Profiles

Dr. Brian Berman is a pioneer in holistic health and integrative medicine—he has brought these emerging brands of medical care and healthcare services to the general public. As a tenured professor of family and community medicine, as director of the University of Maryland School of Medicine Center for Integrative Medicine, and as president and founder of the Institute of Integrative Health (IIH), he’s championed changes to the health care system from the inside.

Licensed Acutonics Level I & II Teacher, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The beauty of working with sound is that it’s a carrier wave between heaven and earth. Between that which is seen and unseen. And it contains all the different modalities. It’s the universal language. It’s Chinese medicine, it’s Jungian, it’s acupuncture, it’s everything. All of it’s there—science, art, spirituality.

Elle MacLaren, as many an Acutonics practitioner before her, originally sought out acupuncture to help her with her issues. Issues in her case being hormonal. Then one day Sylvia Pelcz-Larsen, whom she’d been seeing in Boulder (where Elle had been living at the time), pulled out the tuning forks. “I said, Wait a minute, I’m here for acupuncture,” recalls Elle. “What’re these? What’re you talking about? She ended up using the forks more than the needles.”

Before he discovered Acutonics in 2008, Marco Antonio de Franchi Siqueira used to get very stressed. Worse, the stress led to constant headaches and a terrible sinus condition. Which Marco tried to alleviate first with medication then with Pranic healing (among other things). Finally, it was one of his Pranic healing teachers who told him, Get thee to Acutonics. “That first treatment really knocked me out,” remembers Marco. “When I awoke, I wanted to know more about it.”

Carol was born on a military base in Fairbanks, Alaska to a Korean Mother and Polish father. Her father died when she was thirteen days old. Her mother disappeared, leaving Carol and her older brother with friends, who would adopt Carol and her older brother when Carol was 5. Only as an adult, 40 years after her adoption, did Carol learn that she has a younger half-brother and a very large Korean family within 50 miles of her current hometown. Her adoptive parents were Korean and Irish and they settled in her adoptive father’s home town of Bloomington, Indiana when she was 4. “Growing up biracial in rural America was an interesting experience in the 1970s. I never fit in. My peers couldn’t map me onto any social or religious norms of the time. My mother was Buddhist, my father was Baptist. I took kimchee sandwiches to school and wore a mix of Korean and Kmart clothing.”

“Law gave me permission to study sound healing and Acutonics®” Wait. What? That’s right. Joanie Solaini, Certified Acutonics Practitioner and Licensed Acutonics Teacher, who is helping to spread Acutonics in the UK and Europe, credits the years she spent earning her LLB and LLM English law degrees for getting her to the Mothership. “It helped me prove to myself that I could do the rigorous analytical thing. I’d been a musician before, which was following a passion, but a part of me felt under used. Law study really exercised those rational bits of the brain. And perhaps exorcised an inner critic? I’m not always sure where the line is between discernment and self-sabotage, but in this case, I could tell my inner critic to just pipe down. I jumped through the hoops, proved myself to myself, and now we’re taking a sharp right-brain turn.”

If it wasn’t exactly preordained that Oxana Merimskaya would end up in medicine, it was pretty close. Her mother and father were both doctors. Her late brother was a doctor. At four years old, she herself announced to her family that she wanted to be a medical doctor when she grew up. Her parents, in fact, met as doctors. Her mother served in the Soviet military as a surgeon, operating on the Western (Russian) Front of World War II. Her father, too, was in the military, also working as a physician. And even though they were in Yekaterinburg at the time of her birth, because her mother and father and her sisters and brothers were all born in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine, her mother made the trip back to Kiev just to give birth to Oxana there as well.

Alanda Greene, a student of Theresa Lee, was born in southern Alberta, on the edge of the city of Calgary, where she was close to both the mountains to the west and the prairie to the east. After completing her degrees in English and History and taking time to travel and reflect on the life she wished to have she moved with her partner to the mountains to live close to the land. “I had a sense of deep clarity that I wanted to live my life with meaning, creativity and purpose. We cleared a space in the forest, hauled rock, built a house and garden”, stated Alanda. She taught school for 24 years and then managed the bookstore at nearby Yasodhara Ashram where she also studied and taught yoga.

Valentina “Tina” Morani learned about Acutonics—first hand—in 2006. Back then she was just getting into her first semester at the Southwest Acupuncture College in Boulder, Colorado observing in the student clinic. That’s when one of the College’s teachers (and Acutonics teacher) Sylvia Pelcz-Larsen brought in the tuning forks. “I remember seeing how powerful the treatment was,” Tina recalls today from her home in Chestertown, Maryland, where she grew up and runs her own acupuncture and Acutonics practice. I really want to do this, she thought to herself. But not right now. So she put it aside. She graduated. She got her practice going back in Chestertown.