I have collected a list of stories of patient cases where I have observed the connection between a conditioned immune response and a past perceived trauma. I will be sharing many of these stories in upcoming blog posts.

The first story I want to share involves a patient (I will change her true name to conceal her identity) name Mary T..  Mary fell last year and suffered a traumatic brain injury where her balance, focus and cognitive function were quite impaired. She was also receiving care from a brain rehabilitation physical therapy clinic where they doing very good work with her in reestablishing proper neurological function. Mary was having me help her with her inflammatory response to her brain injury.

Removing foods that were inflammatory to her was vital..so we removed gluten, dairy, soy, corn, processed sugars and processed foods. Turmeric  has been shown to be very effective in squelching the inflammatory response. So, turmeric was something we recommended to Mary. As soon as she started taking the turmeric she noticed she had an adverse reaction to it. Her symptoms from taking the turmeric were a severe ‘heartburn’ sensation in her throat, stomach pain and she felt ‘fire’ the length of her esophagus.

In over 20 years of practice I have seen many interesting physiological reactions to foods, nutritional supplements and environmental triggers. I was curious if Mary’s intolerant reaction to turmeric may have had an emotional basis that triggered an adverse immune response. Using the widely used clinical tool of manual muscle response testing, it was determined that Mary’s intolerance to turmeric did, in fact, have an emotional trauma association.

I used a mind-body technique called NeuroEmotional Technique (NET) to address this ‘conditioned response’ of the turmeric and the past trauma. To learn more about NET you can go here. NeuroEmotional Technique allows the doctor/practitioner to access hidden stored trauma patterns in the mind-body. It is really an elegant technique that gets to the root of the problem very quickly.

Using NET, I determined that the ‘stuck’ emotion that Mary kept replaying in her physiology was ‘depressed’. NET, through semantic based muscle response testing, allowed me to identify the ‘original event’ of this depressed feeling. We found that as a 10 year old girl, Mary was called into the kitchen for a talk with her parents. They informed her that the family would be moving to a smaller house and that she would no longer have her own bedroom. In fact, her “bedroom” was to be in an open area without doors, a part of the house that her parents would have to pass through to go to and from their bedroom – in other words, a loss of her personal space and her privacy. The walls of the kitchen where this conversation took place were painted mustardy gold. Interestingly enough, the color of turmeric in powder form is the color of those kitchen walls she remembered.

The technique of NET allowed us to break the ‘conditioning’ or association of the past memory. After a few weeks, I followed up with Mary and she reported having, in her words,  “No problems now” with the turmeric intolerance reaction.

It is so gratifying to be able to see such remarkable changes to seemingly strange issues with patients and their food and environmental intolerances. My observations are that many people have these reactions and are unaware of these associations. My goal is to help bring more awareness about this phenomenon.