About

Welcome to my website. My name is Ian Dunbar and I am fourth generation of a medical family. Born in Margate in 1936, I was brought up in Gillingham, Kent, where my father was a family doctor. Educated at Gillingham Grammar School and Aberdeen University, I graduated M.B.Ch.B. in 1961, and practiced in Canada and the Middle East as well as the Home Counties. I was in London during the ‘swinging sixties’ gaining valuable insight into the Cultural Revolution, drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. From my experience I formulated original ideas about the causes of physical symptoms associated with emotional distress. These are documented in my autobiography; it is richly illustrated by case histories.

Fundamental to my philosophy is the fact that we all live in two realities. There is the reality of the everyday world about us and there is the reality of our private thoughts and feelings. Intellectuals talk of objective and subjective reality respectively.

Many doctors and scientists dismiss the world of thoughts and feelings as a figment of the imagination. I, on the other hand, always treated this world as if it was as solid and as potentially measurable as the world about us.

After all, adrenaline makes us feel anxious and apprehensive, opiates give us a feeling of well being, cannabis produces a feeling of reflective detachment while cocaine and amphetamine make us more alert.

For these substances to affect us there must be receptors for them in the nervous system. If there are receptors for them in the nervous system then the body must produce similar substances in order to create the reality of the world of thoughts and feelings.

I developed a theory to explain how all these substances might interact to produce the spectrum of emotions we can feel. It is explained in the video which you can watch by clicking