Top

Medical Intuition: Tap Into the Body’s Wisdom

Medical Intuition: Tap Into the Body’s Wisdom

Getty/Kateryna Kovarzh

Intuitive medicine is a complementary tool for health assessments. It works alongside traditional medicine.

Having our pain or illness recognized and acknowledged can be a huge relief to a person who is suffering from something a doctor can diagnose and put a name on. But what about people whose health issues don’t fit into a tidy box or aren’t well-understood, like chronic fatigue?

We know that people tend to seek out alternatives because they’re dissatisfied with conventional treatment. What medical intuitives offer is permission to acknowledge that their pain and suffering has a source.

Medical intuition may be defined in different ways by different practitioners. But, in general, the approach involves things that are harder for some of us to grasp, like energy fields, clairvoyance, and other extrasensory skills.

Medical intuitives perform an entirely different kind of evaluation than a doctor would. They read a client’s energy field, looking for imbalances and their root causes. It typically stops there. The patient needs to take any further steps with a physician, if the physician will listen.

From EEGs to Energy Medicine

The idea that our bodies emit an energy field that someone can be trained to read can feel radical. Of course, doctors currently perform tests, such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) that read the electrical charges emitted by our brain cells. So, our bodies do emit electrical signals; we just tend to couch them in metaphors like synapses firing, or our nervous system sending signals to the brain. But can a person sense and interpret these signals emanating from another person? Medical intuitives say yes.

Most medical intuitives do their work at a distance either by phone or Internet, and some even prefer to work with just a name and a birth date.

Can Medical Intuition Become Science?

Wendie Colter is the founder of The Practical Path Medical Intuitive Training, a program for wellness professionals who want to learn the skill of intuition. She’s also one of two researchers behind a paper published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine titled “Assessing the Accuracy of Medical Intuition: A Subjective and Exploratory Study.” Her co-author, Dr. Paul J. Mills, is a faculty member in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at the Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego.

This first study was self-selecting and relied on subjective client descriptions about whether their medical intuitive readers seemed correct. It’s marked clearly as an exploratory study. And the numbers are remarkable. Colter’s students performed an assessment on their volunteer clients, and those clients reported to the researchers whether the results were in line with illnesses, past traumas, and even diagnoses from their doctors. The intuitives had a 94 percent accuracy rate when it came to identifying the location of a client’s primary energy blockage or main health issue. When it came to connecting the clients’ life experiences to current health problems, another area of focus for these medical intuitives, they had a 98 percent accuracy rate.

Comprehending Clairvoyance

Medical intuitives access information with what Colter calls the “meta-senses” (or extrasensory perceptions), those beyond our five traditional senses. According to a 2021 survey of professional medical intuitives in the US, the most used meta-senses are:

  • Clairvoyance (clear seeing), which is the ability to see information without using physical eyesight. This is what allows medical intuitives to perform remote viewing on clients who are in different parts of the world.
  • Claircognizance (clear knowing), which is an important one for medical intuitives, giving them the ability to know information without having any prior knowledge (and it is sometimes called telepathy).
  • Clairsentience (clear feeling), which lets intuitives feel other people’s emotional or physical sensations in their own bodies.

A Complement, Not an Alternative

We often conflate the terms complementary and alternative medicine. Alternative medicine is understood to take the place of mainstream biomedicine, while complementary practices can be used side-by-side with whatever the doctor orders. In fact, you might see a medical intuitive get insight into potential energy blockages and suggest that you ask your doctor to focus on a problematic area—while leaving out the part about reading your aura. The stigma attached to intuitive readings is not going to go away any time soon.

But consider this: Colter reveals in her book that a survey distributed to self-identified medical intuitives in the US found that 82 percent already assist licensed healthcare providers, with 22 percent assisting physicians and specialists (such as primary care practitioners, pediatricians, and cardiologists). Finding the root cause of pain and illness is difficult, so in the same way that psychics offer insights to police departments trying to crack tough cases, some doctors use medical intuitives.

Biomedicine can only heal what it can define. But we all deserve recognition of our suffering so we can grant ourselves permission to heal.

Dr. Kat Toups, MD, is board-certified psychiatrist who works with dementia patients at Bay Area Wellness in Walnut Creek, CA. She’s a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the recipient of a master’s degree from the Intuition Medicine Academy in Sausalito, CA, which she attended at first just for personal growth. “I was not planning on using what I was learning in my medical practice,” she said.

“But an unexpected benefit is that it gave me a vocabulary about how to talk to my patients about energy and energy medicine. I noticed this gradually creeping into my interactions with my patients ... I learned ways to talk to my patients about surrounding themselves with different colored light or energy for emotional protection (golden light), dealing with difficult people (pink light), healing (green light), or connections for prayer and meditation (purple light).”


Wendie Colter is the founder of The Practical Path Medical Intuitive Training, an accredited certification program for wellness professionals who want to learn the skill of intuition. Students in her training program come from all aspects of healthcare, whether it’s in biomedicine, allied healthcare, or complementary and alternative practices. She offers workshops for the general public in medical intuition for self-healing as well.

Intuitive medicine

Enjoying this content?

Get this article and many more delivered straight to your inbox weekly.