Thoughts On NAET

I'm actually really surprised that NAET isn't discussed more. It dominated my childhood and teen years, so it feels like someone else should know about it. Here is a primer.

Classic 'Ah-ha!' Beginning

So we begin with a person named Devi Nambudripad, who was training to be an acupuncturist and chiropractor in 1983 when she says she had a reaction to eating carrots. (The modality is younger than I am, then.) She treated herself with acupuncture, but found that a bit of carrot was still attached to her. This led her to believe that her body sensed the electromagnetic field of the carrot and her performing acupuncture while holding it allowed the Chi to do something so that she was no longer sensitive to the carrot.

She generalized this to mean that most of our bodily ills are caused by our central nervous systems reacting badly to the electromagnetic signatures of molecules, thus causing a disturbance in the life force. This reaction, she decided, was an allergy.

She would later get an MD from the University of Health Sciences in Antigua, which the state of California does not recognize because the school has been disapproved by the state since 1995. She does have a license to be a chiropractor and an acupuncturist.

The real point I'm getting at here is she had the classic 'ah-ha' genius moment, just like the discoverer of iridology and other discoverers of interesting (fringe) modalities. A thing that happens to her one time is definitely all you need to know about how well a thing works.

The fact that she then goes on to use a type of applied kinesiology, also called muscle checking, to find the molecules your central nervous system is repulsed by is icing on the cake. Applied kinesiology is the ideomotor effect and is no better than flipping a coin to figure a thing out.

Woo Begets Woo

I guess once you are already down the path of 'testimony is the only evidence I need,' it's easy to accept every unproven notion that comes your way. So we have someone using acupuncture, which doesn't work any better than a placebo but is almost mainstream as a modality, deciding that it can be used to eliminate allergies. She then discovers these allergies by the most easily cheated method out there.

And now my mom, having been suckered by two NAET practitioners into going through their allergy elimination technique, has made her own modality, where you are of course not going to see any change until you have said life-force restored at thousands of levels. Each person just throws in more unsubstantiated ideas on top of each other, never checking that any of it actually works.

It's Always Allergies

The allergens we were supposed to be getting rid of through these diets could be colors, dates (as in calendar dates,) TV, vibes, and anything else the practitioner doesn't like. Since these allergens are discovered by applied kinesiology, that is pretty much what you're going by- what you and the practitioner think is bad. No surprise then that practitioners think 80% of what ails us is allergies. Besides, if there's one thing an unproven method of treating something is sure to do, it is collect testimonies of people being cured with it of everything, from lupus to asthma.

I'm very salty on the topic, honestly. My family went through the method twice and wasted a lot of money on it at a time when my parent's marriage was already strained and their budget was already depleted. Did I mention the restrictive diets we kids had to follow? My mom never cooked anything to fit the diet, and I remember going to school with nothing but dried beans for lunch because that was the only thing that worked with the diet. And for what? Because I was 'allergic' to 'purple?' It never cured an allergy, but it sure as hell made life hard for those of us who were forced through the treatment.

Now my mom is devoting her time to this spin-off and swearing to make a business out of it when she could make considerably more selling knitted animals on ebay. At least the knitted animals would be something people could use.