Q&A: Medical intuition gains momentum in research and patient care

Photo Cred: Julien Tromeur/Unsplash

By Liz Gold

What is medical intuition and how can it benefit integrative healthcare practitioners?

We take a deep dive with Wendie Colter, MCWC, CMIP, founder and chief executive of The Practical Path, providing intuitive development programs for healthcare practitioners and wellness providers. Colter serves on the Bioenergy & Health Committee of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium (IHPC), was chosen as rotating faculty for the Integrative Medicine Elective Rotation (IMER) program at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and is an educational contributor for the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine Fellowship. Her programs are accredited for continuing education by the California Board of Registered Nursing, the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM), and the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching (NBHWC).

Recently, Colter published research on medical intuition called, “Assessing the Accuracy of Medical Intuition: A Subjective and Exploratory Study,” in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine with Paul Mills, PhD, director of the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego. She also published a book in April 2022, entitled “Essentials of Medical Intuition: A Visionary Path to Wellness” (Watkins/Penguin-Random House). In it she presents case studies of patients and interviews with practitioners who are using medical intuition in their practice. Here, we ask Colter about how medical intuition works, the role it can play in healthcare, and how she addresses skepticism.  

Integrative Practitioner: Let’s start with a definition. How do you define medical intuition?

Wendie Colter: Medical intuition is a foundational intuitive assessment of the physical body and biofield. It is not a treatment, modality, or intervention, and medical intuitives do not diagnose or prescribe.

Integrative Practitioner: How did you know you were a medical intuitive? How would other people know if they have this gift? Do you call it a gift?

Wendie Colter: I do not call it a gift; I call it a skill. Intuition is something that every human has. The question is, do you want to cultivate it and build that skill set? People don’t think about intuition in this way because it’s so misunderstood in our society. I started out in energy healing. I noticed in my practice that I could intuitively ‘see’ into the body. I could see the anatomy and the physiology. I was also able to see the origin of a physical or energetic imbalance. That came from years of cultivating my own intuitive abilities.

In my energy healing work, I also noticed that some people would come back over and over again with the same issues. I started looking into the body and the biofield for answers. The biofield is an electromagnetic field that surrounds and permeates the body. We know it as the chakra system and the auric field. I was able to discern not only the physical issues, but also the emotional, mental, even the spiritual aspects from their life history, and how this issue may have manifested for my client in the first place.

One of the tenets of medical intuition is that the body holds information pertaining not only to physical imbalance, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual imbalances. With the information from these intuitive assessments, clients were more able to release what was blocking them on much a deeper level. The medical intuitive assessment became my focus.

Integrative Practitioner: How do you experience intuitive hits? Is that how you describe it? And can you give us an example? If you were to do one of your assessments, what happens?

Wendie Colter: Let me make a distinction. Everybody gets intuitive hits, or what I call ‘flashes of insight.’ Physicians and nurses are really experienced at ‘gut feelings’ and ‘hunches.’ Medical intuition is not about ‘hits.’ It is a methodical, systematic, and repeatable practice of asking for and receiving information from the body and biofield. It’s very deliberate.

Here’s an example from my book. I had a client with tendinitis in her wrist that seemed to come ‘out of the blue.’ She’d had it for about a month. For me, viewing the client’s body looks similar to an MRI. I intuitively saw the inflamed tendons in her wrist. Underneath the tendons, I saw a healed bone fracture. All around her wrist I saw what looked like a cloud of grief and emotional pain.

Next, I looked for the origins of the issue. These look like images from my client’s life history. I saw her around age 20 fracturing her wrist while playing tennis with her boyfriend. While in the emergency room, her boyfriend broke up with her. Her wrist showed me it had stored not only the physical trauma of the fracture, but also the emotional impact of that breakup. My client confirmed my insight and told me she was going through a recent intense breakup, just before the tendinitis flared up. In her case, the emotional pain she was dealing with in the present had activated the unresolved grief and pain from her past, which manifested in tendinitis.

Her wrist had more to show me. I saw her at about age five in a dark closet, being struck on the same wrist with a cane. My client then confirmed that her mentally ill mother used to beat her and lock her in a closet. Her wrist indicated that it was holding onto a lifetime of grief, emotion, and physical trauma. Logically, we wouldn’t think of these incidents as being connected, but the body has its own logic and point of view.

With medical intuition, I also ask the body what it might want or need to find balance. I discerned some sleep and gut health issues that were related to her stress. A couple of days later, she called and told me the pain in her wrist was gone and that she felt calmer and more able to begin processing the emotions of her recent breakup. This case is a good example of how much information the body can store, and how medical intuition can access its unique perspectives. 

Integrative Practitioner: What would you say is the benefit of medical intuition to integrative practitioners, specifically? What role does it play?

Wendie Colter: The feedback from my integrative practitioner graduates is that it saves them so much time. They can quickly get to the root causes of issues and put together a tailored care plan. It’s cost effective as they can prioritize testing and treatments. They have also found that patient compliance can be enhanced by bringing awareness to the underlying energetic causes of their issues. Medical intuition offers a ‘whole-person’ perspective.

When I interviewed physicians for the book, their feedback was consistent – if people only knew what medical intuition could do, it would change the current paradigm of healthcare. More research and data are needed. When I looked into the research on medical intuition, I only found a handful of studies. Most of them have been inconclusive for a number of reasons, such as faulty study designs and untrained intuitives.

I got excited about the idea of doing new research with trained medical intuitives. With the support of Dr. Paul Mills at University of California, San Diego, I put together an exploratory study to gauge the accuracy of medical intuition with my program graduates. For the study, we had five medical intuitives and 67 participants, some of whom came from UCSD Medical Center. The medical intuitives were blinded, as we don’t do an intake and did not have access to medical records. The medical intuitives also kept their eyes closed, so they didn’t have a visual on the participant, either. Afterwards, the participants filled out a Likert-scale survey about how accurate they felt the medical intuitive was. The participants rated the medical intuitives as 94 percent accurate in the location and evaluation of their primary health issue. They rated the medical intuitives as 98 percent accurate in describing their life history in relation to their health issue. We also saw 94 percent consistency with a known medical diagnosis, and more. Those results really blew us away. The study was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2020, and represents the first published research on medical intuition in over 20 years. Hopefully, we’ll be able to take this to the next level.

Integrative Practitioner: What is the next level?

Wendie Colter: We need more studies and we need to see how medical intuition can integrate with healthcare as part of the healthcare team.

Integrative Practitioner: Are you teaching practitioners this skill, or are you teaching other people who are not practitioners, or is it both?

Wendie Colter: I teach medical intuition to healthcare and wellness practitioners. I also teach a workshop in medical intuition for self-healing that is open to everyone. My programs are taught live online. We have students from all over the world.

Integrative Practitioner: How do you teach this skill? Can you provide a high-level overview of how you teach a practitioner to be a medical intuitive?

Wendie Colter: There are many types of intuition. I teach a type of intuition that uses ‘mind’s eye’ visualization. The certification program is one weekend intensive per month over a period of nine months, divided into two levels. The first level covers intuitive scanning of the biofield to discern information in the chakra system and the auric field. The second level includes scanning the physical anatomy and physiology, as well as life history. Certification includes practicum hours and personal mentoring. Everyone who graduates the program has a complete skill set.

Integrative Practitioner: So, practitioners can learn this skill themselves and bring it into their own practice. But what is a circumstance where you might work with an integrative practitioner and bring your skills as a medical intuitive?

Wendie Colter: Practitioners call me when they have a difficult case or when they want more information. Medical intuitives may see things in the physical body which may not yet have a name or specific testing. For example, years ago I was seeing things that are now called SIBO [small intestinal bacterial overgrowth]. Medical intuitives can look at the interplay between all of the systems. We’re perceiving connections because we’re not seeing the body through any specific lens or bias.

There’s a wonderful integrative medicine doctor in New York who has created a model for working with a medical intuitive in her clinic. It’s a perfect example of a successful collaboration between physicians and medical intuitives. She brings her medical intuitive into the exam room with the patient and herself. She and her medical intuitive work together to find the best options to help the patient. They get phenomenal results, and the patients love it. It’s the collaboration model of the future. I was thrilled to be able to present her work in the book.

I belong to a group of professional medical intuitives who are in the process of launching a national organization for medical intuition. Our goals are education and outreach to the integrative health community. We sent out a survey to a group of self-identified medical intuitives. We asked, ‘how do you use the skill in your practice? [and] ‘how do you work with physicians?’ We found that 82 percent work directly with licensed healthcare practitioners, and that 86 percent receive referrals from licensed healthcare practitioners. This collaboration is already happening, but nobody is talking about it.

Integrative Practitioner: How many medical intuitives are out there? Do you have an idea in the United States?

Wendie Colter: The truth is, nobody knows. Many may not refer to themselves by that term. This is so stigmatized in society, which is a real problem.

Integrative Practitioner: How do you deal with somebody’s skepticism? How do you address it with a practitioner who is closed off from the idea? You’re dealing with the healthcare industry as a whole – how do you deal with breaking down the misconceptions and skepticism among healthcare practitioners?

Wendie Colter: I believe the answer to skepticism is showing the efficacy of it in practice, and with more definitive research. One of my goals with the book was to bring the conversation forward and say, ‘Here’s what it is, here’s what it isn’t. Here’s how it’s being used. Here’s what it could bring to healthcare.’ When I speak at conferences, physicians will tell me that they can’t really talk about intuition with their colleagues. But when they listened to their gut feelings and trusted them, their intuition worked. It’s an unspoken conversation that needs to be de-stigmatized.

Integrative Practitioner: You are teaching a very specific method. How does one know they are doing it correctly?

Wendie Colter: Most people use their intuition as random hits. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. I teach a deliberate use of intuition to gain information, not as a random, unreliable, unpredictable hit, but as a usable and practical intuitive skill that gains Information on demand. This is a completely different way of using intuition.

Integrative Practitioner: How much does self-trust, play into this? How do you know, to trust what you’re experiencing? Or what information is coming to you?

Wendie Colter: That is part of the learning curve in my program. It takes practice to trust your intuition, and how we gain that trust is to see the effect of the practice. For example, how could you trust that you could speak Italian, if you’ve never spoken Italian? You put yourself in an educational environment, you learn the skill, you practice it deliberately, and you see the effect.

Integrative Practitioner: What advice would you have for integrative practitioners who might want to work with a medical intuitive? What should they know?

Wendie Colter: First of all, they should find out if the medical intuitive has had any training or certification. That’s really important. Secondly, are they doing their work in a confidential, safe, and ethical manner? An integrative practitioner should use the same kind of vetting with a medical intuitive that they would do with any complementary and alternative practitioner. I created my certification program because we want to show that we have studied and have been rigorously tested.

Integrative Practitioner: We’ve covered a lot of ground here. But is there anything else that you think is really important for the Integrative Practitioner audience to know about medical intuition?

Wendie Colter: The message from the physicians and scientists who are involved in medical intuition research have consistently said that it holds so much promise. The possibilities are truly endless. I get excited when I see what my students are doing in the world and how they’re using medical intuition in their practices.

Editor’s note: This Q&A was edited and condensed.