By Dawson Church, PhD
At an integrative medicine conference at which I presented several times, a physician came up to me. He runs a large private clinic in Chicago, supervising teams of doctors, nurses, and support staff.
He expressed his gratitude for having learned EFT from me 2 years before. He said they’d implemented EFT at his facility, and described how and when they used EFT.
Because of the financial pressure on doctors, they typically spend only a few minutes with each patient. The average visit is only 13 minutes (Gottschalk & Flocke, 2005). Visits at the Chicago clinic were no exception, and that time frame doesn’t allow for an EFT tapping session.
The intake session at this physician’s facility, however, was an exception.
The clinic scheduled 31â„2 hours for these. Patients filled out a variety of forms, and were given a battery of tests by the physicians’ assistants. The Chicago doctor used this long intake process to administer a thorough EFT tapping session, as well as completing the rest of the process.
What he found is that many of the problems with which patients came to him simply vanished after EFT.
For instance, their levels of physical pain were reduced. The part of pain due to emotional upset went away. That left the actual medical part of pain to be treated by appropriate medical means.
In the Health Care Workers study, which a colleague and I conducted, an average of 68% of pain disappeared after a 30-minute EFT session (Church & Brooks, 2010). What remained was about one third of the pain.
This portion of the pain was most likely tied to medical causes, and amenable to medical treatment. The Chicago clinic was then able to treat that pain with medical means after first eliminating the emotional part of pain.
They could prescribe medication levels appropriate to the physical part of pain, instead of engaging in futile attempts to medicate the two thirds of the pain that was tied to emotions.
Setting these priorities is a way in which EFT helps both patients and doctors in clinics and hospitals.
A study examined the use of EFT for symptoms of traumatic stress following automobile accidents (Swingle, Pulos, & Swingle, 2004). This research team used EEG machines to measure the brain waves of participants, and also collected their SUD scores.
These declined from an average of 8.3 before treatment to an average of 2.5, and those that received the most benefit from EFT had significant improvements in the brain-wave frequencies associated with stress.
This type of improvement is also found in many stories recounted on this site from successful tapping sessions using EFT.
