AK: A.K.A It doesn’t Work
A Diagnostic That Won’t Diagnose
I know, not my usual stomping grounds, but I feel obligated to atone for something that will happen eventually.
The Diagnostic Tests
Applied Kinesiology is also known as muscle checking. About a million alternative health modalities use it to diagnose what ails you. It’s a favorite in NAET, Chiropractic, Brain Gym, and the random ‘energy healers’ that seem to pop out of the woodwork. Hell, Tara Westover’s mom used it to diagnose people and pick essential oils to treat people.
(I know she did because Ms. Westover described the noise her mom made when doing it. The finger method makes a distinct clicking noise as the fingernails slide over each other.)
There are a couple of ways of doing it. You’ve probably seen it done by having a patient put their arm out while either holding something or thinking of something. The tester then pushes down on the arm. The arm dropping is supposed to indicate something negative (you’re allergic to the subject, you’re refusing it, etc.) Holding the arm up still indicates something positive (you’re not allergic to something, etc.)
The other way I’ve seen involves making an ‘o’ by putting the tip of the pointer finger and to the tip of the thumb. The tester then puts their finger from the other hand through this hole and pulls to break the finger and thumb apart. Breaking the circle is supposed to indicate something, generally a ‘yes.’
I have seen it claimed that a practitioner will use different fingers for different effects when using the hand method. I don’t know who does this, but it wasn’t the person who I’ve seen use this test. She so regularly uses the pointer finger that it is the only one of her nails that is short.
Mind, I am describing what I have actually witnessed being done. Celestia Ward on Squaring the Strange described another method.
The Tests of the Test
In 2014, 51 people were tested three times each to see if, when they were made to hold a vial of a solution that wasn’t marked and the professional kinesiology testers didn’t know what solution was in the vial, their muscles weakened when they held a toxic solution.
They had two types of vials, none marked, and half had the toxic solution in it. The other solution was a saline solution, and only the data collectors in charge of the whole set-up knew who was tested with what and when.
One of the testers got the people to indicate the correct solution 80 out of 151 tries. The other two testers got significantly worse results, only correctly identifying the solution almost exactly 50% of the time.
This is in line with a double-blind study done by the ALTA Foundation for Sports Medicine in 1988 which found that it couldn’t be relied on to diagnose nutritional deficits, and a host of other tests that found that using muscle checking was no better than flipping a coin to determine or diagnose something.
Seen It Fail. Sometimes Hilariously.
When a couple I knew were getting a divorce, the mom would use muscle testing to discover the allergies that were causing her children to suffer in any way. These allergies could include television and 1984 (the year.) One thing the list of allergies causing the problem always included was the dad. A daughter called her on this. Literally said, “Let me guess, Dad.”
The mom jumped. “No! See, I’m not getting him this time.”
The kids never heard of their dad being an allergen again.
A little more tellingly, a friend of mine used it to determine if her current boyfriend was her intended. She got yes, but years later has married someone else entirely.
Ok, you are going to point out correctly that muscle testing isn’t really intended to be used for fortune telling. Or that, maybe the mom was just being a manipulative piece of work.
You may be right, but who is stopping them from using it this way? It is being used this way and getting ‘a result.’
And we just said that it is no better than a coin flip in determining what someone is holding or if they have a nutritional deficiency, so why not use it for everything else?
What’s more, since I’ve seen it used a lot, I can say that I’ve seen it fail miserably and misdiagnose a lot. It has failed to diagnose me of anything; it was used to identify my child’s sex when I was pregnant and was wrong (thought my Liv would be a boy;) it has been used to misdiagnose my brother’s general developmental delay as Marphan’s syndrome.
What’s more, that people frequently do use it for fortune telling or diagnosing their love life and claim that it ‘worked for them’ tells you that deep knowledge isn’t happening. If a thing works for everything equally, it probably works for nothing.
The More Interesting Question
So… if muscle checking is no better than random guessing for diagnosing problems, what is going on here.
To a certain extent, it is being used by such a wide set of alternative modalities because it gets some result, often one that cannot be easily confirmed or denied. Eventually, the arm drops or the fingers lock, and if it happens when you thought of sitcoms, well, that is an action.
How would you know it isn’t sitcoms you're reacting to? Excellent question. We should all spend some time developing that secondary test.
Or start comparing it to a dowsing rod, since I think we are looking at the same ideomotor effect.
The big question in my mind is: how much of this effected by the tester’s biases and culture? If you are constantly reading about the horrible effects of, say, DDT, my uneducated guess would be that a lot of your subjects/clients are going to be found to be allergic to DDT, even if it would be physically impossible to have been exposed. A tester who hates corn might find that all their clients are allergic to corn.
I don’t know, though. What are they finding? How often does it play out more like hot reading, where a tester confirms whatever a client has been complaining about earlier? What would happen if you didn’t think of anything, hold anything, or test for anything but just pushed on someone’s arm a bunch? Is it like those foot toxin baths, where you get an effect no matter where the feet are?
Sources:
Me. My experiences are as valid as all other testimonials. In fact, I may even have a more valid experience for having it been done in such a wide array of circumstances and over so many years. By so many people and modalities, too.
Wikipedia.org Applied Kinesiology