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EFT for Physical Conditions

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Will Illness Respond to EFT?

By Dr. Patricia Carrington

Here, I will address the most frequent question that is asked of me by the many people.  They want to know whether EFT can be used for one or another specific medical condition that they themselves suffer from or that someone close to them does.

Very often people write to ask me whether EFT can be helpful for a specific physical condition, often it is a serious one.  Many of the conditions they mention are so rare that, not being a medical doctor, I may not have even heard of them, however, their questions are legitimate ones.  The only trouble is that they are futile.

This is because we simply don't know whether EFT is useful for most medical conditions, and if the condition is rare, the answer is almost certain to be unanswerable.  While we do have clinical evidence that EFT has been effective, sometimes remarkably so, in helping some of the more common ailments, even in such instances we have no statistics to tell us how OFTEN it is likely to be effective.  When people ask me about the use of EFT for familiar physical conditions, I direct them to Gary Craig's website and suggest they enter a search there using that condition as a keyword.

When people are inquiring about EFT's use for specific conditions that are NOT reported on his site, however, I offer them an analogy.  It would be futile, I indicate, to write to the Bayer Aspirin company inquiring whether aspirin is effective for reducing the pain of a specific type of fracture or a tumor that was pressing on some organs creating pain, or ANY OTHER SPECIFIC CONDITION.  This is because aspirin, like any other painkilling substance whether it be chemical or organic, is NONSPECIFIC in its action — it's action is not directed to any particular illness or medical condition.

Similarly, provided EFT is not contraindicated for a given person, and there are almost no conditions that we know of where it is (one type where the use of EFT may be contraindicated are some forms of  epilepsy, although EFT can be extremely effective for these same conditions if the proper precautions are used — in fact I am preparing an article on this subject now based on the work of Dr. Paul Swingle and his associates) — then I advise the person to view EFT as a generalized healing intervention that can't be pegged to a specific illness.  It is likely that an imbalance in the energy system is being righted by EFT and that it can therefore be useful for an almost unlimited number of conditions.  As Gary Craig has emphasized, the only answer to whether EFT can be applied under any specific condition is to TRY IT and see what happens, (provided, as I have said, that there is no medical reason why this should not be done).

We can also apply Gary's advice to identify the emotional issue underlying the physical condition and tap on THAT.  This is often an excellent strategy.  However, it is not always easy to accomplish because when emotional distress has been converted by the organism into physical manifestations such as illnesses, pain etc. this is usually either because the emotional distress is not accessible to the person's conscious mind because it stems from a time so early in life that it cannot be recognized, or because the emotion is so painful that awareness of it must be avoided and it can only be dealt with in the form of bodily symptoms.

When handling physical conditions with EFT, therefore, one of the first things I advise people to do is to address the fact that the person who is suffering from this condition may not have any awareness at all of any emotional causes that may underlie it.  Gary gets at this indirectly by asking a person to GUESS what the emotional issue underlying their physical condition would be, if they DID know it.  This is a very clever strategy that frequently works and should always be tried.  Nevertheless, it doesn't ALWAYS work, and so I advise the following type of set-up phrase if Gary's "just guess what the issue might be" strategy fails. Here are some examples of such phrases:

"Even though I have no idea what feelings might be causing this, I choose to bring comfort and healing to those feelings." Or, "Even though I have no idea what feelings might be causing this, I choose to let myself know where I need attention and give myself love and support there."

Another useful strategy can be Gary's device of mentally placing the emotional issue "in" the affected body part, and tapping on that. For example, if a person who had severe pain in his knees, were distressed by a memory of a time when his mother made fun of them in front of his friends, a useful set-up phrase for him might be:

"Even though my mother made fun of me in front of my friends, I choose to let go of 'mother in my knees"  That person would then repeat, "Mother in my knees"… at each tapping point. This strategy can be particularly effective because it takes the person off guard and really speaks to the problem. 

There are many physical symptoms or illnesses that can be helped by EFT. 

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