Pain Relief:

New “Acupuncture without Needles” Technique Reports 80% Effectiveness, Often Out-Performing Drugs

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 23, 2006 -- EFT, a new do-it-yourself pain relief procedure has shown remarkable benefits in thousands of clinical applications. Its potential use worldwide may produce major economic breakthroughs in pain management.

For example, chronic pain costs the United States an estimated $50 billion every year, making it the country’s most expensive health problem. An estimated 7 million are partially or completely disabled by back pain, and most adults experience occasional back problems. Arthritis affects 40 million and costs over $4 billion in lost income and health care. Another 45 million suffer chronic, recurrent headaches and spend $4 billion per year on medication.

Prescription drugs provide some relief, but they don’t always work, their side effects can be serious, and the pain usually returns.

One promising treatment recognized by the National Institutes of Health is acupuncture, the ancient Oriental practice of inserting needles at key points along energy meridians. Acupuncture works by removing blocks along these meridians, allowing energy to flow freely, relieving pain and other symptoms in the process.

Now a do-it-yourself procedure takes acupuncture to a new level by addressing unresolved emotional issues that contribute to pain. Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, combines gentle fingertip tapping on key acupuncture points with focused thought, effectively reducing – and often permanently eliminating – chronic pain. According to Its practitioners, EFT is more than 80-percent effective in treating headaches, back pain, cancer pain, arthritis, and pain from other conditions.

Steve Wells, an Australian EFT practitioner, worked with a Vietnam War veteran whose chronic lower back pain disappeared in less than a minute. “He spent the remainder of the session trying to bring his pain back,” says Wells, “but it didn’t return.” Wells reports similar results for clients with shoulder pain, migraine headaches, knee pain, and other conditions.

According to Stephanie Rothman, CHT, “My clients have experienced relief from pain and discomfort from headaches, neck stiffness, PMS, allergies, asthma, fibromyalgia, hiccups, stomach cramps, hangovers, and post-surgical discomfort, using only EFT.”

Los Angeles physician Eric Robins, MD, finds that EFT often works when conventional therapies fail. “Again and again,” he says, “patients with chronic pain have unresolved emotional issues or anger that’s tied to past traumas. Stress and negative emotions aren’t just in our heads, they are stored in our bodies, often in skeletal or smooth muscles. It’s hard for blood to flow through chronically tensed muscles.”

This model, he explains, agrees with the theories of John Sarno, MD, Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University in New York City and author of the best-selling Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection and other books. Dr. Sarno treats patients not with drugs or surgery but with anger management.

“He sees some of the worse chronic pain patients in the world,” says Dr. Robins. “Most have been in pain for 10 to 30 years despite surgeries, epidural injections, and years of physical therapy. He teaches them that the cause of their pain is anger and that when they let go of the anger, their pain will disappear. He consistently produces a cure rate that’s close to 70 percent in terms of pain and function, and an additional 15 percent are much improved.”

Dr. Robins considers EFT the most effective, fastest-acting anger management technique available. “Like most doctors, I’m always in a hurry,” he says. “If I can teach EFT to a patient in just a few minutes and completely resolve not only chronic symptoms but their underlying cause, that’s terrific. In fact, it’s phenomenal. Nothing in the pharmaceutical world comes close.”

Although most Americans have yet to hear of it, EFT may be the world’s fastest-growing self-help technique. Between 5,000 and 10,000 worldwide – including hundreds of health care practitioners – download the EFT website’s free instruction manual each week, and 175,000 subscribe to its online newsletter.

The EFT website generously offers a EFT Free Get Started Package to the public. It includes the EFT Manual (contains all the basics so you can apply it right away) and a free subscription to its popular online newsletter. Click here to get an EFT Free Get Started Package.