have any impact on that, to the two mesh together?
The medical side and the medium side?
Yeah, I mean, I don't want people to think I'm going around giving messages every five minutes in surgery.
Obviously, now my patients know that I've got an interest in this.
I would worry for you that the fact that people do know about you, you must find that people make appointments for a reading and not for treatment.
No, it hasn't happened once.
It has not happened once.
Well, I'm very pleased to hear it.
Sorry, we were talking about death and the issue of terminal illness.
So I've got a patient called Jade whose mum, Leslie, was dying of breast cancer.
Now, Leslie was not my patient, but Jade knew my interest.
And so she said, look, would you mind doing me a favor and have a chat with my mum about your experiences?
So I said, yeah, okay, I would, because I knew Jade very well.
I knew she was very upset over her mum.
So I went around to Leslie's house and spent half an hour, maybe a bit longer, talking to her about what I'd experienced.
And she found it very, very comforting.
And when she died, Jay came to see me and thanked me.
So that was really, really, really comforting.
It was very helpful.
And then, funnily enough, a few months later, Jay came to see me and immediately Leslie was there and she gave me a message for Jade.
And the message was she actually showed me a collection of glass fairies.
And I said, oh, Jade, I've got your mum here.
And she's shown me her glass fairy collection.
And Jay said, well, she hasn't got a glass fairy collection.
I don't know what that can mean.
And then a couple of months later, Jay came and said, we were clearing mum's house out.
And we found stuff behind a chest of drawers.
Oh.
Collection of glass fairies.
Which was, I mean, I'd only seen Leslie once.
I didn't know she collected glass fairies.
I guess that's the kind of thing that happens a lot, though, isn't it?
Where you find that sometimes I don't do very much of this.
I'm not at the level that you're at.
But sometimes I'll tell somebody something and they'll say, no, that can't be true.
And then later they come to you.
You know, I can remember there was a radio presenter called David Prever.
I'm sure he won't mind me giving you his name.
And David had a very nice sports car, which was the envy of a lot of us.
And I remember saying to him, you're going to find you've got a big problem with your spare tire on that car.
And he said, don't talk rubbish.
I know this stuff that you do.
That's a load of old garbage.
And I'm not even going to bother checking the tire.
Three months later, he comes to me and he says, I needed my spare tire.
There was a defect in it.
I couldn't use it.
How did you know about that?
I have no idea.
So those are the sorts of validations that you get all the time, I would imagine.
And it's often the ones that they can't take at first that come back because, you know, that sort of makes it more poignant somehow.
But my, my, my, I don't know where I'm going with this, I suppose, but I suppose what I found it most useful with is in bereavement counselling.
Now, I'm not one of these people who believes that, you know, if you can bring the deceased person back, then everyone's happy.
You can't get over the physical loss of someone.
But there's no doubt about it.
Some people have found messages given from mediums extremely helpful in coping with grief.
I can well believe it.
It's just the knowledge that we don't...
I mean, I have a patient called Linda, and she won't mind me using her name because she actually wrote to Fate and Fortune magazine about me because she found it so helpful.
I mean, her husband, Brian, died on the operating table.
He had leukemia and no one knew.
He actually bled to death.
So I knew Brian, but I didn't know his intimate details.
So Linda comes to see me very upset.
And Brian's there.
this guy had a big presence, he was a big guy, and it was as if he was there.
I mean, I couldn't see him, but you know, if you're in a room and you close your eyes, you can sense someone next to you.
He was sitting to my right, Linda was sitting to the left, and he was gabbling away 19 to the dozen, telling me, tell her this, tell her that, tell her.
And I was saying, look, Linda, Brian's here.
He's telling me what you've got to do in the house.
You've got to get the shed sorted out.
There's building work that he's doing.
And she was going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then she, then, then, and then I remember one of you said, you just bought some sticks.
I said, what are these sticks?
She said, hang on a minute.
She takes a shopping list out, shows it to me.
On the top of the shopping list are garden canes.
I mean, every time Linda came to see me, and I saw once a month with her daughter, Brian would be there giving messages.
Eventually he stopped coming.
Did he stop coming, do you think, because he thought that his work was done, that he'd given enough guidance?
Yeah, she got better and she found it very helpful and didn't need to come and see me.
Now, I always say to Linda, look, Linda, I'm not saying this is Brian.
I mean, we can assume it's Brian just for supposition, but you know, I'm not trying to sell you a line here.
I don't know whether this is real or not.
I could be just reading your mind.
I mean, just reading your mind.
I mean, that's interesting in itself.
But, you know, this is how it's presented to me.
Make of it what you want.
And she said, look, Ian, you know, we're on first name terms.
She said, I know you're much more skeptical than I am.
She said, but I'm so convinced this is real.
I'm going to write to a magazine to tell them about the message you gave.
I said, you wouldn't dare.
She said, I would.
I said, well, go on if you want to.
So she did.
And I ended up being contacted by Fate and Fortune.
And then they talked about it.
And she found it really, really helpful.
And just today, actually, in surgery today, I saw a lady whose father had died.
And she looked at me.
She came for a physical complaint, but she said, do you do readings?
I said, well, sometimes.
I said, if I'm in the mood.
She said, would you mind tuning in, seeing what you pick up?
So I said, oh, okay, all right.
We've got some time.
As long as you understand this is just for fun, you know, I can't guarantee this.
And I didn't get her father, but I got a grandfather came through.
Now, this lady's a Greek lady.
I didn't know the father.
I didn't know the grandfather.
I knew nothing about her family in Cyprus.
But she tells me that everything I told her was actually her grandfather.
I got his personality down to a T. He told me stuff that couldn't possibly have, I couldn't possibly know, which she accepted.
Now, maybe she wanted to accept a reading from someone.
I don't know.
And maybe she wanted to kill herself, but she was convinced that it was useful and helpful.
And, you know, she said, I feel so much better now.
So whatever you think of the scientific validity of all this, certainly in terms of sort of therapeutic terms, it has some value.
And, you know, I'd like to try and explore that if possible, but it's very hard to know how one should proceed with it.
It sounds to me like you're very valuable in general practice.
I wish I had a doctor like you, Ian.
But the problem with all of this is if it gathers momentum for you and if the book that you've got coming out takes off, I can see you being taken away from this.
Well, I don't know about that.
I mean, the book's been out for a year now, so it hasn't been a runaway success.
I mean, in fact, the reason why I contacted you was because I suddenly realized actually it hadn't had any exposure in this country.
Now, I've heard absolutely nothing about it, but what an amazing experience to have had in your life and to write a book about it, about those amazing experiences, and then for nothing much to happen.
That to me sounds like fate's playing a part here.
Maybe somebody up there, I'm just speculating, you know, what do I know about anything?
Maybe somebody up there didn't mean this thing to take off just yet.
But my worry for you is that if it does take off, I can't see how you could stay as a general practitioner, as a medical doctor like that, because number one, you get people queuing up for readings and not for diagnoses and help.
And number two, you would just find that the demand for that service, your mediumship service, would outstrip the demand for your medical service.
And there's only one of you.
And by the sounds of you and by the vibes I'm getting off you, you're full of energy.
Yeah, that's not a problem for you, but even you are a human being.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, the way, I mean, right now, it feels like from general practice that we're trying to single-handedly save the health service from all the cuts and everything.
And my first love is obviously being a doctor.
I don't think that, I actually think that my purpose in this, if there is a purpose, is actually just to let people know that not every educated, scientifically educated person is skeptical of this.
And I think there's more and more of this.
I go to a wonderful group practice locally.
I mean, there are no mediums there, sadly.
But the practice was founded by a doctor called Andrew.
And Andrew was your archetypal fabulous family doctor.
Even if he was massively busy, he would always have masses of time for you.
And he was thorough.
He would always order lots of tests, even if there was not much chance that those tests would find anything.
He was just a good old-fashioned family doctor.
And he retired about five years ago.
And I remember going to see him this last time.
And I said, I'm really sorry that you're leaving.
And he said he was going to do research into the spiritual side of medicine.
Oh, really?
And I just, I had no idea.
I knew this guy was a good doctor.
But I thought, well, there must be a sea change happening in the health service and in the medical profession for somebody like him to start to do something like that.
There is, but it's not a good sea change.
Unfortunately, from the way I read it, is that we're becoming more and more forced into becoming technicians.
The way medicine is organized now is very much ordering tests, tick boxing, prescribing things, medicating people.
It just seems to me that having had it the better part of this year of 2012 with this tinnitus problem That I've had, that my listeners know that I've had.
And I can't afford private treatment, so I've gone through the NHS all the way.
Mostly, and this isn't everybody I've seen, but mostly no one's got any time for you.
They just haven't.
And that's not because they don't care, it's just that they have too big a workload.
Your system's creaking under pressure, and we have to hit targets.
It's target-driven culture now.
So when a patient comes into my room, in the old days, okay, you didn't have a lot of time, but you just had, there was you and the patient, and the patient came in with their agenda, you worked through it.
Now, before the patient even comes to the room, my computers give me 10 or 12 different things I have to do in order to maintain my budget so it doesn't get cut before I even deal with the patient's agenda.
And the patient may have three or four things.
It's not uncommon for people to come in with three or four quite difficult problems, especially with elderly people with multiple cobalt morbidities.
It's very difficult.
And you know as a GP that most of the stuff you see is genuinely physical, but the root of it is to do with lifestyle, stress, the search for meaning, how people understand their lives.
And if you can address those and talk about those issues, some of the other issues would actually solve themselves.
And instead, a lot of us feel that we're being forced just to become, you know, the guys who prescribe the pills, who do the tests, who follow the guidelines.
That's not medicine as I understood it.
So would you like to help other, perhaps trainee doctors or young doctors who are already in general practice who might feel that they have the sort of gift that you have, that sort of human gift?
Would you like to put some of what you've got back into that?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think there's room for it.
I mean, so right now I see myself increasingly when I'm at gatherings.
It's a normal, a 50-year-old grumpy man, you know, saying, look, you know, where are we going?
Where are we going?
And actually, when you start saying, you know, what's the point of this?
Where is medicine going?
We're becoming technicians.
Not that I, I mean, I think we need to be technicians.
We've got some very clever science and very clever technical stuff.
I think as a profession, we need to somehow hold.
I mean, there's the soft side and then there's the hard side.
Whether the middle can hold together, I don't know, whether it will split.
I don't know.
But right now, the beauty of being in general practice in this country is, first of all, you don't charge people.
You're accessible.
And you're the only doctor in the health service who has an overview, a holistic view.
No one else has a holistic view.
My son's just qualified as a doctor.
He's doing his house jobs at the moment.
And he's saying the way hospitals are organized now, no one team has an overall view of what happens when a patient comes into hospital.
That's like a car factory, isn't it?
There are people involved in the process who don't know what the other people a little down the assembly line do.
If the health service has got to that stage, then we have a problem, I think.
Well, we do.
It's all being chopped up into little bits.
The fear is, of course, when it gets chopped up, the profitable bits will be hived up to privacy.
I don't want to politicize this, but you can see various different agendas.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, of course, it's expensive.
We've got an aging population.
So there's this very difficult to know.
I mean, in this country, it's government funded.
In the States, it's insurance company funded.
And the doctors are under the same pressures.
Cut costs, follow procedures, follow just evidence-based medicine.
And if it doesn't work, don't do it.
Or if there's no evidence, don't do it.
But sometimes the evidence is wrong.
Sometimes we now know that, you know, pharmaceutical companies sometimes conceal evidence.
So sometimes you think, what the hell are we doing?
And I've got patients who are on 26 different drugs, you know?
26.
You can justify each.
I mean, it's crazy.
It's called polypharm.
You can justify each individual one.
But when you take it, look at it, and they all need to be on it, you know, they need this and they need that.
But when you take a step back, you think, what are they doing?
This is madness.
You know, where's medicine going?
So, you know.
Very good questions that have to be asked.
I want to bring you back to the mediumship, not because I wasn't enjoying that conversation.
That's the kind of stuff I used to do on news, talk, radio, and I want to do more of, let me tell you, because I think these are conversations that we have to have in this day and age, and we don't have nearly enough of.
Bringing you back to the mediumship, has anybody ever tried to lean on you, bearing in mind you are so regulated, you are a GP in the NHS, and stop you from doing this stuff or at least make you do less of it?
No.
Well, first of all, I'm not doing every five minutes in surgery.
I mean, I like to think that I've got a balance of it.
So, you know, I'm not going off like crazy.
I tell my patients that, you know, I'm not necessarily a believer.
I don't do belief.
I look for evidence.
And when I get these intuitive things come through, they have to make it what they want.
And we can discuss it, what it means to them.
If it's helpful, it's fine.
If it's not helpful, it doesn't, you know, it's not going to happen.
Have you ever withheld information that you've given?
Yeah, well, sometimes you don't have time or sometimes you don't think it's appropriate and you think, and you have to.
I mean, as Keith who trained me, he said, he said, you know, you can't let anybody come in through the door.
You wouldn't let a patient's relatives come in through the door if they're in the physical world.
Why would you let them come in every five minutes to give messages?
It's not appropriate.
Ian, we have to have another conversation.
We're out of time, unfortunately.
And I've really, really enjoyed this one, which is why, if you don't mind, at some point in the new year, can we do another hour?
Oh, yes.
Would that be good?
All right.
Now, the book has been out for a year.
Yeah.
I think that some people hearing this are going to want to buy that book.
What's the book called and how do they get it?
It's called Consulting Spirit, a Doctor's Experience with Practical Mediumship, and it's available on Amazon.
It's in Kindle and paperback format, and it's published by Anomalous Books.
Thank you, Ian Rubinstein.
Okay, Howard.
Okay, well, I'll say goodbye then.
Thank you very much.
Okay, cheers then.
Bye-bye.
Dr. Ian Rubinstein there, a London doctor who is also a medium.
What a tremendous story to tell you on our 100th edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for seeing me through these 100 shows, for your great support, and for walking with me every step of the way.
We've done 100 shows.
Let's do 100 more And then some, and let's show them all.
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I wish you the kind of 2013 you would wish for yourself.
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