Tag: data

Muscle testing: 7 big things to know

Muscle testing sounds pretty easy.

First, test to see if a food or supplement agrees with you. Then, if your body responds positively, pop that thing in your mouth.

Well, not so fast.

I’ve done muscle testing roughly a thousand times over the past few years and I’ve found it’s a bit more complicated than that. Every muscle test is a snapshot of a moment in time. What your body says yes to this morning, it may say no to this afternoon.

This post isn’t about which muscle testing method to use. I’ve tried several, and it’s a matter of finding out which one works best for you.

And since muscle testing isn’t mainstream, here’s a brief explanation. When you test a substance such as a food or supplement, you’re looking to see if that substance makes you a bit weaker or a bit stronger. Strong is a positive result. Weak is a negative.

The most common muscle test is done by chiropractors and other alternative practitioners. You hold the substance in one hand and you hold your arm out sideways. Before you pick the thing up, the practitioner pulls down on your arm to gauge its strength. Then when you’re holding the substance, he pushes down again. If your arm is weaker this time, that means the substance made you weaker.

There are several other methods and several machines that measure the body’s response. Frankly, I like the machines better because it lessens human error, but, again, that’s another story.

A lot of people think muscle testing is quackery, but as you may have guessed, I disagree. Results of my own testing haven’t been 100 per cent accurate, but in most cases they’ve provided valuable information that’s helped me better decide which foods and supplements to consume.

Now, on to the 7 big things:

1. Don’t rely on a single test: The human body is an amazingly complex organism. Countless adjustments are going on over the course of any given day. Maybe in the morning taking a whack of zinc might throw your body out of balance and you don’t want it. But an hour later, you come into contact with a flu virus and your body says, “Gimme that.”

I like to test a few times to determine whether or not something agrees with me. That may be a bit much. Two probably would be sufficient.

2. Time of day matters: I like numbers, so you’re going to see a bit of math, based on a study I did of about 700 recent tests. I’m 74 per cent likely to test positive to a substance in the morning and 63 per cent likely to test positive in the afternoon. I’m guessing this is because I tire as the day goes along and I’m less likely to want to deal with one more thing.

3. Some days you’re more receptive than others: A few  days ago I tested five things and wanted all of them. Today I tested four and didn’t want any. This happens regularly. I don’t bother asking why. My body is smarter than I am. I trust it.

4. Some weeks are better than others: Stat time again. The first week of this year, I only wanted 42 per cent of the things I tested. The second week, I wanted 74 per cent of them. I felt the same both weeks. Go figure.

5. Some seasons you want it, some seasons you don’t:  I tested more than 100 substances. In the fall, Vitamin D had one of the worst results. Since winter started, it’s had one of the best. Easily explainable this time. Vitamin D levels tend to drop with the reduction in warm sunshine that comes with winter.

6. Make food thy medicine: This applies to me, maybe not to you. I was positive for 98 per cent of the foods and beverages I tested, and 65 per cent for supplements. The foods also usually had much stronger positive results.

7. Keep track of test results: If you do a fair bit of muscle testing, you can learn a lot from keeping score. I’ve discovered that I like some brands much better than other brands, that I prefer tinctured herbs to capsules and tablets, and that I’m more likely to react positively to minerals than I am to vitamins.

So, you see, muscle testing isn’t all that simple. But it is helpful, as long as you use your brain and not just your body to make decisions on how to apply test results.

Photo: Linelle Photography

 

LDI: Using Data To Help Figure This Out

If everything goes the way it’s supposed to, Low Dose Immunotherapy can be very simple. Take the dose, feel better.

But I don’t think I’m the only one whose LDI journey has been anything but straightforward. For me, it’s been very, very complicated.

That’s why I’ve started using data to help sort out how my body is reacting as I seek to find the magical core dose.

For those not familiar with LDI, it’s used for many diseases and disorders, but primarily for Lyme Disease and its co-infections. Patients are given, by injection or sublingually, minute doses of deadened microbes such as Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia, and Ehrlichia.

Doses are prepared in homeopathic dilutions and range from the strongest, about 6 C, to the weakest, about 30 C.

Finding the correct dose is key. Hit it just right and a very sick Lyme patient can see symptoms disappear. This is known as the core dose, and if everything goes well, taking that core dose repeatedly over seven-week periods can lead to complete remission.

When I say I’m using data, I mean very basic statistics drawn from my daily symptom journal. There are two key factors involved in a person’s response to the dose: how you feel and how reactive your immune system is.

LDI theorizes that people with Lyme and co-infections are sick not because of the bugs, but because their immune systems are overreacting to the bugs. The goal of treatment is to prod the immune system to react properly to these pathogens and enable the body to heal.

After taking the dose, the practitioner mainly wants to know if the patient felt better afterward or had a negative reaction (called a “flare” of symptoms), in response. If the patient felt better without having a flare, it is generally thought they’ve found their core dose. If there is a flare, a weaker dose usually will be tried seven weeks later.

I use the stats I keep both as information to provide to the practitioner who decides which dose to give, and as a way of looking at overall patterns of how each dose has affected me. This information can be very useful if and when LDI gets complicated. Sometimes doses you thought were core doses didn’t turn out that way, and sometimes it just takes a long time to find the core dose.

The stats I keep measure how I feel in the 7-day period before the shot, the 10-day period following the shot (most people are likely to react positively or negatively during this time frame), and the 7-day periods following that. I could use a 1 to 10 scale, but I try to keep things simple, so I divide it into days in which I feel pretty well and days I don’t feel pretty well.

For immune overactivity, I do the same thing, breaking it down into whether or not I had or didn’t have symptoms of immune overactivity during the above-mentioned periods. One example of a symptom of immune overactivity for me is mild pain in the left knee and thigh. Over the course of a year, I have symptoms of immune overactivity roughly one of every two days.

I’ve taken doses ranging from 15C to 19 C and still haven’t found my core dose, or at least I don’t think I have. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I just missed on 18C, feeling better for the first week, but then flaring mildly the last three days of the 10-day period. And the 19C may have been it. I wasn’t feeling well in the week before the shot, and then I felt considerably better after the shot. I had some mild negative symptoms as well, but did they constitute a flare? It’s hard to say because I also had a lot of negative symptoms in the week leading up to the shot.

See what I mean by complicated.

To give you an example of how I use statistics I’ll give my 18C and 19C shots as case studies.

For the 18C dose, I felt pretty well 7 of 7 days prior to the shot. Then I felt pretty well 8 of 10 days following the shot despite mild flaring. But overall I felt slightly better during the period after the shot than the period before. Also during the 10 days following the shot, I had symptoms of immune overactivity on three days.

For the 19C dose, I felt pretty well on only 1 of 7 days before the shot. But I felt pretty well 7 of 10 days after the shot. And during those 10 days following the shot, I had symptoms of immune overactivity on four days.

So you can look at the numbers one way and say that the 19C shot clearly made me feel better than I had the week before. But there was mild flaring. There also was some immune overactivity, but less than usual.

The 18C dose also made me feel better than usual overall, but the change wasn’t as dramatic as with the 19C dose. And there was some mild flaring, although there was again generally less immune overactivity than usual.

Technically, neither shot met the general criteria of a core dose as I had mild flaring each time. But both times the 18C and 19C doses made me feel better generally and they reduced overall immune overactivity.

I’d love to get reader input as I contemplate an upcoming shot. Should I ask my practitioner for an 18C or 19C dose, or should I go for a weaker 20C dose? I’d greatly appreciate it if you could leave a comment letting me know what you think.