We all wish for the immortality of youth with endless energy, good health, strength and beauty! There are many people who claim that there are health products and treatments that will restore this vitality and many people are willing to pay through the nose for the chance to regain that energy once again. Well I hate to be the one who bursts your bubble but the fountain of youth does not exist nor is there any quick fix product or therapy that will reverse your aging and give you back years of your life. What there is however is choosing a lifestyle that enhances your life energy, removes the negative influences of your health and promotes healthy longevity. I call this squaring the curve.

Squaring the curve is basically a line graph that depicts our life vitality on the y-axis, and time on the x-axis. As we move through life we want to keep our life energy as high as possible for as long as possible. If we live a long healthy life right up until the last few days of our life then as we die and the curve drops to zero making an abrupt 90-degree turn squaring the curve. If we start a slow downward decent of our health earlier in our life, the slope drops steadily down and we suffer greatly from fatigue, pain, and disease until we slowly expire with no life vitality.

The recipe for health requires three things: eating well, moving well, and thinking well. The recipe is important because it balances the three aspects of a person’s health, which are structural health and the way our body can move, the physiological health and how our body’s biochemistry (hormones, neurotransmitters, digestive enzymes, etc.), and the mental/emotional and energetic health of our body function. When all three aspects work synergistically together we have optimal health.

Unfortunately in our health care system each of these aspects of health are often treated separately from each other. We see the orthopedist when our knee is hurt, we see the internist when our stomach hurts, and we see our psychologist and counselor when we are depressed and unhappy. The good news is there is a system that is well established in the health care system, but is under utilized by our population, and unpracticed by many health care practitioners even though it is a diagnostic system that is open to all licensed health professionals with a license to diagnose. The system is called applied kinesiology.

Applied kinesiology is a system of diagnosis that looks at a person as a whole human being instead of looking at a person as conglomeration of broken parts, which is what is taught in most health care disciplines. Applied kinesiology is a system that uses functional neurology to evaluate the neurological integrity of the body using manual muscle testing to determine area’s of dysfunction and in turn what will undo that area of dysfunction and reverse a person’s state of dis-ease to help re-establish balance within their structure, biochemical, and mental emotional states.

When a muscle is tested to determine if it is in an appropriate neurological state (which is taught to all doctors as part of a standard neurological exam) and the muscle is found to not be in its normal neurological state the next question to ask is why? Each and every muscle in the body is controlled by nerves that provide sensory information to the brain and follow specific neurological pathways which is then interpreted by the brain and a response is generated to keep the body balanced and working as intended. The nerve signals of the body follow common pathways to the spinal cord and to the brain that have multiple collections of signals coming from other aspects of the body like the digestive system and hormonal glands, and can also be affected by energy in the acupuncture meridians too. Each muscle has an organ (viscerosomatic) relationship to it. The best example is when someone has a heart attack and his or her arm hurts.  

To make an example lets say a person has a knee pain that comes on with running. All of their knee muscles can be tested to find out which muscles are not firing appropriately meaning they have lost neurological integrity. Upon examination it is found that their quadriceps muscle and sartorius muscle are not working appropriately. Instead of just having them do exercise to strengthen that muscle which doesn’t have a good nerve signal to begin with, lets look a little deeper as to why its not working. The quadriceps muscle relates through common nerve pathways with the small intestine, and the sartorius muscle relates to the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are the stress handling glands. Upon further questioning it is determined that the person eats a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrates which has altered their gut flora leading to a candida problem in their intestine, and the sugar with no nutritional value has zapped the energy demands of the body and put the body in a stress state on top of all the physical stress of running. Upon further questioning it is determined that the person is very stressed out by their job, they are tired all the time, and don’t sleep well.  

All these symptoms relate back to the imbalance of blood sugar and poor diet. The blood sugar imbalance, which will not show up on a blood test because they have not yet reached a level of insulin resistance (diabetes). Therefore no pharmacological treatment could be prescribed to change the body chemistry. They could be put on anti-depressants to help with their mood and sleeping medication so they can sleep at night, and they can take anti-inflammatories for the pain in their knee but all of them are just masking the symptoms of the blood sugar imbalance. However if they change their diet, eat more protein and good fats, and less refined carbohydrates their blood sugar will stabilize, they won’t have as much brain fog, they will sleep better at night, the abnormal gut flora will change, the adrenal glands won’t be as stressed out so they can handle the work stress better and the quadriceps and sartorius will start to fire appropriately and their knee instability will change causing less pain in their knee. That simple.

Seeing the body as a big picture instead of each part being an isolated entity gives greater understanding of why a person has dysfunction and what can be done to re-establish homeostasis. If you live a balanced life with your life energy and vitality on full, you will not need to use medications to function, you can live without pain, and you can enjoy your earthly experience living healthy, living naturally and living optimally.