THE MAN WHO COULDN'T LIFT A PEA -[about NAET or Nambudripad Allergy Elimination]

[Guest guest]

THE MAN WHO COULDN'T LIFT A PEA

_http://www.healingartscenter.com/Library/articles/art01.htm_

(http://www.healingartscenter.com/Library/articles/art01.htm)

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. But 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 when she 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 first 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. Lauterbach

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 hundreds 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

 

 

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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_

(http://www.naet.com)

 

 

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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

 

 

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For information on Dr. Ellen Cutler*s **Winning the War** workshops

 

call 415/927-0741.

 

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