The argument against entrusting a massive government-run monopoly over health care in the U.S. hardly needs any more examples of inefficiency, toxic ineptitude, blockheaded inertia, and small-minded Trapped-In-The-Box One-Size-Fits-All-Groupthink that inevitably emerges whenever a big government bureaucracy is put in charge of an area of our lives which was never intended to be polluted by its corruptive touch. There are far, far too many such examples already, and readers in the conservative blogosphere are likely to be much familiar with many more heartbreaking accounts than they wish to be. But the one that has come to my attention most recently is worth sharing on other grounds, so I hope the readers of this blog will bear with me as I present it.
I would like to introduce you to Retired Army Staff Sergeant Dan Hoaglin. After half a dozen tours through Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, this veteran has been diagnosed with PTSD, and his is no mild case, either. Fortunately, Staff Sgt Hoaglin (Ret.) was made privvy to a relatively new and admittedly unconventional therapy that has nevertheless helped him make excellent progress toward a significant recovery and a return to a normal life when nothing else helped him one iota. Unfortunately, for every soldier like Hoaglin who is lucky enough to stumble upon this new healing modality as its advocates tirelessly (and thus far futilely) attempt to persuade the VA to give it the attention and consideration merited by the startling weight of the clinical evidence in its favor, there are many more who never so much as hear of its existence. While this has much to do with its unconventionality and the way that the theoretical foundation of this approach challenges (to put it mildly) the fundamental premises of the conventional western medical model, what should be important when considering a new treatment, remedy or therapy is not whether it confirms our biases or worldview, but whether and to what extent the claim of its efficacy is supported by the available evidence. Before I continue along these lines, please take the time to check these links and see how Kevin Doran of WROC Fox in Rochester, NY covered this story.:
If you are pressed for time, start with Segment 2: Unusual Therapy Gives Local Veteran Relief from PTSD.
If you have time more time, check this link also,- Segment 1: Coming Home with PTSD: A Local Soldier’s Story It goes to the earlier segment. Segment 2 was a follow-up.
The study in which Dan is taking part, the Veteran Stress Project, mentioned in each segment at the two links given above, is being conducted by the Soul Medicine Institute, which is directed by Dawson Church, Ph.D., who also founded it. Dr. Church is doing more than anyone else in the world to subject Energy Psychology to rigorous scientific standards. The new treatment, as Doran says in the segments at the above links, is called EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques (that’s techniques plural – Doran got that part wrong [understandably and quite excusably, since even now many EFT Practitioners still insist on using the singular]). Dawson Church’s main website, EFTUniverse.com, is a major source of information on this new modality as well as training and many free resources are available there.
EFT was developed by a man named Gary Craig from techniques discovered by a clinical psychologist by the name of Roger Callahan, PhD. Callahan called his method TFT (Thought Field Therapy). The TFT process was very complicated, involved much cumbersome testing and required a practitioner to memorize dozens of long tapping routines or algorithms as Callahan called them, for any conceivable ailment, pathology, stress or pain issue. Gary Craig simplified those algorithms into one single easy-to-memorize routine that could be used for just about anything and everything. Callahan discovered that by tapping on certain points used in acupuncture lifelong debilitating phobias could be eliminated, and proceeded over several years to produce many elaborate patterns of tapping on those acupoints. Craig discovered* that by tapping repeatedly on all the endpoints of the major acupuncture meridians, every issue could be addressed without the necessity of memorizing so many different tapping routines. By tapping them all, you inevitably got the right ones, while tapping the others had no ill effect and did not interfere with the effect of tapping the correct ones. By doing the routine repeatedly, the proper points were inevitably reached in the correct order. Craig called it “the Basic Recipe”, and it is a way to do Callahan’s TFT without knowing any of Callahan’s special algorithms. By doing Craig’s recipe you inevitably find the right points in the right order.
EFT quickly overtook TFT in popularity and is now by far the most widely practiced and most effective of the many modalities that collectively comprise the field of Energy Psychology. I found out about it two years ago by web checking a single oblique reference to “Callahan techniques” in a book I had read. It was about helping people manage their cravings for cigarettes so they could kick the habit if they wanted to. After a little bit of googling I was quite intrigued by what I found. It wasn’t just good for quitting smoking. It was good for just about anything and everything! That motivated me to continue looking into it, and I found that there was so much free information and training available out there (and there still is), I tried it.
It works. It is just that simple. I have used it to help myself and many others (friends, family, co-workers) for many emotional and physical health and pain issues: nearly crippling chronic joint pain, lower back pain, night leg cramps (these were mine. They used to have me in tears and keep me up for hours whenever the occurred), sinus headaches, trouble with swallowing pills, anger issues, fear of thunderstorms, pain from a fall, constipation, grief issues…the list goes on. I cannot remember everything off-hand. Two instances of my use of this modality stand out as my favorites, and were not listed in the preceding sentence. In one, I performed an experiment with a diabetic whose blood glucose reading was very high. Fifteen minutes of EFT brought his next reading, performed immediately after the tapping, down to normal. In the other, I approached two total strangers (this was very much against the grain of my personality, but somehow I summoned the gumption to do it), a couple at a local McDonald’s, because one of them, the husband, was so bent over from Parkinson’s Disease that his head was lower to the ground than hips. That is no exaggeration – how he could see where he was walking was beyond my comprehension since his face seemed to be tilted toward the ground behind his feet. His wife led him around some, but he was also able to get around some on his own, which boggled my mind. I asked them if I could try to help him with EFT tapping and they eagerly agreed. After twenty minutes of using Craig’s the Basic Recipe with the man, his posture improved noticeably – his head was at least a bit further from the ground than his hips and his head could visibly look where he was going when he walked. I gave my name and number and offered to keep working with him for free but I never heard from them (I later found out that such apparently inexplicable refusals to follow through with something that is actually helping them is typical of those with that disease and falls within its symptomology).
This is not witchcraft. This not occult woo-woo or New Age foo-foo. This is an approach to medicine that has worked for millenia . It spread beyond China quite some time ago (e.g., in Japan it became the basis of Shiatsu, which is a form of acupressure massage). It is still practiced in China right alongside Western medicine and some of the best doctors there are qualified in both surgery and acupuncture. The Church existed alongside it for as long as Christianity has been in the Orient, and there was never any movement by Christians in those cultures to oppose this approach to medicine on doctrinal or spiritual grounds. In fact, the English word “acupuncture” was coined by some highly impressed Catholic monks who observed it being performed. It is derived from the Latin (acu means needle, and puncture comes from pungere). Although cultural influences have melded together over time so that some acupuncturists associate their art with Taoist beliefs, they are completely separable, as one might expect of two things whose origins are totally separate and unrelated.
Acupuncture, moxibustion, acupressure, shiatsu, Qi Gong, and now EFT, all use the same system of meridians, or currents of energy or Qi (pronounced “chee”), and the points are gateways or openings in those currents where the energy can be influenced from the outside. The Western medical model rejects such an energy system a priori – because it is obviously conceptually akin to vitalism, which they regard as completely and incorrigibly discredited in favor of their Godless, soulless, de-humanizing mechanistic approach (do you get the idea that I question their hasty and not-entirely justified total categorical dismissal of vitalism per se? Good, because as a Catholic philosopher, specifically as a Thomist, who believes that there is more to life than chemical reactions and more to the universe than particles in motion, I do!). They reject homeopathy for the exact same reason – not because it does not work (it does, even on animals, so no one had better try to tell me it is because of the placebo effect [another phenomenon for which the Western medical model has no explanation whatsoever]), but because their materialist mechanistic view of the world and man’s place in it (as just another pile of atoms jiggling around meaninglessly in the void) cannot account for it; their whole paradigm is incompatible with it. When there is a conflict between the available facts and a theory that is held to that strongly, the facts always lose.
At the Veterans Administration there is no profit motive to drive innovation and improvement of health care outcomes because it is a government bureaucracy and as such everyone involved in its administration has an overriding interest in maintaining the status quo in order to keep their jobs. Don’t rock the boat! Don’t mess with the System! The System is more important than any one individual and his or her problems. Hence it is more important than the vets it is meant to serve and help. They are, after all, just individuals.
If Obamacare is not struck down by the Supreme Court or repealed, we can expect much more of the same. True medical and therapeutic innovation will slowly cease to exist, leaving behind a mockery, a masquerade of it, a sick, twisted funhouse-mirror image of what it once was, in the form of a total corporatist, fascist merger of the interests Big Pharma and Big Government (we were already pretty close to that dystopian nightmare, and Obamacare will just make things worse, much worse). Oh, we’ll get new pills for every conceivable condition or unpleasant life situation to numb us and dumb us down, but these will not be advancements of medical science. We are already pretty far down this road, a road that will end in all effective alternative treatments being strictly prohibited. So do what I did: google it. Find out about EFT now and when you have the opportunity to do so, share it with a vet that you know. Get the word out while you still can, so that as many of our returning soldiers who continue to suffer from the effects of their heroic choice to protect our freedom can have as much of their pain alleviated as possible, while we still have some freedom left and some time to use it.
* Though Craig’s discovery of the tap-on-all-of-them principle was genuine, his was not the first. Prior to Craig, Dr. Patricia Carrington, one of Dr. Callahan’s earlier students, made the same discovery and called her method AcuTap. But she could not get anyone interested in this discovery, so it died on the vine. When Craig came forward with his independent discovery of the same principle, she totally abandoned AcuTap and embraced Craig’s superior EFT.
