By Michelle M. Dillon, ND
The foundations of applied kinesiology or AK started from the curiosity of a chiropractor by the name of George J. Goodheart, D.C., who discovered a pattern of weak muscles with different patients. At times, these muscles were inhibited or weak, only to test normal or strong after a period of time. This puzzled Dr. Goodheart. It was odd to him that these muscles were weak for no apparent reason. There was no atrophy of the muscle or nerve damage, the muscle was simply weak. Dr. Goodheart did not stop there, he and his colleagues spent countless hours of study in search for an answer of why these muscles were weak and then again strong at different times.
Finally after many years of research Dr. Goodheart found different causes for these weak muscles. These causes were the result of different stressors affecting the body’s nervous system, and the body’s organs as well. Over the years that followed, we have found that these stressors were caused by simple things such as: vitamin deficiencies, food sensitivities, parasites, toxins and chemicals. It was then from this concept that applied kinesiology was born.
Applied kinesiology is defined as a non-invasive way of evaluating the body simply by testing the nervous system through a series of organ stimulated muscle tests. To put it an easier way, let’s say that your body is a computer. Your brain would be the main frame or the cpu and your body’s nervous system would be the electrical connections. With A.K. ,a practitioner can find where the body’s ‘glitches’ are and then provide the proper remedies to help the body heal. AK helps the physician find what’s going on in the body and what is stressing the system. It helps by giving the physician more information, allowing in a sense for the physician to ask the computer (body) what’s going on. It is important to stress the point that AK can not tell youwhat you have, but can tell the physician what’s stressing the body and what needs to be addressed first. For example, the physician can find that a patient has a certain parasite by running a parasitology stool test. With AK the parasite would only be found if that same parasite is stressing the body. If the parasite is not stressing the body then that particular parasite would not show up in the muscle testing by making the muscle weak. This example points out a VERY important fact and one that everyone should realize, because AK is not like a standard lab test, but a way of simply finding the stressors in the body. Therefore AK is not something that should replace standard tests, but something that gives the physician a way to find what should be treated as a priority. For instance, let’s say that some patients walk around most of their lives with a parasite or an overgrowth of fungus in their intestines; and not even realize it or have symptoms. By utilizing a standard test the physician would find that parasite or fungal overgrowth. When testing with AK the parasite may or may not show up – because it’s only if that fungus or parasite is stressing the body would it show up in testing.
This brings us to another exciting point about the benefits of A.K. and that is the fact that it’s so individual to the person. God made each and everyone of us unique in our own way. So each of us reacts to everything differently, because we are each an individual. Here’s an example, let’s say one supplement works wonders for one patient, but then giving the same supplement to the next patient results in diarrhea or no benefit at all. With applied kinesiology, the physician can test the patient to see if this supplement will be a benefit or detriment to that same person.
Many of you may have had some exposure to AK (or muscle testing) simply from someone having you hold something and then pushed down on your arm. This is a different version of AK, one that is more simplified. Like ice cream, applied kinesiology as a modality has many flavors and in my opinion some flavors are better than others. The over-simplified approach may work for some, but the results are unreliable since they do not always give the whole picture. To clarify, before testing the patients muscles, the practitioner should ‘clear’ the body’s computer to get a proper reading; kind of like calibrating a scale before using it; to clear the computer one must upload previous stressors to different organs of the body. Uploading the previous stressors is done by stimulating different points. These points originate from different lymphatic points located on the body as well as some acupuncture points. Once these points are cleared, the body’s computer is able to ‘tell’ the physician where the problems lie. The physician knows there is a problem when the muscle becomes inhibited or weak. The physician then can see what will treat the problem by making the weak muscle strong again. Hence, it gives the physician much more information as to what is going on in the body, also what to do to fix it.
So as you can see, applied kinesiology has so much to offer and is a very useful tool in the hands of a trained physician. Applied Kinesiology assists in finding the cause plus provides the methodology of how to treat.
