Healing in Croatia: Plasma Saal (1/2)
The posts on this blog are based on my personal experience and are not medical advice.
Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to spend almost four weeks in Zagreb, Croatia receiving treatment from the PlasmaSaal team. The team of four is run by Aaron who became interested in medicine after contracting a seemingly incurable parasite that migrated to his brain. Doctors told him that there was no safe pharmaceutical for him to take. Any pill might carry the side-effect of death, and thus there was no remedy. He eventually found a machine called the Plasma Wave, a German-made machine based on technology that’s nearly 100 years old. They have since expanded into using other machines that sit between Western Medicine and alternative medicine as well as hypnosis-talk therapy and aerial yoga.
I’ve now had a month to reflect on the experience and I wanted to share my thoughts with anyone considering a visit:
1) Zagreb is a marvellous city for medical tourism. Small enough that getting around is easy, but large enough that it feels worldly and upbeat. The city is beautiful. The people are beautiful. It's two hours away from the coast. It has to be one of the most underrated cities in Europe.
2) Something is happening in the city. I had Uber drivers (I think you need to be licensed as a cab driver in Zagreb) telling me about their meditation experiences. I did yoga almost every day. There seems to be a disproportionately high percentage of the population interested in wellness and health. There are lots of yoga centers.
3) Upon coming back to San Francisco I made a bunch of large decisions. I kept wanting to say, "I decided when I was in Croatia to do X." But the truth is that I made a lot of important decisions while I was in Croatia.
4) Two weeks into working with the PlasmaSaal team I began noticing changes in my body. I began having intense sensations in my chest and the region below my belly button. In Indian and Chinese medicine these are called the 2nd and 4th chakras, or the sacral and heart chakras, respectively. The sacral chakra governs emotions, sexuality, and creativity. The heart chakra, as you might expect, governs love. So after days of visiting Plasma Saal and getting their treatments, going to a reiki healer daily, and doing yoga, I was feeling love and sexual emotions throughout the day. The nerves in those two regions of my body (the upper half of my chest, primarily in the front of the body, and a triangular region from my belly button, to my hips, and down to my perineum), were vibrating on a different frequency. And this lasted for days on end.
5) Like any effective modality that works on chronic problems in the body, the machines they use at PlamsaSaal seem to both 1) work on fixing the problem and 2) show you what life could be like without the problem—and thus give you hope and encouragement to keep healing. In other words, part of the value is the momentum that it gives you to work with other modalities. This is the same argument that mental health clinicians give for using MDMA in their therapy—that deeply depressed patients can be reminded of what life is like outside of their depression and they can have the momentum and encouragement to work out of their rut.
6) Why did I go all the way to Croatia. Two reasons: 1) Not many people in the world are using this technology (I found a guy in Prague who doesn’t speak any English, and PlasmaSaal) and 2) healthcare in the US is insanely expensive. The dollar is $trong in Croatia.
7) Comparisons to neurofeedback: the obvious similarity is that you are using an expensive machine for an hour a day. You cannot use the machine for the rest of your life. So just as with neurofeedback, you need to take the feelings and learnings from working with the PlasmaSaal machines and integrate them into your life when you are not using the modality.