Applied Kinesiology

Applied Kinesiology is the study of movement and muscle function as it relates to the correction of whole body physiology.  

Dr George Goodhart, Michigan chiropractor (1918-2008), discovered a connection between muscle group strength and organs function. His work has been one of the most important contributions to the restoration of health - naturally.

This connection gives an opportunity to make a judgement as to the health of an organ by testing its associated muscle. The theory being that if the muscle is not functioning optimally then there will be a mirroring of that situation in the associated organ as well. This relates to homologous neural connections communicating intimately throughout their life.

3 componentsGoodhart developed the notion of the triune view of the body. For a person to function well, 3 large classes of functions have to work well:

Structural    The physical stuff - see subluxationsEmotional    Whenever we are injured, unwell or in pain, emotions are involved - see emotionChemical     Our body is made of chemicals we need - see nutrition

These 3 components of our nature, work intimately together. This means that if you have an emotional upset, that this can also be impact physically by alterations in posture, body language

if you like, and also in changes in body chemistry. For example a person with depression will often be in a flexed or crumpled posture and their neurotransmitter chemical, serotonin levels will be low in the blood.

5 functionsThe other major view relates to the anatomy of the intervertebral foramen. This is the opening in the spine where the spinal nerve roots pass through to exit the spine  We now know there are  five vital functions which pass through this intervertebral foramina. These are:

1.     nerve control and reflexes (N), controlling many tissues of the body2.     lymph node reflex (NL) assists in the drainage of toxins & debris3.     vascular nerve reflex (NV) assists with nutrient flow4.     acupuncture meridian reflex (AMC) quick automatic responses5.     cerebral spinal fluid reflex (CSF) vital for brain and spinal cord function

All these features are summarised in the diagram at left..

Applied Kinesiology can be divided into two distinct parts.

One is an aid to diagnosis. "Muscle testing" is used to help analysing what is functioning abnormally. This is really a neurological test. It assesses the ability of the nerves to control and co-ordinate not only the muscle, but also indirectly related organ functions as well. There can also be a problem with the nervous system, the lymphatic drainage, the vascular supply to a muscle or organ, a nutritional excess or deficiency, a problem with the cranial-sacral functional linkage - TMJ mechanism, an imbalance in the meridian system or a host of other problems.

Testing individual muscles in an accurate manner and determining what effects the relative strength of the muscle when combined with knowledge of the basic mechanics and physiological functioning of the body helps to make a more accurately diagnosis of what is going wrong. An accurate diagnosis can also be the result of a successful treatment phase. In that what worked to restore function defines the diagnosis very accurately.

The second part of Applied Kinesiology involves the treatment phase. Practitioners have adapted different treatment methods to the problems that have been diagnosed. From

nutrition to chiropractic adjustment to cranial bone adjustment to acupuncture (meridian therapies) to myofascial techniques to nervous system coordination procedures to some of the latest theories in medicine involving control of the nervous system may be employed to balance the malfunction found in a patient.

Applied Kinesiology borrows from many different disciplines including:

      chiropractic      acupuncture and auriculotherapy      nutrition      emotional release      muscle  and fascial retraining      neurology

Through the use of accurate muscle testing, in addition to practitioner training, knowledge from other sources and experience, all this, helps direct therapeutic care to a patient's individual needs.

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) 

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights; But your ears thirst for the sound of your hearts knowledge.

- Kahlil Gibran 

EFT is a life and health changing process. It is important that you read the whole of this page to understand why I just said that. Remember to follow the links so that you can make changes to our life with confidence in the process.EFT is the off shoot of the work of Dr. Roger Callahan MD. This work was further developed by Gary Craig who has web site http://www.emofree.com/ The basic method is written at http://www.emofree.com/eft/recipe.html and is worth reading if you are going to have a go at helping yourself with emotional glitches that are having a detrimental effect on your life.

Gary Craig is an engineer by profession and NOT a health practitioner of any sort. He is a registered minister of religion, making it possible for him to do this work without formal medical training. He is devoted to spreading the word about the usefulness of EFT for making lives better.

EFT is NOT a chiropractic technique. It is NOT a method of psychologists and psychiatrists,

though some of their ranks do attest to its usefulness. It is freely taught to anyone who wants to learn. Many health care professionals use the method, from psychiatrists and psychologists to medical and chiropractic practitioners as well as people without any health care training. This is a starting place for you to help yourself. I highly recommend the manual to everyone wanting to help themselves and their families."Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is an emotional, needle free version of acupuncture that is based on new discoveries regarding the connection between your body's subtle energies, your emotions, and your health."                                                                                         Gary Craig

I find EFT more user friendly than NET but I  integrate both methods into my work.

I have found EFT to be of use in all ages from about 7 years to 80+.

For its uses, I can only repeat Gary Craig's words. "Try it for everything."

EFT can look strange. But when done with specificity and accuracy, it can change lives and make life more comfortable and functional.

EFT is on of those methods that if you try it, it may help and very profoundly. If it seemingly doesn't have dramatic results for you, it doesn't mean that nothing has changed, it just means you haven't been working on the "key" issue that helps resolve the problem.

There are some situations where the emotions are the key to resolving health problems and structural instabilities. These can usually be rapidly resolved. It does require patient participation to a greater extent than with the other things I do.

With EFT, patients need to be full participants otherwise the whole effort can be just a waste of time and money.

EFT works with integrating the body's acupuncture (meridian) system with the Limbic portion of the Nervous System to resolve the stuck emotional patterns using somatic stimuli - tapping on acupuncture points while maintaining intense thoughts, memories, feelings of the causative incident. (See diagram at left). The effectiveness of each "round" of tapping is patient evaluated

and scored on a 0 to 10 scale for intensity. If it is not a 0 then another angle on the issue is explored either verbally, from memory to recall of feelings that the patient feels are related.

Do you think all this stuff about emotions is just all in your head?

Think again!

"Dr. Bruce Lipton, a forerunner in the field of epigenetics and The New Biology, has carefully documented how emotions are one of the most important factors in your health. According to his research, the controlling factor in deciding what your genes express -- in deciding how your future health will play out -- is not your genes, your family history or even the strength of your immune system. It is YOUR MIND."4

Before you go anywhere else on the WWW, take a look at Bruce Lipton's talk on epigenetics Part 1 and part 2 for a life changing view of how you cells actually work. 

Lipton's work is life changing with profound implications for our health and your life. I suggest you don't ignore him!

For a related topic see NET

SETSimple Energy Techniques (SET) is an offshoot of the EFT process. It is the work of Steve Wells and Dr. David Lake - www.eftdownunder.com . The basics of this method id the stimulation of at least 3 to 4 or the meridians while you experience or recall the emotion, problem or even just the feeling of the problem you wish to change. It is much less complicated and works just as well as EFT and NET.

For further reading on this method, see: http://www.eftdownunder.com/docs/SET0709.pdf

Here are some articles that show evidence that there is a meridian energy system that we can influence our physiology through.(Compiled by Fred Gallo, PhD)

1        Sources of Chinese Tradition –Vol. 1 WM Theodore DeBary, Irene Bloom          Columbia University Press NY, NY 19992        Scientific Basis of Acupuncture – B. Pomeranz Acupuncture textbook and Atlas,          NY, NY 19873         Vibrational Medicine for the 21 Century- Richard Gerber M.D. Eagle Brook, NY,          NY 2000 – "Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine"4.       "Can Western Science Provide A Foundation For Acupuncture"- Beverly Rubik,          PhD.Alternative Therapies Magazine September 1995,Vol. 1 Number 45        Vibrational Medicine for the 21 Century- Richard Gerber M.D. Eagle Brook,

          NY, NY 2000 "Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine"6        What is 'Healing Energy'?The Scientific Basis Oschman, James L. (Oct. 1996-          Jan. 1998) . J of Bodywork and Movement Therapies.(Series of articles.)          Part 1-6 . Kreisand Boesch, 19947        Giraud-Guille, M.M. (1988) " Twisted plywood architecture of collagen fibrils          in human compact bone osteons" Calcif.Tissue Int., 42:167-180.8        Knight,D. and Feng, D. (1993). Collagens as liquid crystals, British Association for          the Advancement of Science, Chemistry Session: Molecular Self-Assembly in          Science and Life, Sept. 1, Keele.

Research papersEFT is an emerging science and has some scientific examination of the results that EFT practitioners see on a daily basis. It is nice to see the validation of this wonderful method of changing lives.5

http://eftuniverse.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18&Itemid=11

Bowen Technique

Prof Bruce McEwen:         “… they will not think about stress in the same way as before, because ‘stress’ is a term that is over-used and I think misunderstood because of its ambiguity, and what we’re trying to present is a notion of how the body attempts to adapt in the face of stress, but at the same time, if the same system that protects us is over-used, it results in wear and tear that can cause damage, and this we call allostasis, and allostatic load.

Dr Norman Swan:        “Allostasis is essentially this balance - that stress is often thought of as all bad, and your argument is, as is the argument of others, that there are good and bad things about stress. In other words, we need stress to survive, and it’s just when the balance is out that things go awry.

Prof Bruce McEwen:   "That’s right. I think life would be pretty dull if we didn’t have stress or challenges in our life. I sort of like to use the more neutral word ‘challenge’, and our bodies are designed to help us meet a challenge, meet changing environments; something happens, we react to it. We learn something from it; if we’re injured in the classic fight or flight response: an antelope running away from a predator - if the animal is injured and still survives, then, as we discovered a number of years ago, immune function is actually enhanced by the stress response and this helps the animal fight the infection and repair the wound. In the same sense, the stress hormones help the animal remember a place to avoid in the future, to stay out of trouble, so it actually helps memory function. It helps a lot of things that help us to adapt. At the same time, the system when it’s over-used, or not properly turned off, over a long period of time can create a wear and tear on the body which we call allostatic load.” [emphasis added]

The brain’s response to allostatic load is what we seek to correct when using the chiropractic technique called Jennetics®.

In my experience it is the “not properly turned off” stress responses of the body that add to what is called the “Stress Index”. The Stress Index is an indirect measure of the brain’s stress mode activity level. The way it seems to work is that when we get stressed, our body under the direction of the Nervous System switches into a stress mode to enable us to cope with the things that stresses us. The problem seems to be that when the stressing event is resolved, at some point the nervous system decides that it is better, or more efficient to stay in stress mode of behaviour just a bit. After all it has experienced increased levels of stress, so it may as well just be ready for stress when the next bit of bad stress comes along. That "bit" is most often below the threshold of what we consciously recognise.

As the next stress arrives we now get a slightly exaggerated, stronger response to the new stressing event and with this seems to come a response that makes the body switch imperceptibly just that little bit further into stress mode of brain organisation. This process accumulates, "habituates", as life progresses, culminating in a Stress Index that can be measured.

Prof Bruce McEwen continues:     “Stress as I think of it, has of course two [components]. We often call them good stress and bad stress. The bad stress is something that I prefer to call "stressed out", which I think means the bad stress being in a state of anxiety, frustration, perhaps anger, feeling fatigued, overworked, you name it. This is a reflection of a prolonged or chronic state, which is most certainly accompanied by elevated levels of allostatic load.

……..  Well, the fact that if you become stressed out, you’re gong to lose sleep at night, your physiology is going to respond. For example, we know that if you lose sleep at night, your cortisol goes up, your glucose goes up. Some of these allostatic load measures are elevated and you can very quickly overcome it if you begin to get good sleep. Many people go through life with less than perhaps optimal levels of sleep, and are probably suffering from a chronic state of sleep deprivation, which among other things, can make  them hungrier, so they’re going to eat more of what we call comfort foods, which is going to load their bodies with calories, and the whole thing feeds forward on itself. People who are stressed out are often going to neglect good lifestyle practices. They may smoke, they may drink more than normal, they may eat more than normal and they may neglect regular exercise. So stress or being stressed out has an effect on lifestyle patterns that in turn add to the allostatic load.”Stress seems to not end with the conclusion of early childhood incidents. The effects of these can also linger and have an effect on health in later years. (7) This is a common thread that can be found through probing for those "painful" incidents that we all seem to experience from our elders or even our peers. See also NET and EFT as these can help with emotional issues. Stress is known to detrimentally influence the immune system and is implicated in the body's ability to activate natural killer cells. Stress is also implicated in 75% of Alzheimers patients. Repeated stressful events also contribute to this effect.11

"The consecutive stages of the multistep immune reactions are either inhibited or enhanced as a result of previous or parallel stress experiences, depending on the type and intensity of the stressor and on the animal species, strain, sex, or age. In general, both stressors and depression are associated with the decreased cytotoxic T-cell and natural-killer-cell activities that affect processes such as immune surveillance of tumours, and with the events that modulate development and accumulation of somatic mutations and genomic instability." (10)So the greater the stress intensity, the greater the number of events and has implications not only for our responses to infection defence but also to the body's response to cancer.