muscle testing - Radiant Homeopathy

A Christian Perspective on Muscle Testing

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by

Elisa Joulfaian
in ,

Two emotions come up when I first thought of muscle testing: curiosity and caution.

Questions then flood my mind: What is muscle testing and does it really work? Or is it ok to use? Is it reliable or am I just making up answers in my mind? Am I playing God to predict the future?

As a believer in Yeshua, I want what I do in every area of life, including health to be directed by the Bible. So after an acquaintance asked me if muscle testing fell into the category of occult activities, I needed to research and find out the truth for myself.

Some Background

Muscle testing is simple as it involves testing the arm or another body part for strength or weakness. A chiropractor I went to in high school taught my mom, siblings and I how to do it and we would have fun practicing it on each other.

These days  I mainly use muscle testing to confirm the needs of the body in relation to foods, supplements and homeopathic remedies.

My mom goes to a chiropractor that uses muscle testing to help do fine tune adjustments for a knee issue.

Muscle testing, 10 + years later, has become a part of my life, just like driving a car. Thus, when a friend asked, “Is muscle testing tapping into the occult?” I wanted to learn more about why it works and its origins.

What is muscle testing?

I did some research on google and found out the muscle testing official term is applied kinesiology (AK).

When I googled applied kinesiology, this is what came up:

“Kinesiology encompasses holistic health disciplines which use the gentle art of muscle monitoring to access information about a person’s well-being. It combines Western techniques and Eastern wisdom to promote physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. Kinesiology identifies the elements which inhibit the body’s natural internal energies and accesses the life enhancing potential within the individual.” (Definition approved by the Australian Kinesiology Association 1999, amended in 2006)

According to Healthline:

The basic idea behind AK is similar to one of Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion, which states, “for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Applied kinesiology takes this concept and applies it to the human body. This means that any internal issues you may be experiencing would be accompanied by a related muscle weakness.

I really like what Andrew Rostenberg, another natural medicine practitioner, has to say about muscle testing:

“Muscle testing is a diagnostic tool that uses the body’s own nervous system — a form of biofeedback — to uncover hidden problems. The human body knows what is wrong with it, but unfortunately it cannot give you a sticky note or email you with a list of what is not working correctly. It can, however, communicate through the turning on or off of muscles.

When you test a muscle with applied kinesiology, you are examining the CNS (central nervous system), since it is in control of when muscles turn on and off. A muscle turning on or off is the final output of many different pathways — hormones, toxins, hydration, sleep, stress, nutrition, electromagnetics, and so on. Muscle testing is able to pick up on disturbances in all the different body systems.”

 Origin of Muscle Testing (aka Applied Kinesiology)

In the 1920s an orthopedic surgeon, R.W. Lovett, developed a system for testing and grading the strength of muscles. His work was taken forward by Henry and Florence Kendall in 1949 and they produced a book entitled ‘Muscle Testing and Function’.  Kinesiology, as we use it today, was developed by George Goodheart in 1964. He was an American chiropractor who realized that by using a specific technique of massaging the beginning and ending of a patient’s muscle, he could increase the strength of the muscle. He called this the origin and insertion correction and named this new therapy Applied Kinesiology because he was applying information gathered by studying the muscle response (kinesiology means `study of movement`). George Goodheart became famous for being able to solve health problems that no one else could and he taught these techniques to chiropractors, osteopaths, medical doctors and dentists. He went on to found the International College of Applied Kinesiology (ICAK).

According to the book “Applied Kinesiology” by Tom & Carole Valentine, there are 5 bodily systems that can be tested:

  1. The Nervous system
  2. The Lymphatic system
  3. The Vascular (blood vessel) system
  4. The Cerebrospinal fluid
  5. The Meridian system

Chiropractors often used muscle testing to highlight areas of the body to be adjusted and then supplements that the client might be needing. Muscle testing is used to help determine whether a nutritional substance or medicine may be harmful to a specific patient.

Cautions with Muscle Testing

Muscle testing needs to be done with knowledge and skill, otherwise a false positive or negative can happen.

I have seen this happen several times personally and there are several factors, the two main ones being:

  1. The client’s or the tester’s polarities need to be reset
  2. Lack of knowledge of how the substance being tested works

There are more but I will only expand on the last one I listed.

Here is a great excerpt from “Applied Kinesiology” by Tom & Carole Valentine that shows a danger of lack of knowledge.

…with potential for misuse, is muscle testing for the adverse effect of refined sugar—a dietary no-go in natural-food circles. Because biochemical body conditions are in a constant state of change this into an infallible test, but most of the time placing refined sugar on the tongue of a person who is potentially diabetic or has high blood levels of insulin (low blood sugar) will cause the latissimus dorsi (shoulder to rib cage) muscle to test weak. However, a person in a hypoglycemic state at the time of the test would test strong, because the sugar would send signals temporarily strengthening the patterns affected…thereby masking the hypoglycemia.

More Resources on Muscle testing

Futher resources that dive more into this topic are:

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Summary

Its now up to you. Go research for yourself. (Acts 17:11). Don’t take my word for this technique. Its good to study and hash out what you believe and why.

For me, muscle testing is a tool to see what is needed or missing in the body, a gift from God to help His people walk in health.

Till next time,

Elisa