What is an allergy? An allergy is an exaggerated and misguided immune response to a substance that is not really harmful. The brain and body respond to the allergen as if they are under attack, and we then feel sick because of the hypersensitivity reaction. It may manifest as eczema, headaches, muscle and joint pain, sinusitis, cough, digestive disturbances, etc.. Most of the time, it’s not the allergen itself that is the problem, but our body’s confused response to it.
The medical community refers to true allergies as those that are IgE mediated. IgE is an immunoglobulin (part of the immune system) that responds very rapidly to an allergen and can cause symptoms such as vomiting, swelling, and difficulty breathing. Life-threatening peanut allergies are an example. But there are also non-IgE mediated allergies, and many people refer to them as “sensitivities.” These are mediated by other immunoglobulins (IgA, IgG, etc) and have a more delayed reaction. You can feel symptoms days to weeks after exposure, and the symptoms are generally milder and non-life threatening (although not necessarily pleasant). It can be difficult to identify those types of allergies because of that delay, making it hard to figure out cause and effect. Also, blood testing is difficult for non-IgE mediated allergies because exposure to the allergen is necessary for it to show up on the blood test. And you must wait about 20-25 days after repeated exposure to do the blood test, or it won’t show up because of the time it takes for the immunoglobulins to build up in your system. What complicates things even more is that most of the blood tests are done for raw foods (like raw eggs), and not many people eat raw eggs. Cooking the item changes its protein structure and antigenicity, so many people get false negatives on IgA and IgG tests.
Frustrated yet? I was. In 2016, after several years of rapidly declining health, debilitating pain, and no answers despite running lab after lab, I ran an IgG and IgA food allergy panel for over 100 foods and was found allergic to almost all of them (even though foods I knew I was allergic to and avoided eating showed up as non-allergic for the reasons listed before). I then went on a strict elimination diet for over a year and was only able to eat about 5 foods safely. Even a single bite of an allergic food would cause me severe pain or to get sick. I took every supplement known to man to try to heal my gut and calm down my immune system. But nothing worked. I had a very poor quality of life, had zero joy in food, and felt like giving up.
As a complete last resort, desperate, and filled with skepticism, I reached out to a colleague of mine and scheduled my first NAET® session in August of 2018. That was the first day in my long but steady journey to recovery. I say long, although if I think about how long I had been sick, 8 months of treatment (at the time of this writing) was not really that long to invest in my recovery. I discovered I had Lyme’s Disease, which had been the root cause of the decline of my health and which somehow triggered my immune system to start rejecting food on top of attacking my joints and causing extreme exhaustion. At first my progress was very slow, and I thought about quitting more than once, but I had run out of options and NAET® was my last hope. Fortunately I stuck with it, and after I got over one major allergen (for me it was eggs/chicken, which took many treatments to resolve), things started to clear very quickly and my health started to improve dramatically. I was able to get off of my thyroid medications and had more energy than ever. I was able to re-introduce foods that for years I had not been able to touch. I had zero symptoms during Cedar season and got off all my allergy meds and supplements. And we are finally starting to help my immune system deal with the Lyme. I was so inspired by my own recovery that I decided to learn NAET® myself so that I could help my patients achieve the same miraculous results.
So what is NAET?
Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Techniques, also known as NAET®, was discovered by Dr. Devi S. Nambudripad in November of 1983. It is a non-invasive, drug free, natural solution to alleviate allergies of all types and intensities. It is an energy balancing technique that uses a blend of testing and treatment procedures from acupuncture/acupressure, allopathic medicine, chiropractic, clinical nutritional, and kinesiology. NAET® is not a medical diagnostic procedure and therefore does not diagnose a disease. Rather, NAET® gives the practitioner an indication as to the substances to which the patient may have a sensitivity. The premise behind NAET® is to balance the energy of the individual patient to a substance so that the patient may stop experiencing hypersensitive symptoms when they have future contact with that substance.
One allergen is treated at a time. A patient who is not severely immune deficient may only need one treatment to desensitize to one allergen. However, a patient with severe allergies (like me) may need more than one treatment per allergen. A patient a with mild to moderate amount of allergies may take about 15-20 office visits to desensitize 15-20 foods and environmental allergens.
Basic essential nutrients are treated during the first few visits. These are “essential” because they are needed for all the systems in our bodies to function properly. They are the foundation and building blocks for all later treatments and cannot be skipped. Chemicals, environmental allergens, vaccinations, immunizations, etc. are treated after completing about ten to fifteen basic essential nutrients.
NAET® can successfully alleviate adverse reactions to egg, milk, peanuts, penicillin, aspirin, mushrooms, shellfish, latex, grass, ragweed, flowers, perfume, animal dander, cosmetics, chemicals, cigarette smoke, pathogens, heat, cold, and other environmental agents. It may take several office visits to desensitize a severe allergen.
The NAET® treatment itself involves holding an allergen in the hand while gentle stimulation is applied to the central nervous system. This reprograms the brain so that it can stop having an exaggerated and inappropriate alarm-response to the item. The brain then sends a signal to every organ and tissue in the body that the substance is not harmful, and harmony is restored.
The speed at which the body is able to recover from an allergy varies from person to person depending on the intensity of the condition, the health of the immune system, and the consistency of treatments. But every treatment brings the body more and more into balance and most people notice a substantial improvement in their overall health after finishing the Basic 16 treatments.