[email protected]orgetit (BL 1204) wrote in
news:
[email protected]:
> Only, it ain't delusional, any more than any conditioned response.
> Remember that Pavlov's dog had a conditioned response to a bell, of
> all things. In NAET terms, that would be an "allergy" to a bell.
> There is no such thing as an allergy to a bell among immunologists.
There's no such thing as an "allergy" to a bell to anyone except Humpty-
Dumpty. The NAET practitioners are simply redefining terms. What you're
pretty much admitting is that if NAET works at all, it works as a form of
desensitization for what resemble phobic conditions (i.e. the mere thought
of being exposed to something makes the person sick). And if that's true
it's hardly surprising; desensitization is a well-accepted mainstream form
of behavior therapy that's known to work quite well for phobias, and
dressing it up in mystical trappings probably doesn't impair its
effectiveness much if at all.
But, and this is a *big* but, using the term "allergy" for those phobic
responses makes it sound like the desensitization *also* works against
actual allergies, you know those conditions that involve mast-cell
degranulation triggered by an IGE-mediated response to certain proteins or
protein adducts. And while some of those actual allergies are mere
nuisances and some form of behavior therapy might well reduce their impact
on sufferers' lives (by, for example, reducing conditioned responses to the
symptoms), some allergies (for example, tree-nut or peanut allergies)
aren't quite so benign; they can be life-threatening. The danger here is
that people will think that NAET can do something about *those*, and if
they undergo it and believe it worked, they might expose themselves to
something fatal.
I mean, imagine an alternative medical paradigm in which "cancer" is
redefined to include such things as toenail fungus. If some practitioner
comes up with an alternative treatment for toenail fungus that really
works, that would be a great thing, but it doesn't entitle him to claim
that he's "curing cancer," and someone with cancer in the normal sense who
used his treatment instead of conventional methods would quite possibly be
risking his or her life.
It's just like the Monty Python sketch about the accountant who wants to
become a lion-tamer, but thinks of lions as anteaters. In this case, it
looks like the NAET practitioners are redefining "allergy" to remove the
"mental health" stigma from their treatment. In fact, the NAET "allergies"
as you describe them sound a lot like Hubbard's "engrams." It's quite
possible that Hubbard (or more likely some of the people he plag^hwas
inspired by) stumbled across such conditioned responses and came up with
something that acted as a form of desensitization for them; some of the
lower levels of Dianetics may well function as phobia-avoidance rituals, as
well as inducing euphoria by some endorphin-mediated process. He then, of
course, spent the next 35 years dressing his rituals in layer upon layer
upon layer of expensive clothing obtained from the same designers who once
outfitted a certain emperor...
