Bipolar Chris

Chris came home from his first 45 minute Alexander Technique lesson a week later a different person. He was more decisive about where his body was going. He threw off the gloom that had been dogging him and became practically ebullient in his expressed enthusiasms. He was back on track, or so it seemed, for a few days. He rejoined the choir, signed himself up for another credit course at university and was beginning to establish a better sense of what he was doing in a room. This newfound enthusiasm lasted about a week and then, boom, he began to become unglued again.

When I walked through the door at night would I get the lady or the tiger? Sometimes I came home and Chris seemed more or less together and sometimes I came home and he would be staring off into space and showing the old hesitancy. Over the course of the next couple of weeks I noticed that his speaking voice dropped an octave or two. I shrugged off this weird new development as just another possible effect of the Alexander Technique and probably a good thing, but I wasn’t sure why I thought so. It may have something to do with my perception that lower toned voices signal confidence.

He appeared to be going through a somewhat manic phase, immediately signing up for a fresh course so quickly after dropping the other two, speaking more quickly and interrupting Ian and me with emphatic but off-base observations. One can only imagine what his classroom performance was like. I began to fear that he would have to drop the credit course he had only recently started. After discovering that he blew through his monthly allowance in one week, we began to dole it out to him in smaller amounts. The bipolar Chris was new to us.

Then his holistic psychiatrist phoned. “I have it!, she announced. “I think I can explain why Chris has been having problems recently.” She had stopped prescribing a certain amino acid supplement since August, believing that Chris no longer needed it. However, she had come to learn that it was important for her patients to continue this supplement for longer periods in order to bring the elevated dopamine levels within a normal range. What Chris had been going through was called protracted withdrawal.

Her muscle testing revealed that Chris’s dopamine levels were elevated in his glands and in the central nervous system. As the dopamine system is affected by the serotonin system she recommended an essential amino acid which synthesizes serotonin and niacin. We endured two more weeks of Chris’s quirky behavior before the needed product arrived in the mail. The change in Chris after only a few days on the added supplements was astonishing. He was able to sit with us at night and converse in a normal way, not from two rooms away. His sense of humor and playfulness came back.

This again reminded me again of the importance of getting the biochemistry right. I had been focusing of late on Chris’s problems as psycho/spiritual in origin, and had been discounting the importance of the biochemistry behind his actions. Once I began to appreciate that extra supplementation could indeed help him regain normal, I felt better and more optimistic about his immediate prospects than I had in a long time.

The second thing I learned is exactly the opposite of the first, meaning that if I thought that Chris’s problems were just a matter of getting the biochemistry right, then I would miss the importance of what I have earlier in this blog called the X-factor in schizophrenia. This is a most confounding, unpredictable condition. If you think you know it, you do not. It is also a chicken and egg thing. Does the biochemical imbalance come first, thereby causing mental trauma, or does the mental trauma come first, thereby causing biochemical imbalance? The wisest course of healing action is to keep an open mind and not place all your eggs in one basket.

The hair test

Unlike most psychiatrists who will judge you insane just by looking at you, Dr. Gregory House is perhaps too willing to run tests on his patients. Overlooking the fact that he is the fictional MD star of the eponymously named hit television series, I don’t want House anywhere near my son. Dr. House will run a battery of invasive tests, drill into your skull and perhaps harvest your spleen before he finally figures out what your real problem is. No thank you! There are better, less invasive ways of getting a snapshot of your underlying health problems.

An alternative to muscle testing is hair tissue analysis. Hair tissue analysis is known to the general public in the context of forensic science, but what is not so well known is that it is often used for people with mental illness and other health concerns to discover and correct underlying problems in metabolic rate, energy levels, sugar and carbohydrate tolerance, stage of stress, immune system, and glandular activity. Tests can be ordered through your family physician.

Hair tissue mineral analysis is a relatively cheap, accurate method of testing for the presence of minerals and toxic metals that can be symptomatic of body chemistry imbalances. For example, excess quantities of copper found in the body are associated with various health concerns, from fatigue and anorexia to depression and schizophrenia. Persons with too much copper in their system might tend to be creative, dreamy, and inattentive. A test involves simply snipping a small amount of hair near the base of the scalp and sending it in the mail to a laboratory such as Analytical Research Labs in Phoenix, Arizona, or the Great Plains Laboratory in Lenexa, Kansas. These laboratories analyze the hair sample and send back a printout of the test results, along with a recommended diet plan and protocol of supplements to address the revealed deficiencies and imbalances.

My youngest son, Taylor, was a bright but dreamy and woefully underachieving student throughout his entire elementary and high school studies, right up until I got him a hair test. His test results showed that he was off the charts in terms of his high copper levels. Excess copper made him an excellent artist but a poor academic performer. He had trouble focusing and with attempting to solve complex problems. He all too often just gave up. The turn-around in him in the second half of his penultimate year in high school was astonishing. He graduated in the top 10% of his high school class, and has kept up the pace in his first year of college. Many people would say this pattern is typical of boys, who often pull up their socks academically in their last year of high school. I strongly believe (but cannot prove) that Taylor would not have done so well without the increased focus that the vitamin support provided.

Energy medicine and muscle testing

The implication that human consciousness, like water molecules, can access knowledge nonlocally, across space and time, opened a new world for Chris and me. Through muscle testing we learned that Chris was allergic to wheat, dairy and eggs.

Energy medicine is one of the five sub-classifications of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM), as defined by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Energy medicine proposes that many illnesses of the human body can be rectified by rebalancing the out-of-balance energy fields of the human body that have caused illness in the first place. Energy medicine can be sub-divided into therapies using veritable (measurable) energy fields, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), various kinds of laser surgery and light and sound therapy, and therapies involving putative energy fields (biofields), the subtle energy fields of the body that have so far eluded scientific measurement. Therapies in this latter category include but are not limited to Reiki, Chinese Traditional Medicine (TCM), acupuncture, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), distance healing and prayer.

Applied kinesiology or “muscle testing” allows you to access all kinds of useful and accurate information about your body by asking questions that elicit a “true” or “false” (strong or weak) response by measuring your body’s resistance to applied physical pressure. For example, extend one arm and hold it rigid while another person pushes down on it with two hands while posing a question that can only elicit a true of false answer. You can begin by repeating “two plus two equals four” while resisting the downward pressure on your arm. Since this is a mathematically correct statement then your muscle resistance should be strong. The statement “two plus two equals five” is false and harder for our muscles to resist. The arm will will not be able to resist the downward pressure as well as it could for a true statement. This effect will be the same even if you are asked questions in an unfamiliar language. Your body knows what is true and what isn’t true even if if your conscious will tries to override it.

A person like your doctor can elicit information about you nonlocally by muscle testing. You don’t even have to be in the same room or on the same continent. This can be done by making a closed circle with the thumb and pointer fingers of the left hand. Insert the thumb and pointer finger of the other hand into the circle, making sure it is a snug fit. While concentrating on the test subject and asking a specific question regarding that person’s state of health, try to force the fingers apart. A weak response (the circle broken) indicates false, a strong (unbroken circle) true. The key to doing this successfully and receiving true indicators as to what is going on is to be very specific in the question asked (e.g., Is this [name of particular substance] good or bad for the person’s liver function?) and to apply consistent pressure between the fingertips and consistent force against the circled fingers while trying to force them apart.

Substances such as sugar will weaken the muscles whereas therapeutic substances will strenghthen them. This can be demonstrated by holding a small bag of sugar against the body with one hand while trying to resist downward pressure on the other arm, extended in front of you.

Thoughts and emotional stimuli produce these same responses. For example, the word “War” or “Love ” could be written without your knowlege on a piece of paper and placed in a box that you hold against your body. Or you could imagine something like your family pet. The person doing the muscle testing will know by the reaction of your muscles whether this is a positive thing for you or a negative thing.