Kinesiologist = Voodoo Doctor?
As my kinesiologist I sometimes go to is in Stockholm and I’m not, I recently tried to find one in Denmark. It’s harder than you’d think to find someone serious. Even with going via links from the Danish Kinesiologist Association, I ended up on pages like this, with angels and humbug and whatnot.
Finally I find someone who looks sort of serious and is somewhere within driving range. I get a time and off I go.
Problem is, kinesiology and weirdness is like showers and mold. It is possible to have a mold-free shower, but the chances aren’t very high. Mold grows well in showers, and weirdness grows well in kinesiology (and in Christa’s metaphores, but that’s a different story).
To make a long story a little shorter, one of the things she did was place a individual size coffee creamer package on my stomach and wiggled my arm. What did that tell her? Evidently I’m allergic to milk – which the other kinesiologist, who also tested for allergies, didn’t say I was.
“You have a really bad allergy to milk!” she says. “Luckily, I’m one of the few people who can cure you of that.” She wiggles my arm and counts out loud to 10. She then informs me she has just found out that I have this allergy because of something that happened when I was one year old. It could even be a little thing like I got told off and didn’t understand what I did wrong, and then that made me feel rejected and frustrated and sad and the whole lot, and thus I can’t drink milk (an obvious conclusion). “Don’t you feel sad, frusterated and rejected?” she asks me. “Um, no, not really…” “When you look in the mirror, don’t you sometimes see a sad little girl looking back at you?” “Well, that’s not usually what pops into my head when I look in the mirror, no…” So anyway she wiggled my feet (I was laying down) and said “Christa is now one year old”. Then she sticks her hand on my forehead and says: “Christa, don’t feel sad. Don’t feel rejected. Don’t feel frusterated.” Then she wiggles my feet again to take me back to the present.
Weirdness.
“Now,” says she, “You don’t have a milk allergy but a milk intolerance, which is better.” Set to go, I guess. Then she put on some creepy music and rubbed my feet.
Summa summarum, this is what I should do, according to her:
- Don’t eat yoghurt, milk, cheese, etc for at least a year
- Avoid coffee (waaaah!)
- Go back to her at least a few times so she can do this again because it’s obviously just what I need
My policy is, ignore weirdness, take what helps and leave the rest, and don’t go on an explanation but on whether it works or not. It’s been a week now and I don’t notice any difference, so I think I’ll try to cut down on milk products and coffee, but see no reason to go back to her.
You’ve probably heard of our kinesiologist in MN, Dr. Irestone. I haven’t looked for another one so I can’t say how well your shower mold metaphor holds up, but I don’t doubt that there are a lot of weirdos out there. For some reason anything claiming to be natural or holistic is a magnet for weirdness — apparently on both sides of the pond. We went to organic/natural grocery stores a lot while living in the States, and every one had its share of people with dreadlocks and face-distorting hardware. Or should I say, “people trying to prove their individuality in very similar ways.”
Oh, and I meant to say that you can determine food allergies/intolerances through muscle testing, and she may have been right about that, but I wouldn’t buy the other mumbo jumbo (unless your one-year-old self really does need some reassuring). Dairy problems are quite common so she could be right even accidentally.
Yes, I know that, and that’s why I’m more convinced by the other guy – he put a little bottle with the thing in it under my nose without telling what it was, and I could feel the difference when he pulled my arm. This lady (when testing for other allergies, not milk) held her hand over a paper that said names of food on it, and wiggled my arm very slightly and I couldn’t tell the difference between the times she claimed I gave a response and the times I “didn’t”.