In
my thirty-some years in practice, I’ve treated people from all walks of
life, for a laundry list of symptoms. While most conditions have
several causes, the singular most common cause I’ve seen is stress. One
common example is migraines, which can be caused by food sensitivities,
hormonal imbalances, cranial structural misalignments, and relationship
discord, to name a few – yet, invariably stress is part of the clinical
picture.
The pervasive effects of stress are our minds, bodies and
spirits is nothing new. In the 1920s, Hungarian endocrinologist Hans
Selye described what he called “General Adaptation Syndrome,” or the
body’s response to demands placed upon it. He detailed how stress
induces hormonal autonomic responses which, over time, can lead to high
blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, arthritis, kidney disease, and
allergic reactions. At the time, the notion that there is a connection
between stress and physical disease was groundbreaking, and
controversial.
From the earliest days of my career, I saw evidence
of this connection. In those days, I only treated back pain, neck pain,
and headaches, and when I gave a patient a full spinal adjustment and
applied some physical therapy modality, I helped release their stress
and initiated physical relief.
Since that time, stress has
increased exponentially. But why? Back in the 1980s, people had
financial stress, just as they do now. People suffered from relationship
stress since the beginning of time. After 9/11, however, I noticed a
dramatic uptick in stress that has only seemed to get more intense and
deeper as time passed. And, as I became a better practitioner, I also
began to attract harder cases, meaning those with more complex symptoms
and disorders. I learned how to do emotional adjustments to counter the
underlying triggers that keeps the stress stuck and the body holding
onto it. Then I discovered how to turn off chronic stress. People who
have prolonged stress get to the point where the cortisol from their
adrenals is elevated not only in “fight or flight” situations, but
continuously – meaning it never rests. This causes weight gain, lousy
sleep, anxiety, and chronic restlessness. It also contributes to all the
disorders I see, such as depression, diabetes, autoimmune disease,
fatigue, fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), chronic pain,
acid reflux, and vertigo, to mention a few.
Again this reaction to
stress is not new, so why are people getting these ailments with
increasing regularity? What has really changed is the pace of society
and attitudinal polarization. When we were kids, we would hear
periodically about some tragedy in our city or town. Now we are spoon
fed global misery and tragedies on a minute-by-minute basis via the
twenty-four-hour news cycle and social media. I could go on and on, but
you already know this. Angst has become a staple in the American diet,
and nearly every person today suffers from some degree of stress and
anxiety. The commercial, I will listen, states one in four Americans are
experiencing mental health challenges!
According to a 2012
nationwide study, one in 20 teens suffers from anxiety or depression.
One in three of our children have illness such as ADHD, asthma and
allergies. One in sixty has autism; this is up from one in 10,000 in the
1960s. America’s kids have fifty vaccines by the age of six, so why are
they so sick? One likely reason is that they are internalizing the
negative energy of a world they have little control over. Their
illnesses, in turn, affect their parents’ mental and physical health.
Prescriptions
for medications that suppress symptoms (but do not touch the underlying
cause(s) of them) have exponentially and dramatically increased, and
opioids have become an epidemic, killing more people than our current
wars. It is not just America, either; a recent study from Ontario shows
that in 2015, one in every six deaths of people aged twenty-five to
thirty-four was opioid-related.
We claim to understand that
chronic stress is harmful and must be reduced, yet we still tend to
underestimate its effects on us. We may take a yoga class here and there
or try some other relaxation technique, but at the end of the day we
still accept anxiety as a part of life. We look at brain scans, MRIs,
and blood tests to find a tumor or other pathology, yet oftentimes we
overlook the chronic stress that just might be the cause of the
unexplained symptoms. The medical tests can show changes in the brain
and in the heart, but we’re not seeing the source of those changes.
DNA
doesn’t really change, but epigenetics – the study of the effect
environmental and other factors have on our genes – can explain why we
manifest illness. For instance, children of holocaust survivors may get
cancer even though there is no cancer in the family tree. The stress and
trauma of being in a concentration camp prior to the children’s birth
altered the parents’ DNA and “turns on” the cancer gene. Another factor
is the food we eat, which over time has become more artificial and
processed with sugar in everything, plus more genetically modified food
with more pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides on and in it. Such
chemicals can turn on symptoms such as gastrointestinal distress;
Several factors can lead to epigenetic stress that is pass down to
future generations.
The good news is that just as these genes
could be turned on, they can be turned back off. In this situation, I
combine two techniques – EMDR (eye movement desensitization and
reprocessing) and NAET (Nambudripad’s allergy elimination technique)
First
I muscle test a patient’s strong arm response to stress. If it weakens,
I put stress vials (cortisol) in their hands and do a slow motion EMDR
maneuver, which takes two minutes. Often I’ll see the patient’s eyes
quiver, which indicates stress is affecting their nervous system and
thought processes. Then I retest the patient’s strength to make sure
there is no weakness in the muscles due to stress. It usually takes
twenty-four hours for the patient to completely process the treatment
and for the nervous system to integrate the treatment. As a result the
patient will start to be more relaxed in everyday situations and the
myriad of symptoms healing is initiated. Stress may not cause the
approximately 7000 known rare diseases, but having a rare disease is
stressful. Having any disease causes stress, therefore addressing stress
without medicating it – is beneficial. That said, there are natural
remedies that can help (i.e. science has shown dark chocolate (70%
cacao) reduces stress and inflammation).
Our changing world
necessitated my going deeper to figure out why some folks don’t respond
to treatments. In the process I discovered that this isn’t a mental
thing, but at the core of our humanity, the soul. I believe the soul is
sacred and for a long time avoided confronting any therapeutic
intervention. But now it has evolved naturally, and I utilize a gentle
approach to release stress that is affecting a patient’s soul. Patients
seem to be responding well, and the only side-effects being decreased
anxiety, improve relaxation, and a feeling of joy. You can’t ask for a
better and gentler procedure than that!