

Articles
Interview with Carl H. Jelstrup, D.C.
Revised from a National Publication in Health (2005)
​
Carl H. Jelstrup is a legend in the Puget Sound area of Washington. He is a Norwegian by birth, a chiropractor by training, a cranial-sacral specialist and electro-medicine practitioner by choice, Carl is most of all an iconoclast and an independent thinker. Still competitively skiing in his late 60’s, Carl, who nevertheless says ski machines is ‘bad exercise’ is considered by many to be a ‘genius’ when it comes to intractable head and neck problems. These conditions he manages to fix in days, not weeks or months, thereby earning the enthusiasm of his patients, and their families, and sometimes the envy, or the celebration of his peers.
In this interview, Carl talks about some of the things he is interested in. The conversation ranges from:
-
Biophonics – a diagnostic tool he’s integrated into his practice in collaboration with physicist Bob Shane and his colleague Jeanne Kreider.
2. What it was like to return to the Norway of his birth and find that many of his childhood friends had since died from poor health.
3. Carl’s great clinical success treating whiplash quickly.
4. The connection between dental health and overall body wellness.
5. The usually intractable nature of anxiety and how a single, low-cost supplement seems to be able to alleviate it.
6. Training under B.J. Palmer – the founder of modern chiropractic.
7. The joys of having a cash practice with no advertising
8. Health ‘victims’ vs. health ‘warriors’.
9. And what is going on within five miles of his practice, which is so great he
never wants to go back to Norway for good.
10. The Bellevue Wellness Center.
Carl H. Jelstrup, DC:
I work in a field I think I can term ‘electro-medicine’. I consider the body a well-integrated bioelectric system. I and everyone else in the chiropractic, osteopathic, medical, and dental fields, in the first quarter of physics and physiology, years ago, have written papers on the subject. We discovered the whole body was run on bioelectric principles.
To our understanding that was the very core of how human beings functioned. We were very excited about this….. and then the quarter was over – so we threw the whole thing out! (Laughter) The next quarter was Anatomy 101, and the stuff about bioelectric properties was totally forgotten. When we graduated, it was stuck so far deep into our subconscious as to never emerge again.
At this time, we started to split up and go into different directions. In the health care system today, one major direction is called emergency medicine. This is basically what the medical system is all about. All the big television programs, ER- Chicago Hospital – all glamorize this: people coming in, it is high drama, and very exciting to watch – if you have nothing else to do. And it is good.
Emergency medicine is a real service to people who are in a state of medical emergency of any kind. They are saving lives. They are helping people to pick up the pieces again, giving them a
chance to begin again. American emergency medical system – they know what they are doing, and I have nothing but respect for them.
Then you have the other system, where I belong. We may call this the field of preventive care. In the medical field, you have the ‘general practitioner’ (though this is a rapidly vanishing breed), and then you have the osteopathic physician, the chiropractor and the dentist who, instead of practicing regular dentistry, is practicing biocompatible dentistry. Then there is the naturopath.
Then, lo and behold, here in the State of Washington, there is a new breed of people coming - the massage therapists. They have a good, basic education, a hard year of training, and then they have the right to touch people. With the exception of what the dentist does, the naturopaths, the chiropractors, the massage therapists, and whoever else is out there – all have one thing in common. We all have the permission to touch people, to deal with their specific problems
Now, speaking for myself and the Bellevue Wellness Center where I work, I base my practice on the concept of an equilateral triangle. The baseline of the triangle deals with the ‘structure’. One of the sides deals with the ‘emotions’, and the other side deals with ‘genetic/chemical stress’. As we have worked with the concept of this triangle, we realized each side of the triangle had an effect upon each other. I always write ‘structure’ on the bottom on the bottom of the triangle, because it is my foundation. It is the very foundation of my thinking. Out from this concept I have, over the years, developed some knowledge and come to certain conclusions in my work, the primary one being is that structure controls function.
I can give you an example of this. If you are dealing with somebody in deep distress – there has been a recent death, the woman is left with no one to help her, she has two children, the house rent is due and her husband has died. In grief like this, you do not see the structural expression of ‘openness’ –(he gestures with arms outstretched,) – it goes into a compressed form that sinks down (gesturing a crumpled, slumped, shoulders moving towards each other position). As it sinks down, it creates actually cardiac compression in the process of sinking down, and gravitational pressure. So you can study people from a structural point of view and just by observing them; you can get a pretty good insight into what has happened. You can study their cranial form, their facial features, the curvature of their spine, their gait pattern, the way their feet contact the ground, pretty soon, you get a good idea as to the health of the individual.
Now, structure is tied into a system in the body, besides muscles and ligaments and articulations – there is a system in the body that protects the nervous system. This is considered to be at the core of structural observations, and this system is called the meningeal system. The meningeal system is the wrapping around the brain and the spinal cord and it is tied down in the area of the sacrum down to the coccyx, in the area called phylum terminalis. These are the big guy wires down at the bottom. Over the years, we have taken x-rays that show structural distortions, but we could not always see the whole story. X-rays at best are limited. The x-rays do tell you the function of the body in certain planes like the horizontal–frontal and lateral plane which is also called the sagittal plane. I feel this plane to be the most important one in determining meningeal stress in the spine which shows the core stress of the system.
This understanding was developed by a Swedish researcher Dr.Alf Breig. He wrote the book called Adverse Mechanical Tension of the Central Nervous System. This is groundbreaking work on the body’s reaction to stress.
People say, “Big deal – so we have a wrapping around our brain and spinal cord. So, what else is new? What does that do? What does this mean?” Well, sometimes you get interference in this system, just like if you were to hold the two ends of a pen, where one end represents the head, and the other end represents the tail. Regardless of where there is tension on the pen or a causative factor for the tension, it will affect the totality of the structure – the pen as a whole will rotate and will be affected by that tension. This is a core observation. Out of these observations, we have learned when there is structural tension in certain parts of the body; it leads to many different conditions.
​
I will give you a few examples of this: If you have a spine, where you have a situation called “pottenger saucer,” in the upper dorsal area (this simply means a compression or flattening out of the spine that sets up an irritation of the meningeal system in that area.) This irritation can be tested by simple applied kinesiological testing, or the area can be palpated and it will illicit pain responses. It can also be tested by a system we have developed in our clinic, called ‘biophonics’ which I will touch upon later. There are many ways to test it, but the most obvious one is if you touch it, the patient hurts. Pretty cut and dry.
If you have some pressure in this area, there are two things that will automatically happen to a person. You will have interference in the pericardial area, and this will in turn stress the heart, and thus deplete the person’s energy. There is no way around this, absolutely no way around it. Furthermore, there is generally a tendency to have gastrointestinal problems, because of stress in the upper G.I. tract. This is just one example, of many examples I could give. By studying the meningeal system you can literally read out what is going on with the patient.
If you have the opposite condition in the upper dorsal area, this is called a ‘dowager’s hump ‘, which we often get as we get older. Once this happens, it sets into motion a whole series of events that affects the whole physiological and biochemical behavior of that individual.
It does not matter what else you are doing to overcome this – it does not matter what vitamins you take, what supplements etc. once you have compromised the meningeal system you feel pain and there is no way around it.
There are, however, specific ways to test and monitor this system. Simple tests any doctor can do. You can put the patient on a relatively firm table, not a soft cushioned table but a firm one. Check the leg length and rotate the feet medially. Whenever there is meningeal stress you will always have a short and tight leg compared to the opposite leg. This is one of the many ways you can look into the system. And this is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to results. This is what many healthcare professionals have not really quite caught on to.
In the field of nutrition, we think, “Well, if you eat well…” This is fine, but if you eat well, and the pressures in the meningeal system were to be removed, well then you are doing something right. There is nobody measuring this, there is really no way of knowing if this is happening or not. If you are doing homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, or osteopathy, if you do not monitor what is happening to the meningeal system, you have no idea where that system is going.
You can verify this meningeal stress simply by observing structure and comparing it to a normal system - strictly by observation. If you have pronation in the feet, you will always get pelvic stress; you will always get meningeal stress. You will always set up stress patterns which sooner or later will begin a breakdown effect upon that body sometimes decades later.
If you have a crossbite – which is at the other end of the feet – if you have a Class II overbite - if you are missing molar teeth completely on one side, just to mention a few examples, you will create a torque in the cranium that will translate into the neck, which will translate into the meningeal system, that will set up a torque that will begin a gradual breakdown of that person, and there is absolutely no way around it.
I met in the clinic today a sweet lady from New Zealand. They gave up on her in New Zealand. She was a bright lady, and she came into the clinic about two weeks ago, completely out of her mind in stress, pain, and anxiety. Why? Because her bite was completely deranged because some dentist somewhere had done something terribly wrong, and made what was bad in her mouth much worse. Since they could not see the meningeal system and did not understand what she was saying, they dismissed her as being maybe a bit disturbed.
When she came to my clinic, the immediate thing I saw in her was a major adverse mechanical tension. Now, what does that do? It depends on how much reserve energy one has in the bank. It depends on your body type: Are you a Kapha type, a Pitta, or a Vata type? It depends on your genetics. How strong are you to take this onslaught of stress?
​
This lady was a combination of Pitta and Vata. These people are very sensitive. Their nervous systems are simply sensitive. She was beside herself with pain and stress. Because you cannot see it on x-ray, you cannot see it on MRI – the only way you can see it is by observation of the patient, and by going through specific means of testing. If you do not do testing, you cannot see it. You may come to the wrong conclusion that this person is a fruitcake, and all she was doing is crying for help-and you have no idea how to help them or where to begin.
Besides creating local adverse reactions, going back to the meningeal system, that affects local vertemeers, local sections of the body, you also send signals to the adrenals. Anyone who has read the work of Dr. Hans Selye knows when you have ongoing stressors, the adrenals will flip in and out of alarm reactions. Usually, they will flip from alarm to exhaustion, then maybe back for a short time to adaptation if the person can rest (i.e. sleep, eat well, etc.).As the person begins living his stressful life again, the adrenals kick right back into alarm. There is not a pill, there is not a counselor, there is not a priest, and there is not a piece of nutrition that can help them. In the case, of the lady from New Zealand, there was a major derangement of her jaw. Now this hits the adrenals. Not only does it hit the TMJ mechanism (Temporal Maniduliar Joint) but it hits other parts of the body and the brain.
There is an area in neurophysiology called the homunculus, which represents among many things TMJ stress. If I am not mistaken; about 85% of the central nervous system is hooked up to this TMJ nervous system area. This creates an onslaught of stress on the adrenals that causes panic in the body. You can feed the body protomorphogens or adrenal extracts – like, if you have a flood, trying to put up a few sandbags here and there. It is not going to stop the flood. This is why I put such an emphasis on structure. Regardless of whom you are, whether you are a dentist, a chiropractor, a naturopath, or an M.D., you have to get to respect what structure is telling you. There is a great difference between a person who is genuinely happy and raises his arms to the sky for joy and opens his chest to a person who is compressed in sorrow. This is the simplest way you can point to structure.
WHIPLASH
These are the first things I start to look into with a patient. What does the structure tell me? I look at the cranium, the bite, the gait, the feet, the ankles, and the spine in general – because this will tell me how to proceed with a person, and you do not have to be a chiropractor to do this. The interesting thing in chiropractic, is, they try to monopolize the spine, to build a profession on that – the problem is, they forgot the skull. A few chiropractors out in the field said ‘Wait a minute! We have got a skull too.” They built up a following over the years, like Dr. Major DeJarnette, the father of SOT (Sacral-Occipitial Technique), William Sutherland, who was the teacher of Major DeJarnette, figured out the cranium. It was interesting Dr. DeJarnette, for whom I have great respect, gave away the SOT organizations as he got older, but he kept back the cranial knowledge, because he wanted to keep the nuggets a little longer for himself. He was right – you can read out, in the cranium, just about any condition in the body, by studying cranial movement. It is a very important observation – feeling for cranial movement; studying it; and working with it.
As an example, there is a well known phenomenon called whiplash. Whiplash is, as I see it – based on my clinical practice – primarily a cranial condition, secondarily a cervical condition. If you do not deal with the primary condition you are never going to correct the problem. This is one of the reasons why there is such a long treatment protocol for whiplash. Chiropractors claim about nine months; M.D.s from nine months to three years; and usually, if the case does not get better, they send the case to a psychiatrist who, based on his knowledge will usually find something wrong, and then every one is happy, except the patient. Now he has a stamp on him, too. What we found out in the clinic when we started to seriously research whiplash – which was about 20 years ago – the sphendo-basiliar mechanism is intimately connected to the meningeal system, through a series of attachments which affects, not only the brain but also the entire neck, and thereby the rest of the spine.
It is a bit like when you have a fire in the apartment building - you are living on the third floor, and the fire is on the second floor. You call the fire department, and they can reach up to the second floor and hose the whole fire; but there is still some smoldering and burning on the third floor. If you are on the first floor, you feel pretty happy, there is water coming through the ceiling but at least there is no fire. This tends to be the standard care on whiplash. There are many systems out there, and they are good systems, but meanwhile the fire keeps smoldering on the third floor.
The patient comes to a state where he says ‘Doctor, I really do not feel better’, or ‘Doctor, I am getting a little better but I have still got some pain and I still have that tension – I don’t understand.’ The regular physician or the doctor says, ‘Mrs. Jones this will take about six months to go away, so you have just begun your healing.’ From a medical perspective, the MD will diagnose, usually by observation, not by testing. Also by listening to the patient, or observing how he or she behaves in the chair; asking the patient to turn their head up and down, left and right.
The MD will come to the conclusion this may be a cervical whiplash so the doctor writes this down and prescribes promptly 20 to 30 physiotherapy treatments. Now the patient goes to the physiotherapist, who is taking the order from somebody else. Now he suggests the patient exercise their arm, neck; this and that, or gives something cold or something hot or something cold and hot! They want to use some electrical therapy and some other therapies without really testing what is going on in the meningeal system – which is the culprit in the first place.
Now – granted sometimes there can be some more serious whiplash cases. You may have a dislocation. You really got hit hard in the auto accident – but this is an emergency medicine case. In the average whiplash case, I would say 95% of the cases – number one, you get the shift in the spheno-basilar mechanism which adversely affects the whole meningeal system. (The spheno-basilar mechanism is the connection between the basilar process of the occiput and the sphenoid bone. ‘This is one floor higher than the atlantoaxial articulation, which is the first vertebra.’)
I have someone take a specific x-ray for me who takes a three-dimensional x-ray at this point in the body, to find out how the stress factors are working in the neck, and based on this we make the proper cervical correction. Very often, this is not enough. You have to go one step higher. To get at this you have to do what we call an intra-oral cranial correction.
In a nutshell, the correction of whiplash is about reprogramming destructive stress signals embedded in the brain. This process takes a few days, not months. The correction is very specific requiring detailed testing.
I had a wonderful man in from Trondheim, Norway. He is a bus driver, a solid, big, easygoing guy who was in the clinic two weeks ago. His bus had been hit by a train that went about 40mph and pushed him in the bus 200 yards down the street. He was very uncomfortable when he walked out of that bus, especially because of the sheer compression involved – the train was halfway into the bus. He was beaten up pretty badly, and for five years he tried to get healthy in Norway and was not able too. In ten days we changed his condition here in Bellevue.
DENTAL DILEMMAS
He had two friends with him when he came here; a man and his wife. The one had a whiplash. The other one was foggy and only 60 years old. His thinking was unclear. Observing this we opened his mouth and found he had a lower partial where the metal across the midline was hitting the area associated with the part of his brain that dealt with cognitive awareness. His cognitive awareness was starting to deteriorate. For this reason, he was hiding behind his wife who was making all the decisions.
We also checkout out his wife and found she had gone for ten years having pain in her colon. I checked out her mouth and found out 15 years ago they did an extraction of a molar tooth. The whole tissue and the bone were affected. I sent her to surgery here. Two days later, she was not even supposed to see me – she came in to tell me the pain in her colon had disappeared. She went nuts from excitement! Her friends went nuts from excitement! Then, I got a call from
Sweden, someone else who wanted to come and see me as a result of this event. This is how these things spread! So one was a dental case, one was an oral surgery and the third one was a whiplash. You could have done all the electro-acupuncture according to the Voll work. All the acupuncture; all the medicines could have been tried but nothing would have worked, because in the two cases, we removed core causes. In the third case - the whiplash was corrected.
These people were here for ten days, they stayed in Motel 6 – which from where they were coming from was a royal palace and they had a blast. This is where it is at. This is what I want to bring to people; to be able to observe these conditions and not be intimidated by them.
One has to relearn simplicity. You have to learn to pick it up. Biophonics helps you to pick it up. With the splint, I picked up the brain stress patterns. With the cavitations, we picked up high readings from the tissue. With the whiplash, we picked up the sphenoid. So the principle of biophonics helped us to detect what was wrong.
The bus driver went back home to Norway. After he returned home I received a call from someone in Northern Norway who knew him. He called me needing some help. I mentioned to him to go to Oslo, jump on a plane, come here, and we will fix it. (Laughter)
Now, there is one thing that needs to be mentioned regarding the whiplash conditions. There is often a little nasty secondary event that can happen in the more serious cases and this is a reversal of the cervical curve. Again, the x-ray reveals a double insult to the meningeal system. Again, we are setting the stage for stress in the whole organism. To deal with this we have to deal with cervical procedures we have found to be very good. There is a certain methodology of using home traction, combined with home training. This works, provided you first have cleared the cranial mechanism.
It took us ten days to get this man out of the fog. He was in the fog, mentally, when he came in, he was clear when he left. His brain started to function again more optimally. We had figured out the whole modality for him to gradually re-establish a better cervical curve, he had gone from a normal cervical curve to what we call a military spine (the ramrod straight version). Sometimes people go in reverse curve as well! There are still ways and means to deal with this though. This is another long story. I just wanted to point out – if you have a fire on the third floor, do not just hose down the first and second floors – you have to go all the way. There are very precise means to test for this. If you do not get the fire out, it is going to gradually adversely affect you, all depending on your genetic makeup. Whatever is the weakest link is going to get hit first.
So this is the menigeal system. This is the first observation we do in the clinic because it is core. It is the A-B-C’s. It has vast effects on the whole individual. Once we are through with the observations, I usually open the patient’s mouth and see what I can find in there. I look for adverse metal reactions which can have far reaching effects on the body – again, back to the adrenals – toxic effects. I look for missing teeth; I look for cavitations which are basically breakdowns of part of the jawbone from old extractions. There is something rotten in there, so to speak, which has to be dealt with.
We have found out through the excellent work of Louisa Williams,ND and Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt MD., PHD, with their work in mapping out the relationship between the teeth and the organs. I found out their work to be 100% correct. I use their charts to map out the effects. Just today I had a very strong, healthy, Kapha type lady from Montana come in. She oozed of good looks, She was very sick. She complained of fibromylagia, which I consider wastepaper basket diagnosis of symptoms from the 90’s. When you have fibromyalgia, it does not just walk in on you.
There are a series of symptoms which come from a major stressor which has hit your system. Your body is starting to react in an adverse manner. The medical professions conveniently name this syndrome ‘fibromyalgia’ so you can then join the fibromyalia club. Doctors will frolic and give lectures to get more patients to give fibromyalgia pills and medicines too. In reality, with all these people there is usually an underlying factor. It will be in either the structure or toxic chemistry or
combined with some serious emotional breakdown. This is where you look. So we are back to the triangle.
With fibromyalgia as she described, I said, ” let's take a look at it.” She had a very fine spine, a very good gait pattern. Everything was fine – until I got into her mouth. There, lo and behold was a serious disturbance in tooth #30. This tooth is connected to the lungs and intestines, according to Williams and Klinhardt. By testing the corresponding muscles into the lungs and intestines doing therapy localization plus palpation, we established indeed, there was a major disturbance in those two areas. She said she was short of breath, and she had problems in her colon. This confirmed the situation. But it went back to the tooth.
In this case, we were dealing with a possible combination of a dying nerve, faulty crown materials, and some other decaying things that were hitting the circuitry which had been there for the last ten years. This was gradually creating a breakdown not only in her intestines but also in other parts of her body. This was setting up a defense state we might call fibromyalgia. For me, a disease is a state of defense, not just a random occurrence.
To treat her, I called a great dentist who proceeded to clean up the decay in her mouth I expect the fibromyalgia will gradually start to clear as well from her body, given good nutrition.
Though our findings did not relate directly to her meningeal system there was stress affecting it. However, because of her complaints of her condition, we had to look elsewhere.
I look into teeth to a large extent. Very often, I look for problems with old extractions – things which are supposed to be fine and are not. There are specific tests where you can access this information.
Interviewer: When you are testing are you using the biophonic instrument in your office?
Jelstrup: I usually cross-reference the information I get. My primary testing is through biophonics, and biophonics is nothing more than a simple device that helps me to enhance my palpatory skills. Based upon a concept that was developed about 25 years ago, by I believe the department of medical engineering in Colorado, they found the body would exhibit stress in the microwave range. If your joints were stressed, they would exhibit microwave radiation from those points. They determined the radiation to be in the gigahertz range, and we human beings can sense this if we use a simple biofeedback device. You have your hands and your head that sense it through working with a simple biofeedback device. This system we call Biophonics.
Interviewer: Why ‘the phonics? Where is the sound coming from?
Jelstrup: The sound is in the friction plate, touched by the hands. When we elicit friction, we can start to approach making observations, make certain conclusions. This is one testing system. We immediately correlate this with the appropriate muscle testing, or palpation for pain, or leg checks. There are other means of structural observations. We use biophonics as a rapid way of accessing information on, shall we say, an elementary level. We correlate two or three systems of analysis before we arrive at a conclusion.
Interviewer: How long have you been using this system of observation? Jelstrup: I have been doing it now for the last 25 years.
Interviewer: So you are pretty pleased with it?
Jelstrup: I am extremely pleased with the system. As a matter of fact, my colleague Jeanne Kreider teaches this work nationally and internationally. It is good work and it is wide open to whoever wants to learn it.
If you are interested in learning this work go to Jeanne Kreider’s website at http://www.jeannekreider.com.
Interviewer: Now how does bio-phonics relate to CRA (contact reflex analysis*) which I also understand you and Jeanne Kreider use at the Bellevue Wellness Center
Jelstrup: CRA is another system of analysis, developed by Dr. Versandal. He is a chiropractor who observed that when one is in distress; there is a pattern of radiation emitted from the body. You can learn to detect this. You can use applied kinesiological testing procedures to access these points and to read out what the body is saying. I find it a very good analytical system and am using it to quite an extent in the clinic as part of my overall observation. It is not the complete technique we do.
You can access – instead of using applied kinesiological testing, you can use bio-phonics to access these points, which I may call the Versandal points. Versandal spent 40+ years mapping out this system, He got some of his information, I believe, from Dr. Riddler who was a naturopath, as well as from many other chiropractors making similar observations. He put the information together into a system called CRA* and I have nothing but praise for his work. I have great respect for this man. It is a technique but you can take this system and integrate it with other systems. It all depends on how deep you want to go in your observation of the body
There is no doubt in my mind you can get some of the deepest and most profound information from the human being by simple testing methods which only cost a few dollars. It is all in how you are trained to access the body which I will touch on a little bit later in this conversation.
​
GOING BACK TO NORWAY
Back to the teeth, I will tell you a little story. About five years ago I decided to go back to the valley where I grew up as a child in Norway. It is a mountain valley. When I returned to my home there had been a major revolution that had gone through the valley since I had left 60 years ago. They had painted the houses a different color and now they had refrigerators that were all the same colors as their stoves! READ MORE...
​
BACK TO THE TOP
​
​
​
​
​