High above the Avenidas in central Palma, just along from Plaza España, in a tall building looking down over the rushing traffic, the cars and buses, and the people scurrying here and there, sits the Cell Medicum clinic.
Isolated from the intensity of the modern world, but with its finger on the pulse of current medical technology Cell Medicum aims to achieve that delicate balance between ancient and modern wisdom, at the heart of this is its founder Marion Kleeberg. Having met her and spent the morning with her we think it’s possible to say that if one project can encapsulate one person’s life´s work and experience then Cell Medicum might be just that.
Marion Kleeberg moved to Mallorca 17 years ago but when we ask her to tell her story it begins much earlier than that, in Hamburg back when she was pregnant with her son and her touchstone, her beloved grandmother, had passed away.
“My grandmother had lived all her life using herbs and never saw a doctor. She intuitively knew a lot about how to keep healthy. We had many conventional doctors in our family, but I would always go to my grandmother, and she would give me a hug and some tea or some herbs, some nice words, and then I would feel better.
I knew that she knew what she was doing but all my other family members would laugh at her. I felt a bit ashamed and I felt as if I was stuck in the middle. When my grandmother died I was pregnant and I still had a lot of questions for her. The doctors told me I was at risk because of my age, I was 30. I wanted to do the best that I could with my food and my lifestyle, and I was sure that she would know but I couldn’t ask her. So I started to study.”
Marion smiles, and pours the first of several cups of tea. Her office is simply decorated with a few well-chosen Asian artefacts. Her manner is as soft and gentle as the white linen she is dressed in. She didn’t get into health care as a business; it was in fact more of a calling.
Her actual business she says was the importation of Bonsai trees. She and her husband began to bring them to Europe in the Seventies after he had developed a passion for the perfectly formed miniature trees.
She recalled the first time that she laid eyes on one, “It was the most exciting thing, a little tree, a symbol of nature. I was fascinated to see how it would grow. You have to take care of them every day you know.
The trees were at least a century old and there you would have it on a table! It opened up to me a world I had never known before”. With the Bonsai trees came an instant interest in the culture of Japan and then of Asia.
She tells us about the exploitation of the Bonsai business by cheaper importers who just washed the soil from the roots of the trees and shipped them in and re-potted them for a quick profit.
“The little trees couldn’t have lived,” she sighs, with a note of sadness in her voice. Marion began to experience stress, “I had put all my love in, and to see what happened made me feel very down”.
To cope she explored meditation and then yoga, and one thing led to another. “I had a realisation that I knew that the tree business was not something I could do. I had this vision of lying underneath the Bonsai tree, and relaxing.
I knew other people were suffering similarly and I thought that I would like to help them. I felt that life was moving too fast and I wanted to help people to slow down.”
Cell Medicum brings together the conventional and alternative branches of medicine alongside the innovative and groundbreaking. Marion calls it ‘Integrated Medicine’. “More and more there are two sides, some people will never accept anything that is not conventional medicine, that which is not evidence based, and will always say that the “white coats” are right, so the staff are all qualified doctors, but they are also trained and educated in other disciplines which means they will treat the underlying causes of illnesses, not just the symptoms”.
We discuss how forty years ago when she started her own path she needed to find a book or an expert to give her answers to her questions, but these days we all have an enormous encyclopaedia at our fingertips, the internet. “People do a lot of research now, and they are more open minded about solutions to health problems.
If you think about it when I was a child we would have our doctor who would come to the house. He would know about our family, about our lifestyle, about our community, and he would be able to advise on how to deal with a problem. But nowadays we have a disconnection between us and ourselves, we have lost our own wisdom, we sit in waiting rooms with 20 or 30 other people waiting to be seen for two minutes by a doctor who doesn’t know us, and will only write us a prescription for a drug to mask a symptom, not address the cause”.
The current state of modern healthcare is alarming, but not all of us can afford to go private, so what can we do? “Listen to your bodies,” Marion replies, “learn about how you are feeling, and believe in yourselves a little more. Look at the internet, research your options. There are things you can do for yourself, there are many things you can do to improve your own lifestyle“. That is true, and many are suggested within the pages of the Nourish The Guide website, taking responsibility for our own health is step number one.
“The illnesses you can develop vary much more than forty years ago: we have a lot of toxic things in our lives and we are living differently. We are not built for the amount of electronic information that we receive every day, we are even falling asleep stressed and this is damaging our immune systems. Conventional doctors don’t yet know how to handle this and they are being disempowered by a system where they don’t have the time to properly talk to their patients anymore. It’s a system under pressure. Preventing illness today is very important”.
The first port of call when you make an appointment at Cell Medicum is to meet Marion. Her role is to connect and to interpret the services that the clinic offers in the best way for the individual. The consultation will continue with a blood, hair and gut analysis as necessary.
“I want to understand what the client needs, then when I have a picture we can put together a treatment plan for them”. The range of treatments Cell Medicum can offer is impressive, and the types of ailments it can treat, but what is really interesting is the Pure Cell Energy Programme, but before we can discuss that you have to have a short lesson in human biology: within the human body in many, but not all cells, you will find something called “Mitochondria”.
They are a vital component of the cell as they produce the energy without which the cell cannot function properly. The amount of mitochondria in a cell depends on how much energy that cell needs to produce. Muscle cells, for example, have many mitochondria because they need to produce energy to move the body. Red blood cells, which carry oxygen to other cells, have none; they do not need to produce energy. The mitochondria also store calcium, which maintains homeostasis of calcium levels in the cell. They regulate the cell’s metabolism and have roles in apoptosis (controlled cell death), cell signalling, and thermogenesis (heat production).
Malfunctioning mitochondrial cells are the foundation of many physical diseases and emotional and psychological problems within the body. The last two years of Nobel Peace prizes have been awarded to scientists in this field of medicine. Last year’s winner proved that the mitochondria have a way of recycling themselves when they experience stimulation. By stimulating the renewal of these cells the body can be healed of and avoid illnesses. This is the basis of Cell Medicum’s ‘Pure Cell Energy Programme’.
Just like the miniaturised and perfectly formed Bonsai trees which Marion fell in love with so many years ago, so she now works with the smallest and most powerful of all things, the mitochondrial cell.
The programme is a four step process which is repeated up to ten times throughout a month. We ask Marion if it is normal for clients to do this in the winter time, “It’s the perfect time to do it, when perhaps you have less to do in your working life and you can take the time to spend on yourself. The programme is being used by people suffering from various illnesses, sports people and persons who wish to prevent illness as well.” The key therapy used was discovered by a Greek physicist and mathematician, Professor Pappas.
He observed the spontaneous recovery by a patient from a chronic illness after being hit directly by a lightning! He began to research the physical reactions within somatic cells.
His observations led to a series of new discoveries about the foundation of all living organisms and about the positive effects of “Papimi” on the biochemical and electrical processes in the somatic cell. “When your body is under pressure it can experience oxiditive stress”. Oxiditive? You mean your cells get rusty? “Yes, exactly, and with this treatment, you can clean and renew your cells, it’s amazing”. (P.S. The treatment does not involve being hit by lightning. It’s based on the principle of IIT (ion-induction therapy) which is induced, pulsed electromagnetic oscillation. It takes place clothed and is non-invasive and very gentle).
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the therapies that Cell Medicum can offer. With the collaboration of Clinica Rotger where they use the specialist accommodation and care staff to support patients Cell Medicum is very active in helping any type of addict to break their habits (drugs, food, alcohol, behaviours, etc) through the use of neuroelectric stimulation therapy (used by many famous rock stars to break their own reliance on drugs).
Other Cell Medicum treatments that are in demand are pain management, PRP (where your blood plasma is separated to regenerate bone), infusions, and treatments for arthritis, leaky gut, detoxification and allergy work. “The therapies also extend to affecting emotional conditions as well such as depression which can be treated very effectively using Papimi”.
“It’s quite typical at the beginning of a new year we see clients beginning to think about what they can do to take better care of themselves. It is a quieter time of the year for many people so they perhaps will give themselves the time to do the ‘Pure Cell Energy Programme’. That is more than thirty hours of treatment so we have a lot of time with them and we do a lot of work on their bodies and their minds, it is a great opportunity to reset”. Even in paradise, modern life happens and we all can benefit from slowing down and taking better care of ourselves. “A lot of people come to see us suffering from physical and emotional exhaustion”.
It is obvious to see why so many of Marion’s clients rave about her and the clinic, her kind and sincere manner make it easy to talk about problems or concerns, and what a luxury even that is. How does she take care of herself? Marion lives close to the sea in Portals and swims every day throughout the year. She swears by this practice to stimulate her immune system.
Then she meditates. “The first hour of the day is mine, when the sun comes up I swim with my face into the sun, it is beautiful.” For a Hamburg girl this is pretty special. She stays late in the office most days, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are the days for the Cell Power Up with Tuesdays and Thursdays the days for other patients. “We always see people by appointment, and then we have the time for everyone. Utilising what we have on offer in our clinic we can alter the metabolism, it’s an incredible possibility for someone who really wants to change their physical or emotional condition”.
Surrounded by icons and art from the Asian cultures, high above the city streets there is a woman quietly and calmly blazing a trail for innovative and intelligent health care, weaving together cutting-edge technology with a grandmother’s knowledge. Her role as she sees it is to communicate with and connect her clients to the right doctors and therapies for them. “When people look at conventional medicine and the alternative possibilities, they will have questions about both.
We have to have an integrative medicine, the best from all things: from the natural, the Chinese and the conventional medicine. If you fight then you lose energy, it is better to understand. Words can be medicine. Love can be medicine”.
Written by Vicky McLeod, Phoenix Media Mallorca