The man who couldn't lift a pea

Natural Health, July-August, 1998 by Linda Weber

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 examination table in Cutler's chiropractic clinic in Corte Madera. Calif. 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 too] 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 the 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 holds 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-1970s by Devi Nambudripad, D.C., a chiropractor, acupuncturist, and registered nurse in Buena Park, Calif. 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 on herself while holding the carrot and found that she was no longer allergic to it. (See "Muscle Test Yourself".) 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."