Tapping Therapies
Hearing that my friends in the United Kingdom at www.thoughtfieldtherapy.co.uk were about to have a conference on Thought Field Therapy (TFT) was all the encouragement that I needed to write a few more words about TFT and some of the other tapping therapies. I made mention of two of them in a blog entry for February 28th 2006, and I have dedicated several sections to it in my book and CD series Healing Meaning and Purpose.
TFT was the creation of the psychologist Roger Callahan, who discovered that stimulating a number of acupuncture points while connecting with an negative emotion, thought, impulse or memory, could initiate a cascade of healthy neurological, chemical, emotional, cognitive and even physical effects. There is an interesting sidebar here. When I first came across his work, it seemed absurd. It looked like a collection of unproven techniques cobbled together into some sort of system. I worry about sick people being treated by ineffective therapies, so I was determined to debunk TFT. I was a little taken aback when I sent for some of the Callahan materials and saw a smoker permanently cured in about five minutes. Undeterred, I flew to California to expose what I thought might be another scam. Within two days, I discovered that it was no scam. Roger has indeed made an extraordinarily important discovery that supports the notion that the laws of healing are changing. As a simple example, I used one of Roger’s simplest treatments on inveterate smokers. The first 11 whom I treated all stopped smoking, and when I followed up almost one year later they still were not smoking. This could have been beginner’s luck or a placebo effect, but both are unlikely. We know a great deal about the duration of the effectiveness of placebos.
TFT is based on the concept that thought is a form of energy, structured by a field and that psychological problems are manifestations of distortions within “thought fields,” which Roger defines as “a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behavior.” He conceptualizes psychological problems as the consequence of “perturbations” in the thought field. These perturbations contain the information that triggers negative emotions, and they also have relationships with specific major acupuncture points on the body. Fixing these perturbations involves tapping specific points in a specific order, while doing a series of other small tasks.
An important aspect of TFT is the concept of psychological reversal. Roger calls this the energetic blockade of natural healing, caused by reversals in the flow of Qi through the acupuncture channels. It now seems that much of what has been described as therapeutic resistance, self-sabotage or lack of willpower is a result of psychological reversal. He has devised some deceptively simple treatments that have shown us that people’s difficulties were often not a matter of a lack of willpower at all, but were the result of reversed energy. Deal with that, and many problems can melt away.
Like Roger Callahan, I emphasize the importance of toxins, of extending our concept of them, so that we conceptualize them as units of rogue information. In recent years Roger has done pioneering work into how to track down and deal with them.
Not everyone will be helped with any single form of treatment, and even with the best therapists, TFT is not for everyone. However, when someone says that he or she has not been helped with TFT, it most often for one of these seven reasons:
1. The treatment has not been done quite correctly.
2. The problem has been only partially treated.
3. Psychological reversal has not been dealt with.
4. There are still some toxins lurking around.
5. There is more than one problem, and they haven’t both been treated. (Somebody who said that he felt silly doing TFT needed to treat that fear of appearing foolish and then getting on with the primary problem.)
6. The problem may need the help of someone trained in TFT.
7. The person may have needed a combination of therapies.
TFT is the original tapping therapy, but others have now sprung up, including Emotional Freedom Techniques, and I have just read a new book called the Tapping Cure that claims that tapping an array of points on the surface of the body, while at the same time doing a specific affirmation, can be just as effective.
I have tried all these techniques, with varying degrees of success. Not just for clinical problems, but also for sports and other types of performance. While I was recording the CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I several times found places where I fluffed my lines. On each occasion, the problem was resolved by tapping the border of my hand, because I was developing psychological reversal.
Unfortunately, proponents of each of these – and there are others – tend to be competitive with proponents of other techniques. And some enthusiasts have made some pretty incredible claims about what they claim to be able to cure. The competing claims really need to be resolved through empirical research.
Until we have that, I strongly suggest exploring the tapping techniques as adjuncts to other forms of therapy.
Technorat tags: Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Integrated medicine Thought Field Therapy Emotional Freedom Techniques Qi Subtle Energy Biofield
The Prince of Wales and Integrated Medicine
It is not widely known in the United States that His Royal Highness Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, has been instrumental in the development and adoption of integrated medicine in the United Kingdom and in some parts of Europe and the Middle East. I had the privilege of working extremely closely with his Foundation for many years, and have acknowledged his personal influence in my most recent book, Healing Meaning and Purpose.
The British media is today reporting that his position on trying to integrated the best of conventional medicine with the best of traditional approaches if once again under attack, from a well-known group of critics. This time they are saying that the adoption of inadequately tested therapies is a needless drain on resources, and that regardless of what patients want, the money should be spent on treatments that are “evidence based.” This has become the new clarion cry of medicine: that everything that we do should have a defined research base. A terrific idea in theory, but sometimes disastrous in practice. As an example, there is not much in the way of an evidence base for appendectomy.
This morning, one day after the critics published their letter in the Times of London, the Prince of Wales spoke about his position and his work at a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva and he had this to say:
"I believe that the proper mix of proven complementary, traditional and modern remedies, which emphasize the active participation of the patient, can help to create a powerful healing force for our world.
This is where orthodox practice can learn from complementary medicine, the West can learn from the East and new from old traditions."
It will not surprise you to hear that I strongly agree with the Prince’s views. If you glance through a few of my blog entries, you will see that I am a huge advocate of good research: I analyze dozens of studies every week and present you with the best. I have also had to spend a great deal of time making decisions based upon cost. But it would be a big mistake for us to declare that any therapy that does not have a biological basis, or conform to the medical model should be excluded from health care. After all, patients also have a say, and they are clearly deriving benefit from complementary medical therapies. And as I have reported before, we are slowly collecting more and more data indicating that at least some of the 500 different schools of complementary and alternative medicine do have research to support their use.
“In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.”
–Thomas Henry Huxley (English Biologist and Educator, 1825-1895)
Technorati tags: alternative medicine complementary medicine evidence based medicine
prince of wales
How Not to Use Complementary Medicine
There is a report in the British Medical Journal that the Amsterdam Medical Disciplinary Tribunal has struck one doctor from the medical register and suspended two others for their exclusive use of unorthodox approaches in the treatment of a famous Dutch actor and comedian named Sylvia Millecam, who sadly died of breast cancer in 2001 at the age of 45.
After being diagnosed, the patient was recommended to have surgery and chemotherapy, but instead sought unorthodox treatment. Although the patient wanted this type of treatment, the legal case was that the doctors failed to give a reasonable assessment of the chance that their treatments would help, or made it clear that the only treatment that had been proven to help the course of the illness is the conventional route. One of the doctors was also judged to have caused her unnecessary suffering by withholding conventional palliative care as she deteriorated.
Not surprisingly, this case has attracted a lot of interest in Europe, where alternative, complementary and integrated approaches to health care are far more commonly used than in the United States. Many alternative practitioners feel that conventional medicine simply “suppresses” the underlying cause of the illness, and that there is no need to use orthodox and unorthodox together.
The approach that I have been advocating for many years is that if the individual warrants it, to use conventional and unconventional approaches together. But to see them as working on different dimensions of the person: what I call integrated medicine, though the term “integrative” is more popular in the United States. There is nothing very integrated about using St. John’s Wort instead of Prozac. That is just an alternative, which may be appropriate for certain individuals. And everything gets tailored to the individual: a man came to see more for acupuncture, but left with a prescription for a medicine. Once the medicine had done its part, some acupuncture was a very helpful adjunct. And there have been many folk where we have worked the other way round: acupuncture or homeopathy, and sometimes also a medicine. Whatever it takes to help people get to where they need to be.
In an ideal world, Ms. Millecam would probably have had surgery, but also psychological and energetic work, and perhaps some other remedies and spiritual counseling to support her through the process. Would it have enabled her to live longer? Perhaps, but the point is that the integrated approach would have aimed to help her quality of life and to help her to find the meaning and purpose of what she was going through.
She may have declined all this, but the problem was that enthusiastic doctors were using their approaches in place of regular evidence based medicine, without making it clear to Ms. Millecam what she was letting herself in for. Yes, a mentally competent individual has the right to decide whether or not to have a course of treatment, but he or she must be given all the options, so that he or she can make an informed decision. It was all rather sad and probably avoidable.
Technorati tags:integrated medicine
Autistic Spectrum Disorders
Over the last few months I have reported on a number of advances in our understanding of autism, and I was pleased to see that Time magazine has autism as this week’s cover story.The writers at Time are really to be congratulated on having put together a first rate set of articles.
Although we often use the term autism as shorthand, we prefer to use the term Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as autism is not one illness, but rather represents many illnesses with many distinct causes. The illness can range from profound disability to mild forms that may even be advantageous. One of the mild forms that has attracted a great deal of interest on recent years is Asperger’s syndrome, in which people may be highly intelligent, but are typically clumsy and have poor social awareness. There has been speculation that a number of highly successful scientists, writers and innovators may have the disorder.
One of the great puzzles of these illnesses is that they appear to be becoming more common. Even when you take into account changing diagnostic criteria and a greater awareness of the illnesses, they genuinely seem to be becoming more common. It is not surprising that a whole long list of culprits has been examined, from vaccinations to radiation and food additives. But so far no credible cause for the increase has been identified.
Last December I wrote an item about mirror neurons in the prefrontal cortex and their relevance to ASD. This research was part of a large series of brain studies being conducted around the world. For many years we thought that the key regions of the brain involved in autism were in the cerebellum, a “second brain,” that lies at the back and underneath the cerebral hemispheres. This structure is involved in coordinating movement, in language, emotional processing and some social functions. But now it is becoming clear that many regions of the brain are affected. Investigators from London have just published a study indicating that some of the difficulties in relating to others that are experienced by people with ASD may be due to poor communication between brain regions. People were asked to look at pictures of faces or houses, while their brains were scanned. In healthy volunteers, paying attention to pictures of faces caused a significant increase in brain activity. However, in the people with ASD, paying attention to faces made no impact at all on the brain, explaining their lack of interest in faces. It seems that the areas of the brain concerned with decoding faces are not well connected to those parts of the brain that control attention.
Just last week, investigators from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, published a study concerning a gene named Pten. This gene has already been linked to some rare gene disorders, and is involved in controlling the numbers and size of neurons. In mice that did not have a normally functioning gene, parts of the cerebral cortex and hippocampus did not develop normally, and the mice showed some odd deficits in their social functioning: The genetically altered mice were socially less skilled, being rather incurious about new animals coming into the cage. They also showed the same level of interest in an empty cage and in one containing another mouse, something very similar to the behavior of some children with ASD. The genetically altered mice were also less likely to build nests or look after their young. But they were more sensitive to stressful stimuli, such as loud noises or being picked up. Again, these are common features in children with ASD. The brains of the mice were also larger than those of their littermates, which is again something that has been picked up in many brain imaging studies in children with ASD. I have warned many times about trying to extrapolate from animal studies to human: Social abnormalities in a mouse may be caused by entirely different factors from human social abnormalities. But this new finding is another brick in the wall.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge has proposed that a central cognitive problem is ASD a result of developing extreme male tendencies to analyze and systematize rather than to empathize. His group has also just published data in the Archives of Disease of Childhood, indicating that highly analytical couples, may be more likely to produce children with ASD.
One of the things that often worries me is that desperate parents have sometimes been persuaded to try treatments that may actually do harm. Not so much from the therapy being toxic, but rather because the child may then not get the treatment that he or she needs. ASD is a prime example of a group of conditions that do best with an integrated approach: physical care, nutrition, cognitive, psychological and social skills work. And it is essential to ensure that other family members also receive help and support.
Technorati tags: autism, mirror neurons, autism spectrum disorder
Happy World Tai Chi & Qigong Day!
Saturday, April 29, 2006 is World Tai Chi & Qigong Day . The day is going to be celebrated in 60 countries around the world as well as all fifty states. The event has been recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization, and proclaimed officially for 17 US states by their governors, as well as senates, legislatures and mayors of various countries.
I taught Tai Chi and Qigong for several years, and had the privilege of studying with teachers in China and Malaysia whose methods were part of an oral tradition. Much of this material has still not been published. I recently reviewed a very nice book at the Amazon.com website. One of the things that impressed me about the book is that it contained exercises and techniques that I had been taught by Chinese Masters, but which to my knowledge have never been published anywhere else.
I thought that it might be a good moment to review the world literature on the medical effects of Tai Chi and Qigong. My search has turned up over 2,200 published reports, of which about a third are the reports of clinical trials. I have been able to analyze the data in about a half of those trials. The data now suggests that Tai Chi is genuinely useful for:
- Preventing falls in the elderly
- Improving functional mobility and some aspects of immune function
- Improving blood pressure and lipid profiles and subjective wellness
- Improving overall physical performance
- Stress reduction in HIV positive individuals
There are many other studies indicating the value of Tai Chi, but these give you a sense of some of the research that is going on at the moment.
As I mentioned in another post, qigong is both a personal practice and is used as a form of therapy. It has recently been shown to help:
- Chronic pain
- Cardiac rehabilitation in the elderly
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Overall immune function
- Asthma
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but as you can see, this is an active area of research.
Learning some Tai Chi and Qigong could be one of the best investments that you ever make in your own health.
Technorati Tags: Tai Chi, Qigong, Wellness, Asthma, Chronic fatigue, HIV
New Clues to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
In this month’s edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, a team from the University of Michigan has published a very interesting report. Every one of us has made a mistake at some stage in our lives, whether it is something trivial like dropping the groceries, or something more serious, like deleting a crucial computer file. What the researchers did was use functional MRI (fMRI) to peer inside the brain at the instant of making a mistake. While in the scanner, people were forced into making an error that carries consequences – for instance, losing money. When that happened, a particular part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, or rACC, became much more active when the person realized that he or she had erred and there was a penalty attached to the mistake. This part of the brain is involved in deciding what kinds of emotional responses are appropriate.
What is so interesting about this work is that in a previous study on a small group of people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), the same team has shown that the rACC region of the brain became much more active in response to a no-penalty error in the brains of OCD patients, compared to people without the condition. One of the characteristics of OCD is fear and anxiety about errors or failures in certain aspects of everyday life. As a result, many begin repetitive patterns of behavior to ward off or to prevent such events.
So it looks as if people struggling with OCD have a hyperactive response to making errors, after which they begin to get more and more worried that they may have made a mistake. OCD can be a terribly incapacitating condition. We think of mild cases like Melvin Udall in As Good as it Gets, or Adrian Monk, but in reality it can cause much suffering.
I was once asked to see a seventy five year old man who had suffered from a bizarre case of OCD since the age of fourteen. He had traveled the country trying to get help, and it was an extraordinary tribute to him that despite his problem he had built a successful business and family life. He came to see me for acupuncture, but left with a prescription for a medicine that was at the time relatively new. His improvement over the next few months, as we used medication, psychological and social work and then some energetic techniques was just extraordinary.
Research like that from the University of Michigan may well bear important fruit in the future.
Technorati tags: OCD, neurobiology, anxiety, psychiatry
Toxins and Information Medicine
In Healing Meaning and Purpose, I twice mention the impact of toxins: first I mention that environmental factors are now generally believed to contribute to many tumors. Three years ago the World Health Organization estimated that environmental factors are responsible for between one-quarter and one-third of the global burden of disease. Since the creation of synthetic inorganic and organic chemicals in the late 19th century, the global community has faced an enormous rise in the production and subsequent exposure to environmental chemicals, many of which are potentially toxic. The concentrations of many of these chemicals remain quite low, but a key observations if that combinations of chemicals may produce significant health hazards not generally seen with small concentrations of each individual chemical. There is a synergy that forms between them.
Secondly I mentioned the intriguing hypothesis that environmental toxins are a factor in the obesity pandemic.
The first of these has just received significant support from a study by Tyrone Hayes and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. They studied frogs in York County, Nebraska, and found that a mixture of nine chemicals found in a seed-corn field killed a third of exposed tadpoles and in the survivors lengthened the time to metamorphosis by two weeks. This work confirms the point that I made: individually low concentrations of the chemicals have little effect on developing tadpoles. But add them together and the effects can be devastating. This study is cited together with several others in a thoughtful article in the current edition of Scientific American.
Understanding the damaging effects of combinations of chemicals, or the disease-producing effects of a combination of minor risk factors, was one of the planks that allowed us to construct the new and growing science of Information Medicine, in which combinations are the key to successful treatment.
Technorati tags: integrated medicine, toxins, information medicine
Fungal Contamination of Pillows
I recently came across a study from colleagues at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, that was published in the journal Allergy.
Fungal contamination of bedding was first studied seventy years ago, but there have been no reports in the last seventy years. In this new study, researchers sampled ten pillows with between 1.5 and 20 years of regular use. Each pillow was found to contain a substantial fungal load, with four to 16 different species being identified per sample and even higher numbers found in synthetic pillows. One of the most worrying things was that the microscopic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus was particularly common in synthetic pillows. And fungi as diverse as bread and vine moulds and those usually found on damp walls and in showers were also found in the pillows. Aspergillus is a very common fungus, carried in the air as well as being found in cellars, household plant pots, compost, computers and ground pepper and spices. I have treated many people with invasive Aspergillosis, a sometimes nasty illness that occurs mainly in the lungs and sinuses, although it can spread to other organs including the brain. It can be very difficult to treat, and as many as 1 in 25 patients who die in modern European teaching hospitals have the disease. In France and Germany, this is one of the occasions when unorthodox medicine is often used at the same time as high doses of antibiotics: proper integrated medicine.
Aspergillosis is a particular problem in people with compromised immune systems. Hospital pillows have plastic covers and so are unlikely to cause problems, but patients being discharged home – where pillows may be old and fungus-infected – could be at risk of infection. Aspergillus can also worsen asthma, particularly in adults who have had asthma for many years, and it can cause allergic sinusitis in patients with allergic tendencies. Constant exposure to fungus in bed could be problematic.
The moral of this story is be extra aware that pillows may harbor fungi that can cause or exacerbate allergies and more serious problems in people with other illnesses. If you have allergies, it is best to use foam rather than feather pillows. If you have synthetic pillows, wash them regularly in warm water and with a non-allergenic detergent. Dip the pillow one small section at a time in the solution and squeeze through the pillow. Once the pillow is clean, rinse it out at least three times to remove all of the soap and residue. Then lie the pillow out flat to dry, and turn it frequently. To fluff the pillow, take a couple of tennis balls and put them in the dryer with the pillow and air dry for about 30 minutes.
Technorati tags: fungus, integrated medicine, allergies, asthma
Tools of the New Laws of Healing: Extra Reading
Gentle reader, if you have been here before, you know that I am convinced that the laws of healing are evolving. I recently wrote a series of articles for Success.com on the tools of the new laws of healing. I wanted to post them here in case they may be helpful.
The tools of the new laws of healing 1: Acupuncture
The tools of the new laws of healing 2: Energy Medicine
The tools of the new laws of healing 3: Qigong
These articles encorporate research and information found in a number of the books that I have placed in my Amazon lists of the corresponding names. Links to these lists can be found here in the sidebar. I hope that you find these useful.
As always, if you have comments or questions, please leave them here. I enjoy the conversation.
Technorati tags: Acupuncture, Energy Medicine, Qigong,Homeopathy, Bach Flower Essences, Health
