Source: Linda Weber, Natural Health
Magazine July/August,
1998.
FIVE MILLION AMERICANS SUFFER FOOD ALLERGIES. A revolutionary treatment
detects them by testing the strength of your arm while you hold a
suspected food. After a 15-minute acupressure treatment, you're cured -
for good !
IT'S 8 A.M. AND DR. ELLEN CUTLER'S first patient
of the day, husky Robert Peterson lies face up on an examining table in
Cutler's chiropractic clinic in Corte Madera, California. Standing to
the side of Peterson, Cutler pushes against her patient's uplifted
right arm which remains strong and straight. The doctor then places a
tiny sealed glass vial containing a clear liquid in her patient's left
hand. A label on the vial reads "peas". Cutler then repeats
the muscle-testing procedure. Again Peterson tries to resist the
doctor's pressure, but this time his arm crumples like a rag doll's.
"You're allergic to peas", Cutler says.
The diagnostic technique Cutler performed on this
patient, called muscle-response testing, is widely discredited by
conventional doctors. But to many of the country's 50,000 chiropractors,
it's a valued tool for detecting allergies and organ weaknesses in their
patients. It doesn't matter who the patient is or how muscular -- if the
strongest man in the world is allergic to the pea, his arm will go limp,
according to advocates of the technique.
Muscle-response testing is the first part of an
obscure treatment for allergies called Nambudripad Allergy Elimination
Technique or NAET. NAET is used by more than 400 practitioners in the
United States, mostly chiropractors, to eliminate reactions that a
surprising number of people have to common foods as well as to
chemicals, plants, animal dander, and other substances. After the muscle
test, the doctor does a simple 15-minute acupressure treatment along the
spine while the patient hold the allergen or a vial containing a
solution of it. The patient then must avoid the offending substance for
25 hours.
Between 80 and 90 percent of the time, according
to doctors who use it, NAET works permanently. To any of the country's
estimated 5 million people whose lives are a living hell because of food
allergies, this is news from heaven. Because I've been one of those 5
million for more than 10 years, I badly wanted Dr. Cutler to work her
magic on me, but I had my doubts. The idea that holding an allergen
while getting acupressure can cure a person of long-standing allergy
symptoms seemed too good to be true.
Carrot Allergy Cured
NAET was discovered in the mid-1970's by Devi
Nambudripad, D.C., a chiropractor, acupuncturist, and registered nurse
in Buena Park, California. In her book, Say Goodbye to Illness, (Delta
Publishing, 1993), Nambudripad (who was not available for interviews for
this article) describes the technique she developed after her own
multiple food allergies had forced her for several years to rely largely
on a diet of white rice and broccoli. Since childhood, Nambudripad had
suffered from many ailments including chronic bronchitis, pneumonia,
arthritis, depression, sinusitis, migraine headaches, and a combination
of exhaustion and insomnia. It wasn't until she became an adult,
however, that she discovered she could eliminate many of her symptoms by
banishing certain foods from her diet. As soon as she reintroduced those
foods, though, the debilitating symptoms would return.
She accidentally discovered the NAET technique one
day when she gave in to the urge to nibble on a carrot, a food she was
allergic to. She had an immediate severe reaction. After treating
herself with her acupuncture needles, she felt uncharacteristically
energetic and noticed that a piece of carrot was still clinging to her
skin. Based on her understanding of how energy in the body behaves
(which she was studying at the time in acupuncture college), she
concluded that something had happened to change the way her body
responded to the energy field of the carrot. She did a muscle test and
found that she was no longer allergic to it. (See "Muscle Test
Yourself," page 111.) From that point on, Nambudripad says she
could eat carrots with no adverse effects. She solidified her NAET
theory in the ensuing years and began using the technique on patients in
1986. To date, she has taught the method to approximately 1,000 health
care practitioners worldwide, a majority of them chiropractors.
How NAET Works
IN SAY GOODBYE TO ILLNESS, Nambudripad uses the
insights of many disciplines - chiropractic, Oriental medicine,
immunology, environmental medicine, genetics, and Western physiology and
physics - to explain how NAET works. Vastly simplified, her theory is
that allergies result from energy blockages in the body "due to
contact with adverse energy of other substances."
She explains that when energy is freely flowing
along, the energy pathways or meridians as they are called in Chinese
medicine, then "no allergic reaction is possible." Blockages
occur because the allergic person's immune system responds to normally
harmless substances as if they were a threat to the body.
Antigen-antibody complexes are formed with T and B immune cells. Ellen
Cutler, who was a student of Nambudripad, says, "When trying to
destroy these complexes, the immune system brings about an autoimmune
reaction that inflames and destroys healthy tissue."
This inflammatory reaction blocks the energy flow
along meridians and thus prevents the movement of vital energy to all
the body's organ systems. This, says Nambudripad, can produce an enormous
variety of health problems, depending on exactly where the
energy is most blocked. Disorders can range from simple tiredness and
cloudy thinking to headaches, digestive problems, depression, skin
rashes, and eventually diseases of the kidney, liver, lungs, and other
organs. When NAET is performed, these blockages are released, and most
importantly the body is reprogrammed to not react to the substance as if
it were a threat. In turn, energy blockages caused by food allergies
cease, and the symptoms caused by the blockages disappear.
Cutler explains in her book, Winning the War
Against Asthma & Allergies (Delmar Publishers, 1997), that when the
areas along the spine are stimulated while a person is holding an
allergen, " a chemical or enzymatic change occurs neutralizing the
immune mediators and interrupting the allergen or antigen-antibody
complex reaction." This, she says, clears the energy blockage and
sends a message to the brain that this is not an allergen.
Because it takes two hours for energy to make its
journey through each of the body's 12 meridians, it takes 24 hours for
this energy, called qi in Chinese medicine, to circulate through all the
meridians. NAET practitioners make sure that the blockage has cleared by
requiring patients to avoid the food for 25 hours.
It's not impossible to believe that clearing
blocked meridians can free energy to move along these pathways. B ut
it's less easy to imaging that doing acupressure on points along the
spine while a patient holds an offending substance, such as a carrot,
cans somehow reprogram the body to know that a molecule of carrot is not
really a threat.
Proponents explain that when an allergen is held
within an allergic person's energy field while acupressure is done, the
energy begins its circuit of the body on a freely flowing path that it
had not experienced during previous exposure to that substance. The body
relearns how to respond to it.
The question most people ask is why the body
misinterprets a carrot as a throat in the first place. Cutler points out
that the probability of being predisposed to a food allergy climbs if
your parents were allergic to that food. However, other factors play
important roles, too, especially poor digestion which can trigger
allergies in people who are genetically predisposed to them. Digestive
weaknesses can occur for many reasons including a lack of necessary
digestive enzymes or vitamins and minerals, ingestion of antibiotics,
chronic stress, and the consumption of foods whose large protein
molecules are hard to digest, such as dairy products.
Who Has NAET Helped?
NAET remains obscure for two reasons: One, the
theory of how it works is hard for most people to accept; and two, no
controlled studies have documented that it works. The reason it's become
as popular as it has -- and why it could revolutionize allergy care --
is that doctors and their patients are swearing it's helped. In four
years of using NAET to treat close to one thousand patients, the success
rate reported by Bellevue, Washington osteopathic physician Ann McCombs
is roughly the same as that of other doctors who use it - between 80 and
90 percent other patients become "symptom free".
Robert Sampson, M.D., co-author of Breaking Out of
Environmental Illness (Bear & Company, 1997), runs an alternative
healing practice in Andover, Mass., for patients suffering from
environmental illness and allergies and chronic fatigue syndrome. He
uses NAET to treat 90 percent of his patients.
"We don't have the staff to keep
statistics," says Sampson, "but to the best of my knowledge I
would say that NAET has entirely relieved allergy symptoms or produced
satisfactory improvement in 80 to 90 percent of our patients. But the
individuals must follow through with a series of treatments as opposed
to stopping after one or two. We've treated up to 200 patients so far
with the technique."
And Cutler, too, who says she has treated hundred
of patients during the seven years she has used NAET, claims an 85
percent success rate in patients who stick with the treatment. Cutler
lacks no confidence in NAET: "I'll challenge any doctor. I'll take
their patient whose allergies they cannot cure, and I'll get the
allergies to go away."
After 16 years of food allergy symptoms that
ranged from hives all over her body (including inside her mouth) to
extreme digestive disorders , artist Helen Uhl turned to Cutler for NAET
treatment one year ago. Uhl, who was weak and emaciated at the time,
didn't see an immediate improvement after the basic treatments. Yet she
felt enough subtle changes that she was willing to persevere.
"When I started, I was not allergic to
halibut, rice, and turkey. But I was allergic to about everything
else," she says. "Now, after a year, I can eat everything but
milk products. I'm just so grateful to Dr. Cutler that I've gotten this
far. I'd recommend NAET to anyone with allergies. For someone seeking
help, a solution is out there."
Like many other food allergy sufferers, Diana
Gazzolo, a Boston, Mass., executive recruiter, became disillusioned
after she consulted several conventional allergists, all of whom were
unable to help, let alone cure her. Now over 40, Gazzolo was 13 years
old whenshe first got hives.
"They were welts, and they itched beyond
belief", she says. "At the extreme, my eyelids, lips, and my
whole face would swell. Every morning when I got out of the shower, I
had welts. An allergist prescribed antihistamines which made her sleepy.
She began altering her diet which didn't help things, although by doing
so she began to discover some of the foods such as cheeses, yeast, and
breads that were causing her problems. She also tried mind control,
willing herself to not itch, which was an uphill battle she predictably
lost. Basically, throughout her 20s and 30s, Gazzolo says, "I just
lived with it."
Then she discovered Seldane, an antihistamine that
doesn't cause drowsiness. She became a Seldane junkie. "As long as
I could pop a Seldane, I was fine. Little did I know it was causing my
heart to race," she recalls. When she learned of the heart problem,
Gazzolo stopped taking the antihistamine. Her allergies then raged out
of control, forcing her to often cancel business appointments at the
last minute.
Then Gazzolo developed a new symptom: Her throat
began closing up, a sign of anaphylactic shock. By the time she arrived
at Sampson's office, she told him, "Take my blood out of my body
and put it back in again. I don't care. Just make me better."
Using muscle-response testing, Sampson found that
Gazzolo was allergic to 50 or 60 different substances, many of them
foods. But after the firs two NAET treatments, her symptoms worsened.
"What the hell are you doing?" Gazzolo asked Sampson. He told
her that some people get initial reactions like this. "He didn't
try to sell me an instant cure," she says. It wasn't until the
fourth treatment that Gazzolo saw improvement. "I had fewer
hives," she says. "I came in with about 50 at the beginning of
treatment and at that point I had 10. By the fifth session, they were
all gone. When it finally happened, I just cried." After 8
treatment sessions, she was asymptomatic and no longer needed to
continue. "I'm like a different person now. The bottom line is that
there's hope."
Not every patient treated with NAET for food
allergies recovers as quickly or miraculously as Gazzolo. Nor can you
walk into a practitioner's office and say "Just treat me for
chocolate and bananas." NAET practitioners follow the same initial
treatment protocol for every patient. Because most allergy
____________________________________ everything they're allergic to,
doctors begin with a series of 10 treatments for the most common
allergens. The basic treatments cover various food groups, including egg
mix (eggs, chicken, feathers, and tetracycline), calcium mix (goat and
cow's milk an substances such as casein and albumin contained in milk),
vitamin C mix, (ascorbic acid, bioflavonoids, and fruits and vegetables
containing vitamin C), and seven other food categories. "By the
time most people finish with the basics, " Cutler says, "many
of their food allergies have cleared up."
"It Saved My Life"
Valerie Lauterback, a Los Altos Hills, California
engineer and mother of a 3-year-old, is another Cutler patient.
Lauterbach says she literally owes her life to NAET. Three years ago,
for the first time in her life, Lauterbach suffered a sudden allergic
reaction to dried apricots that sent her into anaphylactic shock.
"My tongue started to swell up and my throat
started to close," she says. "I immediately went to the
Emergency Room , and they gave me some shots of epinephrine as well as
prednisone. They told me that if I had gotten there 10 minutes later, I
would have been dead." She soon found out that sulfites used to
preserve foods caused the reaction. She tried avoiding them but still
had many close calls because of inaccurate food labels and not knowing
the content of foods in restaurants. Then she realized she was becoming
allergic to other foods.
"By last August, the only things I could eat
were chicken, beef, and some fish, salmon in particular,"
Lauterbach says. "That's all I ate for a few months. But sometimes
my husband would come home from work and kiss me, and I would have a
reaction to something he ate. I just had to get it on my lips."
She sought treatment from a nutritional medicine
doctor who gave her megavitamins but who ultimately wasn't able to help
her. She then considered a promising form of treatment known as Enzyme
Potentiated Desensitization (EPD). EPD is a series of intradermal skin
injections followed by a one-week diet that eliminates all foods the
patient may be allergic to. Lauter bach eventually ruled out the
injections because the doctor recommending them insisted she eat a wider
variety of foods and use Benadryl to control her anaphylactic reactions.
The Benadryl made her sleepy, and she was unwilling to knowingly eat
something that would impair her breathing and risk killing her. That's
when she decided to try NAET.
Despite the fact that Lauterbach landed in the
emergency room once or twice from unexpected reactions during the first
months of NAET treatment, she was able to reintroduce former tigger
foods into her diet.
"It was really a turning point once I could
eat vegetables again. Before that, I thought I couldn't live like this.
Now I eat vegetables, yogurt, butter, nuts, and meats. I can probably
tolerate more foods, but I'm still faraid to try," says Lauterbach
who is continuing once-a-week treatments.
"Amazing" Muscle Testing
Although it's widely accepted as a diagnostic tool
among chiropractors, it's hard to fathom how pushing against someone's
arm can reveal what foods we're allergic to. The former behavioral
science coordinator for Madigan Army Medical Center's department of
family practice and a lecturer who demonstrates muscle-response testing
to audiences, Robin Carter, D.C.S.W. says that muscle testing works
because the physical body, in sometimes dramatic ways, can respond to
extremely subtle changes in energy fields.
In April 1997, Carter demonstrated muscle testing
to a group of more than one hundred physicians, mostly M.D.s, at a
conference in Denver that was billed as "the scientific basis for
holistic medicine." Carter explained that many things can affect
the body's energy fields and cause muscles to become strong or weak. To
make his point, Carter showed the doctors how even more dubious energy
fields -- those carried by symbols -- also weaken or strengthen the
body's muscular system. Most of the doctors were suspicious as Carter
began his demonstrations. Some chuckled when he explained that he could
weaken someone's arm muscle by placing a swastika against the person's
body, even though the person didn't know what the symbol was. Carter
proceeded to test many different symbols on a number of doctors in the
audience. Some stepped forward to prove to themselves that this was a
simple matter of the mind playing tricks with the body. But one by one
they returned to their seats muttering or shaking their heads in
disbelief.
Jerry Aldhizer, M.D., an assistant professor in
the department of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University
in Redmond, VA., was one of the conference participants. "I'd never
seen anything like this before," said Aldhizer. "I think the
use of symbols was the most amazing thing. Robin would turn a cross
upside down, and the person would lose all power in the outstretched arm.
With the cross right side up, the arm was strong again. He repeated this
with the same person several times. Afterward, everyone in the audience
definitely believed."
Experiencing is Believing
Like many of the people I talked to while
researching this story, I too had slogged through allergy hell by the
time I discovered NAET and decided to make an appointment with Cutler.
I've had an array of what individually might be considered minor
symptoms -- everything from a flushed, itchy face and scalp to nasal
congestion, digestive irregularities, extreme fatigue, foggy thinking,
memory lapses, and cravings for sweets that have led to a recent
20-pound weight gain. But the cumulative effect has felt anything but
minor. Conventional doctors, who claimed they could not help because my
reactions to foods didn't fit the classic definition of food allergies,
told me simply to avoid all the foods I reacted to. But that, I felt,
would be impossible since I seemed to have become sensitive to more than
a hundred different foods.
Cutler turned out to be a dynamic woman who,
unlike many doctors who are asked to treat food allergies, knew exactly
how I suffered. After all, she's seen hundreds of people like me and had
experienced food allergies herself for years.
Although most practitioners still rely on muscle
testing for diagnosis, Cutler now uses a new computerized
electroacupuncture device. It consists of a metal cylinder (attached by
wire to a computer) which the doctor wets and placed in the palm of the
patient's hand and another device that looks like a fat metal pen, also
wired to the computer, with which the doctor touches an acupuncture
point on a finger of the patient's other hand. Cutler uses this because
with it she can test h undreds of foods in one session without a
patient's arm becoming tired.
When Cutler printed out the foods my body could
not tolerate including chemical additives and food colorings, I couldn't
believe that the single-spaced list ran a whopping three pages. For
someone who lives to eat rather than eats to live, the thought that so
many foods were off-limits to me seemed intolerable. Cutler, however, was
confident NAET would help me. I decided to go forward with her program.
By the time I completed the basic 10 which took
four weeks with three appointments per week, my severe digestive
problems were nearly gone, and I was able to eat carrots, muffins,
polenta, and peanut butter, all of which had previously triggered major
reactions. At one point I began to wonder whether the 25-hour diets had to be so rigorous. In order to avoid certain food substances, the
patient may be required to eliminate nearly everything from her diet for
those 25 hours. For the B-complex treatment , for example, I was reduced
to eating Jello, tapioca cooked in water, and if I wanted, Cool Whip.
Those were the only foods Cutler identified that had no B vitamins. But
what if I waited only 23 hours? Of what if I ate something that wasn't on the
diet? I quickly got my answer. The first time I cheated, I needed
to repeat the treatment.
Once we'd finished the basic treatments, Cutler
retested all the food groups on the EAV machine. An amazing number of
foods had "cleared" including corn, wheat, and most other
grains. Unfortunately, I couldn't muster too much excitement because the
list was still a page long, and I continued to experience itching, the
most annoying and frustrating of all my symptoms. In fact, the itching
had grown far worse than it had been when I started treatment. After
Cutler had eliminated some of my worst allergies, I had begun reacting
to substances I had previously not been allergic to, a phenomenon known
as "unmasking". I began having strong reactions to foods, food
supplements, and herbs I was accustomed to taking regularly. And I had
to repeat one treatment five or six times because it wouldn't hold.
Meanwhile I itched. It was my darkest hour.
Soon after that, everything changed. Once I got
through the treatment for bioflavonoids, most of the itching stopped.
And in the past month I've raced through the list of foods I'm allergic
to and crossed each item off after treatment.
But the big revelation has been the physical and
emotional changes. I feel better than I have in years. I'm no longer exhausted
all the time nor do I feel hungry most of the day. I have fewer
food cravings and they're less intense. And when I indulge them, I'm
satisfied with smaller portions and sometimes even just a taste. I also
used to walk through life with a vague fog bank of depression floating
above me. I'm not sure when that could lifted, but it definitely has.
Although I still have some treatments to go before I'm done, the end, I
clearly see, is in sight.
MUSCLE TEST YOURSELF
The following is the test that some practitioners
say you can do on yourself to determine if you are allergic to a
substance.
First, do a baseline test by forming a circle, an
O-ring, with the index finger and thumb of one hand. Then insert the
index finger of your other hand into the ring and try to pull it apart
where the thumb and index finger meet. This tells you the degree of
strength before testing a substance. Now dab onto the palm of your hand
a small amount of a substance you want to test (maybe a drop of milk or
soda). If it's a solid substance, like a piece of bread, break off a
tiny piece and hold it in the palm with your little finger. Now try to
pull the O-ring apart again. If the ring is as strong as it was for the
baseline test, you are not allergic to the substance. If you can pull it
apart, you have tested positive for allergies to that substance.
RESOURCES
Books -
WINNING THE WAR AGAINST ASTHMA & ALLERGIES
By Dr. Ellen Cutler, D.C., Delmar Publishes, 1998, $13.95.
To order call 800/842-3636
SAY GOODBYE TO ILLNESS
by Dr. Devi Nambudripad, D.C., L Ac., R.N., PhD., Delta Publishing
Company, 1993, $40.
To order call 714/523-2933
BREAKING OUT OF ENVIRONMENTAL ILLNESS
By Robert Sampson, M.D., and Patricia Hughes, B.S.N., Bear &
Company, 1997, $14.
To order call 800/932-3277
TO FIND A PRACTITIONER
-
Dr. Cutler's book (see above) lists 200 U.S. and Canadian NAET
practitioners by state and province. Also, the following web site has a
searchable directory of practitioners by geographic area: http://www.naet.com
For information on
NAET SEMINARS -
Call 714/523-8900 or write to the following:
Nambudripad Allergy Research and Relief Foundation
614 Beach Boulevard
Buena Park, CA 90621
For information on Dr. Ellen Cutler's "Winning the
War" workshops
call 415/927-0741.
Source: Linda Weber, Natural Health
Magazine, July/August
1998
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