In my thirty years in practice, I have treated people from all walks of life to provide them with a list of symptoms. While most conditions have many causes, the single most common cause I've seen is stress.
The pervasive effects of stress on our minds, bodies, and spirits are nothing new. At the time, the idea that there was a link between stress and physical illness was groundbreaking and controversial.
From the early days of my career, I saw evidence of this connection.
Since then, the stress has increased. But why? Back in the 1980s, people were under financial stress as they are now. Humans have suffered from relationship stress since the beginning of time. But, after 9/11, I noticed a dramatic increase in stress that seemed to intensify and deepen over time. And as I became a better practitioner, I also began to attract more difficult cases, that is, those with more complex symptoms and disorders. I learned how to make emotional adjustments to counter the underlying triggers that keep stress and the body holding onto it.
Again, this stress response is not new, so why are people getting these illnesses with increasing regularity? What has changed is the pace of society and the polarization of attitudes. When we were children, we heard about some tragedy in our town or village. We are now fed minute-by-minute global misery and tragedy through the 24-hour news cycle and social media. Angst has become a staple of the American diet, and almost everyone today suffers from some degree of stress and anxiety. Advertisement I'll Listen to states that one in four Americans have mental health issues!
According to a 2012 national study, one in 20 teenagers suffers from anxiety or depression. One in three of our children has conditions such as ADHD, asthma, and allergies. One in sixty has autism; that's up from one in 10,000 in the 1960s. American children have fifty vaccines by age six, so why are they so sick? One likely reason is that they internalize the negative energy of a world over which they have little control. Their illnesses, in turn, affect the parents' mental and physical health.
It's not America; a recent study from Ontario shows that in 2015, one in six deaths of people aged 25 to 34 was linked to opioids.
We may take a yoga class now and then or try some other relaxation technique, but at the end of the day, we still accept anxiety as a part of life. Medical tests can show changes in the brain and heart, but we cannot see the source of these changes.
The stress and trauma of being in a concentration camp before the children were born changed the parents' DNA and "turned on" the cancer gene.
The good news is that as these genes can be turned on, they can be turned off.
First, I test the muscle response of the patient's arm to stress. If it weakens, I put stress bottles (cortisol) in their hands and do a slow EMDR maneuver that lasts two minutes. I often see the patient's eyes flutter, indicating that stress is affecting their nervous system and thought processes. I then test the patient's strength again to make sure there is no laxity in the muscles due to stress.
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