A New Dimension to Meridian Tapping Techniques

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Enhance the results of tapping techniques (TFT, EFT) by improving the biochemisty of your body and especially by eliminating food sensitivities. The fact is that it’s not just negative programming that creates the need for tapping. Many biochemical imbalances, particularly food sensitivities and common reactions to artificial, negative, and GMO foods, create self-defeating behaviors and increase the need for tapping. Because these factors also interfere with the effectiveness of tapping, addressing them will add value to your tapping and will improve your health and well-being regardless of whether or not you use tapping techniques.

My earlier blog, “Why Use Meridian Tapping Techniques?”, gives a brief background of the evolution of acupuncture meridian point tapping, and my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, can get you started if you are unfamiliar with tapping.  My book also explains the “psychological reversal,” which is so helpful in understanding the essence of tapping. Almost everyone has psychological reversals in some areas of their life, meaning there is a “disconnect” between your body and your belief system. For example, you may think you want to be healthy or to lose weight, yet your behavior and actions could continue to sabotage your health and your weight loss. The same principle can apply to your belief that you want to be successful in a particular area of your life, yet you don’t take the necessary actions to ensure your success. In these common examples of psychological reversals, your attempts to move ahead in positive ways can be stifled and sabotaged by your own biochemistry.

Correcting these psychological reversals is commonly done by tapping points on the outer edge of the hands below the 5th finger (the knife edge or “karate chop”point) while verbalizing the positive statement that one is reversed about. This specific hand point is on the acupuncture meridian for the small intestine, which means it is directly related to what goes on in your small intestine, which is highly influenced by the food and drink that you consume. A poor quality diet makes people reversed and re-creates reversals after they have been corrected, because it “flips a switch” in the small intestine and upsets the acupuncture meridian system.

What then constitutes a poor quality diet? Artificial and refined foods, man-made chemicals, genetically modified foods all confuse the small intestine and frequently create psychological reversals along with other chronic health problems.  Beyond this basic rule, a poor diet is quite individual, and almost any food that a person is sensitive to can create reversals. In an earlier blog, I talked about how most people have food sensitivities that increase inflammation in different parts of their bodies, based on their genes, and that your own best anti-inflammatory diet is a diet of foods that do not trigger inflammation or stress in your immune system. A great way to identify the foods that your body is reacting to and are likely causing reversals is through the ALCAT, a test available through my website, yourinnerpharmacy.com. Eliminating your reactive foods will improve your health, reduce your psychological reversals and will greatly enhance the results of your meridian tapping.

Understanding that foods may be sabotaging your emotional as well as physical health is quite empowering. Realizing that food sensitivities are likely interfering with your personal growth and success is equally significant. Identifying and eliminating food sensitivities can change your life, bringing improved health and well-being and allowing your beliefs to control your biology in positive ways.

Why use Meridian Tapping Techniques?

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Tapping on specific acupuncture points while stating or thinking an affirmation (TFT, EFT, etc.) can beneficially alter the physiology of the body.  Tapping was originally used as a specific treatment for an identifiable pain or emotional issue and has evolved as a valuable tool for disconnecting old traumas and getting one’s body congruent with new beliefs. The amazing growth of these techniques is based on the fact that they work. Tapping Techniques are now well established and used by hundreds of thousands of people.

The tapping of acupuncture points to alter physiology was first used by the great Chiropractic Physician, George Goodheart, in the mid 1970′s when he developed powerful “pain-control” procedures. John Diamond M.D. used tapping in the 1970′s, connecting specific emotions with the acupuncture meridians. In 1980, a psychologist Roger Callahan named the “psychological reversal” and went on to develop specific protocols that became the Callahan Techniques and then TFT (Thought Field Therapy) used by thousands of psychologists. Much of it evolved into Energy Psychology and an offshoot that is used by thousands of lay people, known as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique).

If you have not encountered tapping techniques, there is an introduction in my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, including a way for you to get started yourself. These procedures can have powerful effects at getting your physiology and behavior congruent with your belief system and connecting your physiology to new beliefs, as you grow. Many people use tapping to erase “old tapes” and to create new ones that support new positive habits and behaviors…..such as managing weight, being healthy, exercising regularly, attracting healthy relationships, just to name a few.

From a “mind-body” point of view, many people who struggle with their health are not emotionally aligned or congruent with being healthy and totally free of pain. Manual muscle testing, as performed in Applied Kinesiology, or the “forward-bending test”, that I describe in Your Inner Pharmacy, can usually reveal this “disconnect” between what someone thinks they believe and the contrary message their body may be receiving about that belief.

The beauty and effectiveness is that tapping specific points while stating the belief will connect or re-connect the body with that belief. In The Biology of Belief, Dr. Bruce Lipton elegantly describes how our beliefs control our biology, and he acknowledges the value of tapping techniques for synchronizing our biology with positive beliefs. My observation, from using these techniques for over 30 years, with sick people as well as high-level athletes and performers who unknowingly sabotage their progress, is that all too often, biology is compromised by psychological reversals and circuitry glitches, which are so often correctible. In these situations, our biology is literally controlling our beliefs, thus creating physical and psychological limitations.

I highly recommend using these techniques. If you want a professional to help you, many applied kinesiologists use TFT procedures and NET (Neuro-Emotional Technique) with phenomenal results.

Stay tuned for my next blog, which looks at a “new dimension in tapping”.

Discover Your Own Healthy Diet

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Improve your physical and mental health by eliminating foods that weaken your immune system and create inflammation throughout your body. Whether you are really sick with a chronic disease or are more concerned about mental clarity, prevention, and healthy aging, you deserve to know what specific foods are creating problems for you and what foods you can eat without adverse effects.

First, know that there are different types of food allergies and sensitivities. Besides the traditionally recognized food allergies that create immediate life-threatening reactions, there are other types of food allergies and sensitivities that create less severe and delayed responses, sometimes 24-48 hours after consuming a food. However it is these lower grade, delayed responses that are so often responsible for chronic problems. For example, would you have thought that your shoulder or knee pain, headaches, indigestion, fatigue, or mental fog may be the result of your body’s reaction to a food that your are eating regularly?  Since food sensitivities can trigger inflammation anywhere in your body,these are all common symptoms and can become severe, acute problems.

In my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, I tell the story of a famous orchestra conductor who experienced disabling shoulder pain and was anticipating surgery. His problem totally disappeared after we discovered that wheat was triggering weakness and inflammation in his shoulder. Not only was surgery unnecessary, it would not have corrected the problem. All he had to do was eliminate wheat from his diet and his shoulder problem took care of itself. This doesn’t man that everyone with a shoulder problem has a reaction to wheat or that everyone who eats wheat is doomed to get a shoulder problem; the fact is that everyone’s body reacts in different ways to different foods. And yes, food sensitivities are becoming much more common, as the quality of our food has deteriorated and our digestive systems have become compromised by varying stresses.

How could you know what foods you may be reacting to and furthermore to know if the reactions are mild, moderate, or severe? I have seen tremendous value in a specific blood test which evaluates the reaction of your white blood cells when exposed to specific foods. Called the ALCAT, there is more information on my website, yourinnerpharmacy.com, and the opportunity to proceed with discovering what foods your body does and doesn’t react to. Once you obtain this valuable information, you will know your own anti-inflammatory diet.

Just know that there is no “magic” medication that will eliminate these food sensitivities. However you may be taking medications to treat the symptoms that your food reactions are causing. Rather than treating the symptoms that result from the food reactions and the further problems that often result from the side-effects of the medications used to treat the symptoms, you can treat the cause of the problem. It will require you to eliminate certain foods from your diet…..usually not forever, but for a period of months. During that elimination period while you are no longer triggering the reaction, your digestive and immune system can be healing and improving in function. Working with a holistic doctor, such as an Applied Kinesiologist, can optimize this process, the restoring of normal function to your body.

The beauty of this whole approach empowers you to deal directly with improving your physical and mental health in a way that eliminates specific symptoms and complaints.

Question the media spin on Vitamins

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Concluding that vitamins are bad based on two recent studies, is like giving people high doses of random medications for years at a time, and then concluding that medications are bad because people got sick and died.

The two recent studies (one in older women taking many vitamins, and another in men taking high doses of vitamin E) reported a slightly higher death rate from taking high doses of vitamins, many of which were synthetic, of questionable quality, and randomly consumed whether people needed them on not. This approach to taking vitamins is distinctly different than the logical, rational approach of  taking low doses of natural, “biologically active” supplements that are matched to the individual needs of each person.

The proper and safe use of vitamin supplementation is a science, and there are doctors who are trained in this science. For example, I hold two post-graduate Diplomate titles specifically in the field of Nutrition, as a “Diplomate of the College of Clinical Nutrition of the American Association of Integrative Medicine” and as a “Diplomate of the Chiropractic Board of Clinical Nutrition”. I can tell you that it is not wise to randomly take high doses of vitamins, regardless of their quality, and I can say the same for medications. Presumably, if you take medications you do so at the direction of an expert, your physician, who prescribes the specific medication for you and then periodically re-evaluates your needs.

Vitamin supplementation can be a powerful tool for restoring and maintaing health and improving human performance, but the matching process is absolutely critical to insure that each person is taking the right vitamins for them. Furthermore, the periodic re-evalution of one’s supplementation is a necessity, because vitamins alter your body chemistry, and the needs of your body change over time.

Since one of the recent studies involved the use of high doses of vitamin E and the risk of prostate cancer, I am including an excerpt from page 201 of my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, that was published in 2006:   ”There is a big difference between taking megadoses of a few nutrients—an approach I rarely recommend—and the common (and safe) supplementation of low dosages of a variety of high-quality, biologically active nutrients. Most of us will benefit from the latter, which provides many nutrients that are both missing from foods and are increasingly needed due to demanding lifestyles, and which does not overload the body with any one nutrient.

High doses of vitamin E (above 400 IUs a day) may often have many effects opposite to the same vitamin in lower doses. The amount you take determines its effects. For example, while lower doses of vitamin E will often help decrease blood pressure, amounts higher than 400 units a day can raise blood pressure. Lower doses help to decrease inflammation, while higher doses actually block the Inner Pharmacy’s production of anti-inflammatory chemicals and lead to further inflammation. Throughout my career, I have reduced the vitamin E intake of many patients who were influenced by the typical “more-is-better” mentality.

Since certain health problems can be aggravated by high doses of vitamin E, some people worry that vitamin E is harmful, which is not true. This misunderstanding then creates a phobia of taking vitamins.”

My advice is to acknowledge that vitamins do affect the physiology of the body and to seek out an expert who can guide you in the safe, optimal, and efficient use of vitamin supplementation to support your own body and lifestyle. If you don’t know where to start, check out the health questionnaire on my website, yourinnerpharmacy.com, which will help to match you to a set of high quality, low-dose, natural supplements that you can take for 4-6 weeks and then re-evaluate. You can also schedule a consultation through my office, which is an opportunity to review your specific health history and concerns. Either of these approaches is strikingly different from that which recently received so much media attention.

Why Take Nutritional Supplements

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Why Take Nutritional Supplements, When You Already Have a Powerful Inner Pharmacy?

Nutritional supplements, along with your diet, provide the building blocks that your inner pharmacy uses to make the chemicals that govern your physical and mental state. Which chemicals it produces, and the quantity of each, are influenced by the raw materials that you take into your body. Want to produce more anti-inflammatory chemicals of your own? Your body will naturally do it, but it requires specific building blocks including omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, niacin, vitamins B-6, E (although not too much E), C, magnesium, zinc, and calcium. If you really want to get your body making more anti-inflammatory chemicals, my recent book, Your Inner Pharmacy, will guide you in the process.
Your lifestyle, including your exercise, can stimulate the conversion of these raw materials into good chemicals that can help to minimize the deterioration of your body. While everyone’s body battles excesses of inflammation in the aging process, to a great extent, it is our genes that determine where we are most prone to inflammation. It could be joints (arthritis), the cardiovascular system (heart disease and dementtia), the digestive system, or the respiratory system, to take several examples. Regardless of its location in your body, the inflammation is a similar process, and your lifestyle (including your diet and the supplements you take) can either aggravate it or improve it.
Here’s another huge reason for taking nutritional supplements: The right supplements for you will bring you mental clarity, give you more energy, and help you to feel motivated to be more healthy…..all of which means you will be more inclined to persue a healthy lifestyle and to stay on a balanced track of eating and thinking “healthy” and exercising regularly.It’s true, and “the right supplements FOR YOU” is one of the keys. The other key is having and taking extremely high quality supplements.
This is pretty basic, but the two biggest reasons most people don’t take supplements are: 1) they don’t what to take or how much, and 2) they don’t know the quality of various supplements or even how to tell if they contain what the labels say they do.
My website, yourinnerpharmacy.com, offers a solution to both of these dilemmas, containing a questionnairethat helps to match YOU to a set of high quality supplements that would be most beneficial for you. These supplements will provide your inner pharmacy with building blocks that it can then use to make more good chemicals that improve your health and well-being.

Remember, the supplements are only one piece of a healthy lifestyle, but they are an extremely important piece….especially if they help you to feel more naturally energetic and motivated, you will be much more likely to make healthy decisions about the rest of your lifestyle and your health care.

How to Control Inflammation With Your Inner Pharmacy

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The best anti-inflammatory medications are produced within your own body. If you have any condition that has “itis” in its name, like arthritis, bursitis, colitis, tendonitis, fascitis, you have an excess of inflammation going on in your body. To control this inflammation, you have probably tried taking over-the-counter or prescription medications. While they may have reduced your symptoms, you probably were concerned about their cost, both monetary as well as potential side-effects, and perhaps wondered if they were really addressing the cause of your inflammation and if there is a better long-term solution.

Your body can make the safest and most effective anti-inflammatory chemicals as long as three criteria are met. First, your body needs the raw materials, many of which come from good fats in your diet and nutritional supplements. Second, your lifestyle, including stress-reduction and specific exercise, determines what chemicals your body produces from those raw materials. Third, your body has to be functioning properly to promote the healing of the inflamed area.

All three of these criteria necessary for the production of good chemicals and explained in depth in my book, “Your Inner Pharmacy“, and all three are attainable for most people. You have a powerful resource, within your own body, that can be used to produce more good chemicals and less bad ones.

Excess inflammation is a contributing factor in most chronic diseases, whether inflammation targets your joints-creating arthritis, your blood vessels-creating cardiovascular disease and even dementia, your intestines-creating colitis, or any other “itis” condition. Don’t wait until excess inflammation or the side-effects from medications have destroyed vital body parts.

With the proper guidance, you can begin producing more anti-inflammatory chemicals now. My website, www.yourinnerpharmacy.com. will get you started by teaching you great ways to promote fat-burning by exercising in a way that converts good fats into energy and anti-inflammatory chemicals.

Best wishes for your health and success.

How Your Diaphragm Causes and Corrects Heartburn / GERD

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The cause of heartburn and GERD is a biomechanical imbalance, not a chemical one. If the acid from the stomach gets up into the esophagus, heartburn and GERD result. The symptoms are not from an excess of stomach acid, but from the acid in the wrong place, which is controlled by the diaphragm. A properly functioning diaphragm muscle keeps the acid in the stomach, where it belongs.

Yet the Western Medicine treatment for these problems is a chemical approach to medicate to reduce or neutralize the acid, the very acid that plays a vital role in health and normal digestion. Furthermore these medications were not intended for people to take for more than 3-6 months, and millions are suffering costly side-effects now and in the future by taking them for years, often indefinitely.

Because the diaphragm is a muscle, just like your biceps, it is modifiable and can be improved and developed, to keep the acid in your stomach and eliminate the need to medicate to suppress your acid production.

Here is a brief excerpt from my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, that explains how diaphragm problems develop and how your diaphragm can be improved….


Consider what frequently happens to the stomach over a lifetime. As we age, our shoulders and upper back can become increasingly hunched over. In mechanical terms, thoracic kyphosis increases, or we get more kyphotic. Try this: hunch over for a moment and try to take a deep breath. It’s difficult, because there is no room for your diaphragm to move when you are in that position. If you were constantly in that position, you’d never be able to take a deep breath and, of course, your brain would receive less oxygen. Furthermore, in that position your stomach is compressed up into your diaphragm, putting extra pressure on the esophageal sphincter and challenging its ability to keep the contents of your stomach out of your esophagus. Now, sit or stand up straight and take in a deep breath. Not only can you inhale more oxygen, but you might even feel your head clear immediately.

One reasons for the recent increase in diaphragm-related problems in younger people is that a sedentary lifestyle generally means more sitting, poor posture, and shallow breathing. Like any other muscle, the diaphragm must be used. I turn on the switch through treatment, and the patient puts in a fresh bulb by breathing properly and exercising. If we each do our part, the light goes on. For most people, a couple of visits are sufficient to correct a diaphragm imbalance. They may need to have it checked or fixed periodically to maintain the correction, especially if they don’t exercise, if they overeat and lie down too soon after eating, or if they are under a lot of stress. For some older people who are already quite hunched over, I may not be able to fully correct the problem, but usually I can maintain some significant amount of improvement through periodic treatments.

Stress can adversely affect the diaphragm in several ways. In stressful situations, you naturally tighten up. You breathe less deeply and sometimes feel tightness in your chest. I frequently remind people to breathe deeply during stressful times or even when working intensely in a stationary position. A more extreme example of diaphragm tightness is caused by a physical trauma. Most of us have had the wind knocked out of us from a fall or a physical injury, which is a good reminder of what a spastic diaphragm feels like.

Emotional traumas and stresses can have a similar tightening effect on the diaphragm. On a deeper level, chronic stress can really upset the diaphragm. The body’s sphincter muscles, such as the esophageal sphincter, are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nerves tighten the sphincters, while the parasympathetic nerves relax them. When you are exhausted from constant encounters with saber-toothed tigers, your sympathetic nervous system (which enables the fight-or-flee response) is depleted and may be unable to maintain the normal tone of the sphincters. This laxity of the sphincter then predisposes you to gastric reflux.

If you are chronically stressed, adjustments and corrections that selectively stimulate specific parts of the nervous system are useful, as is taking specific vitamins and nutrients that will provide the building blocks to rebuild exhausted parts and functions of the body. And of course, you must commit yourself to lifestyle changes that reduce the effects of the saber-toothed tiger on your body so your body can heal itself.

Fix your diaphragm and your heartburn/GERD will probably disappear.

How to Get More Oxygen For Health

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The diaphragm is an overlooked solution to symptoms and improved performance. Whether you have a specific symptom related to poor diaphragm function, like fatigue, heartburn, asthma, or even dementia, or  you want to improve the performance of your brain and body by providing more oxygen, look to your diaphragm .

The diaphragm is the second most important muscle in the body, second only to the heart. Yet the average person’s diaphragm muscle is working at far less than 100% of its ability. Because the diaphragm is the pump that determines how much oxygen comes into our systems, anything less than 100% of normal function of this vital muscle means less oxygen to our brains as well as all our muscles and internal organs.

In my book, Your Inner Pharmacy, I explain more about the diaphragm and how its function can be improved to help you to be more healthy, whether you are an aspiring Olympic athlete, an average person with frequent heartburn, or concerned about and perhaps battling with dementia.

I am including a few excerpts from my book that may get you interested in optimizing the function of your own diaphragm muscle…… For specifics on how your diaphragm affects your stomach, check out my post, The Diaphragm Causes and Corrects Heartburn/GERD.

From the book, Your Inner Pharmacy:

Good diaphragm function is important for your health and vitality. Antioxidants, found in fruits and vegetables, can be quite helpful. But the best antioxidant is oxygen itself. If you improve your body’s ability to deliver oxygen to its own tissues, you reduce oxidative stress and tissue damage throughout your body and slow the decline in body function that occurs with aging.

While I recommend that many of my patients take antioxidant nutrients, I definitely want to optimize the vital function of their diaphragm muscle. I test for it in almost every patient, regardless of their symptoms, because I know that by correcting it, I have a good chance of helping their digestion, mental function, and overall energy and well-being.

How can the function of the diaphragm be improved? The first step, as with any malfunctioning muscle, is to identify what could be inhibiting or weakening the muscle. With the diaphragm, there are common patterns of weakness. The nerves that stimulate the diaphragm exit the spine in two areas, the neck or mid-cervical spine and the lower thoracic spine, where the ribcage ends. If these spinal areas are misaligned or fixated (failing to move properly), there can be a reflex inhibition, or weakness, of the diaphragm.

Other common faulty mechanisms can affect the diaphragm. If the rib cage is not moving freely on either side, usually from past injury, the motion of the diaphragm can be limited. A common pelvic or lower-back misalignment creates a torquing in the body that limits diaphragm motion. If the cranial bones are misaligned or limited in their normal respiratory motion, this can prevent a person from breathing deeply. An important lower-back supporting muscle, the psoas, attaches indirectly to the diaphragm. A common imbalance of this muscle can also compromise the diaphragm. Many people with low-back problems have an imbalance of this muscle.

All of these are switches that commonly disturb the normal function of the diaphragm. To obtain normal function of the diaphragm, a healthcare provider has to determine which biomechanics are impeding its normal function. Treatment then entails manipulation or adjustments to specific areas of the spine that affect nerves leading to the diaphragm, or the correction of other muscle imbalances as well as a manipulation to the stomach itself.

And it all results in getting more oxygen to your brain and body 24 hours a day.