Right from when she was seven years old, Dr Hanan Selim wanted to heal the world. “With my seven-year-old child’s mind, I said to myself: When I grow up, I’m going to give medicines to everybody to make them feel better,” she remembers. Today, as an influential and widely recognised healthcare practitioner, Dr Selim has more than achieved her goal.
Born in Egypt, she was raised in the USA from the age of seven. Even then, she was disturbed by the misfortune she witnessed in Egypt. “I’d see the suffering of children who were actually my age, who didn’t have the advantages to healthcare and medicine to get better,” she recalls. This is what formed the initial trigger that made her want to study medicine.
After attending Grammar School, Dr Hanan Selim obtained a PhD in Clinical Pharmacology from St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and specialised as a chemotherapy pharmacist in Manhattan. She worked with various formularies and products, and held positions at many prestigious hospitals. She was also a member of the P&T (Pharmacy and Therapeutics) Committee, which includes doctors, physicians, pharmacists, hospital administrators, nurses and various other healthcare practitioners and staff.
With my seven-year-old child’s mind, I said to myself: When I grow up, I’m going to give medicines to everybody to make them feel better
“Why is This Happening?”
Interestingly, it was during these years that Dr Selim experienced something that would start her on her long journey toward inventing Healology. “As an accomplished healthcare professional, I was helping my own patients and clients with these wonderful formularies and protocols, with the approval and the help, of course, of my team members in the committee,” she explains. But there was something strange: many of these patients weren’t permanently cured.
“I would see these people who had diabetes come back with gangrene,” she remembers, adding that some of them even underwent limb amputation due to the life-threatening nature of this complication. And it wasn’t just diabetes patients: “You would see a cancer patient who had been doing so well on chemotherapy, but they’d come back [and be told they have] five, six months to a year to live… Or I would see an obese patient come back needing a ventilator because they couldn’t breathe…”
Even as she continued to do her best to treat them, she couldn’t stop wondering: “Why is this happening? Why are they doing so well, but yet come back later, with a worse condition?” What she did not know was that she would soon face something similar.
The Doctor Becomes the Patient
Some years later, Dr Hanan Selim found herself suffering from a variety of conditions—obesity, high blood pressure, borderline diabetes—when she was given some damaging news. She had developed precancerous cells in her ovaries. Needless to say, her first refuge was in a familiar field. “I went to what I knew best, right? Conventional medicine,” she says. “Unfortunately, it didn’t help me at the time. As a matter of fact, my cancer indicators went from 70 to 700 in a small amount of time—within three months.”
That was when she began looking for what she now calls the ‘root cause’. “This led me on a journey to find out what was actually happening behind the scenes—what was not showing up on my diagnostic tools, whether that is my MRI, my blood work, my X-ray results, and so on.” So she decided to delve into the other end of the spectrum: “Alternative medicine, or methods like NLP, mindfulness, energy healing… I found that it helped a little bit, slowly, but it did not reflect on my lab reports,” she explains. That was not something she found satisfactory.
Disillusioned with the conventional treatments she received, Dr Selim spent a lot of time and money learning and mastering different alternative methods. “That didn’t work for me,” she says wryly. “Being a scientist and coming from a science mindset, numbers mean everything to me. I was actually looking for a methodology from start to finish. Something that would not only help me on the physical aspects and the mindset, but which would actually reflect in measurable results that I could see like those in a lab test or an MRI or an X-ray.”
It was thinking along these lines that led to her watershed moment.
I’ve taken existing processes used by millions every day, and I’ve evolved it into a holistic natural process that aims to get the same clinical results in health and wellness
Reconciling the Two Worlds
Dr Selim outlines her theory: “So far, we’ve been dealing with the mind using alternative methods. And we’ve been dealing with the body using conventional methods or conventional medicine.” But there is a problem: “We’re acting as if they’ve both come from two different worlds—we are actually creating two different worlds of mind and body. That just doesn’t work.”
She believes this disconnect is what causes what she calls ‘yo-yo effects’—the wild ups and downs in a patient’s health cycles, which is something she has witnessed “in my own personal experience as well as that of my clients and in my teaching.”
She further elaborates that every ailment, disorder or illness arises from its root cause, which Dr Selim terms ‘chronic bio-disruptors’. “These are the silent stressors in our environment that affect us psychologically and physically,” she clarifies, giving diabetes as an example. “It does not appear at the doctor’s office with a diagnosis. It’s been in the works for 10 to 15 years as pre-diabetes.” Similarly, she notes that most such ailments don’t just appear out of the blue but are actually the results of years of these ‘bio-disruptors’ affecting our bodies, our minds and our organs.
It was this realisation that began her journey towards bridging these two worlds and innovating a remarkable new solution.
Second Chances and the Birth of Healology
Eventually, the journey towards healing herself and finding a solution took more than a decade, and Dr Selim documented this journey in a book, Second Chances: An Uncommon Guide To Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Health and Superhuman Performance. “It’s pretty much the roadmap to my own journey, from being this accomplished healthcare professional, who became the patient and was able to reverse these conditions,” she explains. “[Reversing] endometriosis, losing 30 kgs in 10 months, reversing my cancer indicators, getting over polycystic ovarian syndrome without invasive measures… All of this was unheard of.”
In addition, the book also outlines all the steps and the tools she used and explains what her discovery is worth. For interested readers, it also offers templates and details of how they could implement Dr Selim’s newly discovered techniques for their own health and wellbeing. These techniques, which bridge what Dr Selim calls the ‘mind-body-organ connection’, form the core of her healthcare programme, called Healology.
So what exactly is it? “I’ve taken existing processes—conventional methods—used by millions every day, and I’ve evolved it into a holistic natural process that aims to get the same clinical results in health and wellness. This system has evidence-based tools to test and measure your progress. We also give natural prescriptions at the end of the process of diagnosis and prognosis in the self-healing process. These have nothing to do with drugs or invasive measures and all to do with getting to the root cause, healing it and supporting the immune system to auto-regulate you back to health by boosting your innate resources—what we call ‘DNA Excellence’.”
“It’s a program that works with the mind-brain-organ connection without drugs and surgery, and it gets results without the side effects we see in conventional medicine or the ‘yo-yo’ effects we see in alternative methods alone. It’s a start-to-finish process with measurable tools like in conventional medicine as well the healing aspect of alternative medicine,” she says. “Most people who show up for Healology already know they have a problem and have tried many methods that don’t work. We find and address the root cause from day one—causes that are not found on X-rays or lab work but are still actively causing havoc.”
At this point, she sheds light on one particular distinction many people seem to be concerned about: is Healology only for health issues, or is it more to do with wellness? “Health is part of wellness, not exclusive of it,” she says. “So, while Healology is all about health, it also includes how to increase your finances, improve your relationships, your lifestyle, and how to benefit your family, business and career. Once you are able to use Healology as the mind-brain-organ connection, you’ll be able to leverage it in all parts of the wheel of wellness. And of course, that is inclusive of health.” In other words, Healology does helps your health and wellbeing, but, done right, “it also has a ripple effect in every area of your life.”
The wellness industry was worth $4.2 trillion in 2018 itself. By 2022, ten key wellness sectors are expected to grow almost by 8%
Healing the World
Ever since the launch of the Healology Wellness Programme, Dr Selim has been catapulted to the forefront of the health and wellness space. She is also popularly known as the Pharmacist of the Future. Over the past years, Dr Selim has worked with luminaries including iconic TV show host Larry King; American poet, rapper, filmmaker, and spoken-word artist Prince Ea; American physician Dr David Katz and more. Her work has also helped numerous people all over the world overcome their illnesses, heal their mind and maximise their productivity. “People are so happy and amazed at the lifelong, lasting recovery,” reveals Dr Selim.
She has also received numerous awards for her work. This year, at the World Health and Wellness Congress and Awards, she received the Healthcare Leadership Award, something that means a lot to her. “I really have been very fortunate to have this research that has got me this kind of recognition,” she humbly admits. “It’s actually helping me leverage that and take my system across the world.”
Once you are able to use Healology as the ‘mind-brain-organ connection’, you’ll be able to leverage it in all parts of the wheel of wellness”
‘I Want it to be a Household Name’
Since 2012, she has been living in Dubai with her family and three children: “Two boys and one girl; they’re teenagers now, in college, studying to be a doctor, an artist and a lawyer,” she smiles fondly. She has also started a company called Healology Wellness, for which she has big plans. “I want it to be a global brand, recognised like NLP and other methodologies that have their own certifications. I want it to be a household name. I want it to be an option for people across the world—a start-to-finish process they can use to leverage their health and wellbeing.”
She recognises that the wellness sector is booming currently: “According to the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), the wellness industry was worth $4.2 trillion in 2018 itself. By 2022, ten key wellness sectors are expected to grow almost by 8% as consumers adopt different wellness lifestyles,” she says. “This just shows that people are actually out there, looking and searching for all these modalities to start taking back control.”
She emphasises that it is very important for people to work on their wellness as well as their health. Not having a proper wellness mindset, according to her, could cause a lot of limitations. “It could actually affect their full potential, whether in their business or their relationships, their family…on many, many levels. So I think the root cause is present in the mindset, like a block, not allowing us to achieve the goals we’re looking for.”
That is why it is very important for people to change their mindsets, and attack their problems from the root. She quotes Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So, if you want new results and new outcomes in your life, in your relationships, in your finances, in your business, and in your health and wellbeing, you have to step out of your comfort zone. Do something different to get something different in that area of your life,” she concludes.
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