About us

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Oklahoma Healing Arts Institute (OHAI) is a state-licensed vocational school offering a variety of natural healing arts classes leading to certificates of completion.

The school is the achievement of a dream that began with the late Clark Manning, one of the first Westerners trained in true Chinese Medicine here in America.  Clark was a visionary.  Consequently, when he came back to Oklahoma to set up his school, he named it Midwestern School of Inner Wisdom and offered courses far beyond just Chinese healing arts..

Clark had already published a groundbreaking book entitled,  Bio-Energetic Medicine East and West:  Acupuncture and Homeopathy.  He and his co-author, Louis J. Vanrenen, often kidded that they, like the Louis and Clark of the famous real estate  expedition,  were blazing trails into what was then unknown territory in the world of modern American medicine.  

Between the pages of this amazing book, Clark had the opportunity to explore the history and philosophical basis of ancient healing arts like Chinese Medicine and India's Ayurvedic medicine, both complete medical systems based on ideas that are not bio-chemical in nature.  Then and now they are based on invisible, universal energy, chi or prana.  Clark traced the history of Western Medicine from  Hippocrates to the present day, focusing on those who carried the torch of energy as the basis of healing.  

He pondered the philosophy of alchemist Paracelsus who believed man was both material and non-material in nature.  He made special note to discuss Franz Mesmer, who, just prior to the French Revolution, harnessed the non-material essence he called animal magnetism that runs through the Universe and through all of us to heal people by the thousands.   This invisible essence, to this day, is ignored by modern bio-chemically based allopathic medicine whose practitioners still believe we are just machines.   

Ironically, Nobel Prize winning quantum physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein called this universal energy field "the Matrix" and went so far as to acknowledge the existence of a superior consciousness that is the maker of us all.  Clark also included a major discussion about Rupert Sheldrake, who had just emerged on the scene when the book was being written.  Sheldrake, a biologist at Cambridge University, formulated the idea of "morphogenetic fields", which expands the understanding of how the essence within the matrix actually works.   

Clark's student days in Boston coincided with the re-emergence of homeopathy in the historic epicenter of the teaching and practice of this amazing healing art in America.  As a result, in the years spent writing the book, he was experiencing a total immersion course in ideas that now are on the frontier of where the practice of medicine is now going.

At the time Clark studied Chinese Medicine, his teachers included the late Dr. James Tin-Yau So (considered the father of American Acupuncture), Kiiko Matsumoto (Founder of Kiiko Style Acupuncture) and Ted J. Kaptchuk, O.M.D., whose ideas had not been influenced by Western medical philosophy.   We have noticed that with the growing popularity of Chinese Medicine, and the eagerness of the medical establishment to mold it in its own image, students are now taught more and more allopathic medical topics and, in the process, slowly moving away for the pure Chinese philosophy that made this ancient healing art so perfect. By law, we are not required to teach-to-test to meet national certification (NCCAOM) requirements which now boils down to 80 of the test related to allopathic medicine.  That makes it possible for us to avoid forcing our students to apply for costly student loans. As a result, students graduate debt free.