Podcast 48 – Emotional Freedom Techniques

Transcription

Edwards: This is Dr. Chad Edwards, and you’re listening to Podcast 48 of Against The Grain.
[music]
Edwards: Are you tired and fatigued? Are you frustrated with doctors because they just don’t seem to listen? Do you want to fix your pain without surgery? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then we are the clinic for you. We offer Tulsa prolotherapy, PRP or Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy and stem cell injections, IV nutritional therapies, Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy and functional medicine to get you back on track to optimal health. Call our clinic at 918-935-3636 or visit our website at www.revolutionhealth.org to schedule your appointment today.
Announcer: Welcome to Against the Grain podcast with Dr. Chad Edwards where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go, Against the Grain.
Marshall: Hello! Hello! This is Marshall Morris and today I am joined with Dr. Chad Edwards who believes that 80% of medical recommendations are crap, technically speaking here. He is a board certified family physician. He is a veteran of the US Army, and he’s an author of Revolutionize Your Health with Customized Supplements. Dr. Edwards welcome!
Edwards: Man it is good to be here and we had last week off. I hated not being here. I’m ready to rock and roll.
Marshall: Okay, awesome. Now, Dr. Edwards we have a guest on the show today. I’ll let you introduce her.
Edwards: Yes. So we have Sue Gaskell. This is I think the third time.
Sue: This is the third time
Edwards: Third time we’ve had her as a guest. She’s absolutely amazing. She is the area Rep–
Sue: I’m the senior territory business manager for Innovative Skincare, is clinical brand.
Edwards: If you want the absolute best skin care stuff out there, this is the company. Sue knows more about this. In fact, she’s forgotten more about this stuff than most of us have ever known.
Marshall: [laughs] Okay.
Edwards: It’s amazing, and we’re going to get into some of that in the next couple of episodes but this– The topic that we’re going to start with and- Is there anything else I should about you?
Sue: No I think-
Edwards: On that? Okay.
Sue: [laughs]
Edwards: But she is also an expert and I I don’t know the certification on this. But–
Sue: So you get certified in a number of ways, so I’m getting certified through EFT Universe. I’m certified with Carol Luke’s Yes Code Abundance Training. So, I’ve got a couple of certifications. I’ve got a trauma certification through-
Edwards: Wow.
Sue: EFT for Trauma
Edwards: Okay.
Sue: So a few.
Edwards: Very cool. So you talked a little bit about the EFT portion, and we try to keep most of our podcast about 20 minutes or so. This one, I don’t know how long it’s going to go, so if it goes over it’s necessary because this is one of these topics that when I first saw this, I was like, “That is pure quackery.”
Sue: [laughs]
Edwards: That is the weirdest most bizarre thing, and you have to be a lunatic to think that this works. In fact, I wanted to go get the pyramids and put them on my head and smoke the incense and all them. That’s really kind of what I thought, but the reality is, this no joke works, and I am so excited about this. We’ve been planning this for at least a month, if not a couple of months, and I think it’s something that we all need. The foundation of what we do in our clinic is the healthy trinity. So it’s exercise, nutrition and the 3Rs. So today, we’re going to focus a little bit of on part of those 3R’s which is reducing stress, recovering from exercise, and rest or sleep. So stress and a lot of the emotional baggage that we have, the way we react to certain things in the environment and in our world cause a lot of problems. A lot of us have a lot of scars because some of the crap that we’ve gone through and a lot of people will have severe emotional responses to certain things and so Sue talk to us a little bit about what we’re talking about here.
Sue: So when you explain EFT to people, lots of people think it’s a goofy thing just as Dr. Edwards was saying. The EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. Most people referred to it as tapping. It’s a way of tapping on the energy meridian points that have been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years effectively. It’s the same tech– Same basic idea as you would see in acupuncture, except for with EFT you tap on those energy meridian points to relieve the stress in your body and by tapping on those energy meridian points, you can release the stress because it changes the negative charge in your body to a positive charge. In fact, the science behind it shows that cortisol, which is one of our fight-or-flight hormones, can be reduced as much as 50% with only one EFT session Tulsa Prolotherapy.
Edwards: Holy cow! So we talked about adrenal fatigue and some of these things and the cortisol, high cortisol levels, cortisol response, this hyper-reactivity. This are kind of constantly on alert. So you’re saying that with the emotional freedom technique we can lower that response just in one treatment?
Sue: Just in one treatment and it’s something that is easy to teach anyone. So, there’s a couple of different scenarios you can use it in. The idea of this is if you came to an EFT practitioner is we want to help you through your big issues, but we want to teach you a technique that you can take home with you and use anytime you want to easily to relieve the stress of your minor issues. So if you relieve the stress of your minor issues through tapping or even your bigger issues where you have some big negative belief that is hugely impacting your life, you can change the negative charge around that and then that belief quits controlling some aspect of your life. Once you release it once, it’s gone for good.
Edwards: That’s absolutely amazing. So clearly I think a lot of our patients at Revolution would benefit from this. A lot of the things that we do in Revolution– There’s a paradigm shift in the way I was trained in medicine and the way I was trained was you have a randomized placebo-controlled double-blinded study that proves something works so you incorporate that in your practice and if there’s not, one of these studies, then we’ll often say, “Well there’s no evidence it works.” I don’t practice that way. My first foundational principle is the first take of the medicine. First, do no harm. So as long as I’m not harming someone, then that intervention is on the table. So how many people have been harmed with EFT?
Sue: None.
Edwards: That’s just amazing, and that was a loaded question, I did—
Sue: [laughs]
Edwards: We haven’t talked about that before-
Sue: No.
Edwards: -But I knew what you were going to say. So if you’re skeptical about the intervent– Our listeners are skeptical about the emotional freedom technique. You got to understand that this is something that is not going to harm anyone, and you may look a little goofy doing it or something like that, but who cares? Approach it with an open mind because this is something that a lot of our patients have had tremendous benefit with. I’m going to turn it over to you and tell us how do we get started with this? What are some of the caveats? Where do we get started?
Sue: Well, probably if you want to see EFT in action, anyone can YouTube it. Honestly, there’s tons of it out on YouTube. Anyone can see how it works. The reason that we recommend often that you go to a trained practitioner, is that we all have issues that are bigger than ourselves, and we can think about our big issues ourselves, but we don’t ask ourselves the right questions to get to where did they come from? Why do we have them? What is the actual belief? What are the other aspects of the belief that are keeping it in place? So, our level of helping ourselves sometimes is a little bit limited just because we don’t know what questions to ask ourselves. On a day-to-day basis, you can relieve almost all of your stress and a lot of the pain that we see just as stress pain just by tapping yourself and doing stupid things like, it’s not stupid, but it’s going to sound stupid when I say it Tulsa Prolotherapy.
Edwards: Right, sure
Sue: “I want this pain in my shoulders to go away.” “I’m upset by with this pain in my shoulders I wish it would go away.” Statements like that while you tap around the meridian tapping points, and pretty soon the pain goes away. It’s really kind of amazing that way. And if you think about that in the reality of medicine today, 95% chronic medical problems that are going on in the world today are partially caused by a stress reaction. So, then if you can heal your stress reaction, you heal your body, and the disease goes away.
So, it’s not going to cure– I can’t say it’s going to cure everything but I will say that it’s going to make your healing happen faster and better.
Edwards: Sure. So what are some of the things– minor issues, moderate issues, severe issues. What are some examples of some different minor issues and maybe some severe if you got some moderate. What are some examples? Who would benefit from this?
Sue: So pretty much everybody benefits from it. It’s one of those things if parents did it with their children when they were young, they wouldn’t end up as adults with emotional baggage that they’re carrying around with them because they would have let it go when they were young. Unfortunately, we don’t teach it to our children, so they carry it all the way along with them. But you can do something as small as; stop smoking, I’d like not to crave chocolate, any of those things you can do, addiction, it’s powerfully helpful for addiction. They had– the last time that there was a big problem at Killeen at Fort Wood in Killeen Texas. They had 100 EFT practitioners there to help the people on the base-
Edwards: I had no idea.
Sue: -Heal from this stress that was caused by the shootings at Killeen.
Edwards: All right, so the military brought these people to deal with that trauma?
Sue: Yes, there has been a couple of things. There has been a big study done in the VA system in the United States on using it for the veterans for post-traumatic stress. There was a significant trial done on something called operation freedom where they brought people, and that had post-traumatic stress for years, and it was affecting all of their relationships and the period of about six or seven days, they were able to help them deal with many of their advance that they’d been carrying with them from when they were in war, and it was affecting everything in their lives.
Edwards: Wow. As you were talking about some of those things especially with the veterans. I’m the medical director for the Patriot clinics that use hyper barracks to help with our veterans. One of the things we see so commonly is low testosterone. There are a number of different issues with veterans, and you want to treat that holistically and incorporate everything that you can because I think that’s what? How many suicides– 11 suicides per day?
Sue: Huge number.
Edwards: From veterans dealing with all the issues and so anything, I don’t care how crazy we look doing this, it doesn’t matter. We got to do something to stop that stuff, so I did not know that the military was, and even the VA was using it on that level. Anything to help with this and again it’s one of those things that there’s correct me if I’m wrong, there’s no side effects.
Sue: No side effects.
Edwards: And there’s no harm.
Sue: No harm.
Edwards: Why wouldn’t we consider this especially when everybody could potentially benefit?
Sue: Everybody — it’s just one of those things the reason that people don’t do it is they’ve never heard of it or they look at it, and they go,” Oh that’s too woo woo for me.”
In reality, all they have to do is try it to find out that it works on everybody if you got the right practitioner starting you on your path.
Edwards: Right, and I will say this, I will give you a personal guarantee if you will try this and it doesn’t work I will give you your money back.
[laughter]
Edwards: You’re not paying anything; anyway, it’s worth a try. How would someone get started?
Sue: Well, there are a number of practitioners anywhere. Like I said, I suggest that people find a practitioner but if you don’t want to get out on YouTube and tap along with any of the people that are tapping on YouTube. What is interesting about EFT is they have something in EFT that they call borrowing benefits. You tap along with somebody’s problem that is not your problem at all, and you get benefits from it because of the tapping releases stress in your body. It doesn’t matter whether that’s your issue or not, if you’ll tap along with anything, then the stress will go down.
Edwards: Can you give me — I know this is not necessarily an instructional podcast on how to do this because it’s probably too difficult or not, but it’s hard. In just three words, a picture’s worth 1000 words.
Sue: Sure.
Edwards: Just three words. Can you kind of run through a scenario.
Sue: Sure, so out in the world a lot of venues are saying, “Oh, all you have to do is think positive thoughts and the positive thoughts will turn into positive action.” In reality what happens in your mind is you might have some positive thought you’re thinking.–I’m going to use this as an example because this is a good one.
“I believe that I have been a better job coming my way. I believe I have a better job coming my way,” and in your subconscious mind, your subconscious’ mind is saying, “You’re a liar. You’re not qualified for a better job. You’re a liar. You’re a liar. You’re a liar.” What you can do with the EFT is you start with a setup statement. EFT is done around negatives, so you start up with a set of statements saying, “I believe that I’m not qualified for a better job even though I want one. But even though I have this belief that I am not qualified that even though I want one, I accept that I have these limitations, and I love myself anyway.” You start saying, “I know I have these negatives, but I’m going to accept that I have them.”
Edwards: It’s just a statement?
Sue: It’s just a statement.
Sue: And you’re tapping on what we call the karate chop point. That would be the point between your little finger and your wrist which is the soft point at the hand where you would chock a block of wood if you are a karate master.
Edwards: The lateral aspect of the hype within our limits.
Sue: Okay, we’re going to go with that.
[laughter]
Edwards: That couldn’t happen.
Sue: Whatever he said.
[laughter]
Edwards: That’s the media aspect, all right, go ahead Tulsa Prolotherapy.
Sue: Then you have various tapping points around your face and upper body that you would tap on while you say statements about it, and it could be as simple as, “I don’t believe I am qualified for a better job. I don’t believe I’m qualified for a better job.” Most people get caught up, and they don’t know what to say when in reality what you say around the tapping points has more to do with keeping you focused on your issue than it does with having some brilliance statement to say about your issue.
You tap on it to keep the focus and then you want to judge before you start, how stressed you feel out about it on what we call asides level. It’s units of distress, so from one to ten how distressed do you feel. You get your unit of distress so maybe an eight. You do your round of tapping so you would do all of the meridian points a couple of times then you take a deep breath and then you evaluate where that level of distress is. Most the time it’s going to have gone down when you get it down below the level of four, sometimes it will resolve by itself and sometimes you need to get it a little lower. But, once you’re lower than five, you’re what we call over the hump. Chances are it’s going to start to resolve by itself.
Edwards: Makes sense. Marshall, I think we need to take a break for a second.
Marshall: We’ll take a quick break, and when we come back we’ll wrap up where they can get more information.
Edwards: Sounds good.
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Marshall: Okay and we are back. We’re joined today with Sue Gaskell and Dr. Chad Edwards, and we’re talking about EFT. Before the break we were talking about – we’re starting to get into the specifics of how to do it. But I’m going to pick up where we left off and just keep you down this path of how our listeners can implement this or try it for themselves.
Edwards: Sounds good.
Sue: There are a number of easy ways that you could learn to do this. Out on our website called the EFT University, they have a mini manual that anyone can download; it’s free. It shows the energy meridian points, but I’m just going to go through them quickly for you, the ones that are the most common. We talked about the karate chop point is where you start with the setup statement.
Once you’re past the setup statement, and you’ve accepted your issue, then you just tap on different points around your face and body. The first could be where you’re — the hair of your eyebrow meets your nose. You want to tap right where the edge of your hair is.
Edwards: If you have a unibrow what do you do, sorry?
Sue: If you have a unibrow you tap where most people would have the entire eyebrow.
[laughter]
Edwards: Got it.
Sue: Just imagine where it is.
Edwards: Got it.
Sue: Or let’s go someplace and get it waxed.
[laughter]
Edwards: Sorry, didn’t mean to throw you-
Sue: It’s okay, [laughs] the second place you would go is to the outside of the eye, and you don’t want to be on the temple, you want to be on the area that’s right near the orbital bone where your eye meets the orbital bone. Then you would tap underneath your eye again where the orbital bone meets your eye, underneath your nose between your nose and your upper lip. Underneath your lower lip at the chin crease so where most people would have a chin crease.
The next one is a little harder to find so where you have a U-shaped bone in your collar bone, you can tap on either side of that just beneath the pointy part of the bone or you can take your whole fist and tap up all the way across that area, across the two pointy bones and you would cover everything.
Edwards: And that’s just for – if you to –said you can’t see a picture, you try on the manubrium which is the upper portion sternum and you got the medial portions of the clavicle so that your collar bone, that come and meets at the middle and so she’s talking about the whole area right there.
Sue: Where a man would tie his tie, that’s an easy explanation, it’s where a man would tie his tie.
Edwards: Exactly.
Sue: Then you will tap, underneath your arm, and this is four inches below your armpit. On the side, if you’re drawing a line down the side of your body, it would be right in the middle of that line. For women, it’s right where your bra strap usually is. For men, again four inches below your armpit, right underneath your armpit. And the last tapping place would be at the top of your head, and you can use all of your fingers to tap around in a small circle at the top of your head.
The reason that you are tapping on so many different places is because each different energy meridian point pertains to a different place in the body and you don’t know where your negative energy is stored. So the idea is to hit them all if you cover them all you’re going to get one or two of them right, and you’re going to make a change.
Edwards: Okay, and how many times do you need to tap at each place?
Sue: So, it depends. Sometimes you can do it just in one round, and things will go away, more often it takes a few rounds. But for most people, for most of the things that they’re going to be doing themselves, which are day to day stress, they can do it in less than five minutes.
Edwards: And so if I’m tapping there around Karate chop part on my hand, how many times do I need to tap that?
Sue: You’re going to tap it through 3 statements. So it’s a continual tapping through three statements. So let’s say that we are going to go with, “The stress is causing me pain in my shoulders” so this is Karate chop point, “even though the stress is causing me all this pain in my shoulders and I’m really not happy about the pain in my shoulders, it’s causing them to be really tight, I accept that I have all this stress, and it’s causing me pain in my shoulders, and I’m going to honor myself the best I can.” And you would do that three times. That sentence three times.
Then you’d start at the eyebrow point, “I have all this stress,” then to the side of the eye “I wish it would go away,” underneath the eye “all this stress is causing me pain in my shoulders,” underneath the nose, “I wish the pain in my shoulders would go away.” Underneath the chin, “it is so stressful that I have all this pain in my shoulders.” Collarbone “It’s very stressful, I wish the stress would go away.” Underneath your arm, “This stress is way too much for me, I’m tired of it now.” Top of the head, “I wish this pain and stress would go away.”
You can do it as many times like three or four, you can do it as few as 1. What you want to do is, at the end, you want to take a deep breath and check your stress level. And you do it as many times as you need to until you’re down at 3 or below and once you’re down to 3 or below you can stop because it will go away on its own.
Edwards: Okay, and so reevaluating or evaluating that stress level again, when you’re thinking about that stressor, you’re giving it a number on how stressed out you feel about that statement.
Sue: 1 to 10. How stressed are you and check it every time on a scale of 1 to 10.
Edwards: Okay, very very very interesting topic. A lot of people I think could benefit from this if they’ll take the time to do it. Again, it can look a little whacky; it can seem a little bit weird, but I think if most people would jump outside the box and consider doing it I think that there may be a lot of benefit for a lot of people.
Sue: It’s interesting, if you look at the studies on what they — or the literature on things that they’ve helped with EFT, as little as day to day stress and, again, as much as PTSD. So it’s a wide range, and everybody has stress. There’s not anyone in the world that couldn’t benefit from this technique.
Edwards: Amen. So if they want more information, you’ve mentioned that most people, if they’ve got some real severe stressors, they certainly need some assistance with this. So how would someone–, if they’re not in Tulsa or Dallas area, how would they find out. How can they find someone that can help them?
Sue: So the great thing about this is you don’t physically have to be in the same place as the person that’s helping you.
Edwards: Okay, cool.
Sue: Most of this that I do with people that I know is done either via the phone or via Skype so anybody anywhere can get help from anybody else anywhere in the world.
Edwards: That’s awesome.
Sue: Yes.
Edwards: So we can just have them call you, what’s your cell phone number and–?
[laughter]
Sue: So, actually, if you wanted to contact Dr. Edwards’ office he can get you in touch with me, and I do take few clients on a referral basis.
Edwards: Okay, so you can call our clinic at 918-935-3636, or you can go to our website revolutionhealth.org, and there’s contact information, and we can help stir you in the right direction. Amazing topic, I’m so excited about it, I’m ready to learn more. I have not yet done it myself; I’m anxious to give it a try because I like doing most things that I recommend. Seen some fun doing Tulsa prolotherapy on yourself– Maybe we could do EFT during Tulsa prolotherapy. Those needles are stressing me out.
[laughter]
Edwards: Maybe there’s something to that.
Sue: Maybe.
Edwards: So, anyway, thanks so much for listening to us today. Marshall?
Marshall: Dr. Edwards, thank you. Sue, thank you. We’ll see you guys next time.
Edwards: Thanks.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to this week’s Podcast with Dr. Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going Against the Grain.
[00:25:05] [END OF AUDIO]

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