CHAPTER 8. RELAXING NERVOUS TENSION.
Perhaps you may not do it. You have such splendid control over yourself. But you know many people who, when angry, or when suffering great physical pain, sink their teeth into their lip. Sometimes they bite hard enough to start the blood. Others clinch their teeth and hands, and double their toes up in their shoes. Why do you suppose they do this? They do these, and many other natural and apparently inevitable things, because they are instinctive and scientific, and because Nature knows her business. We have done and shall continue to do them involuntarily and automatically, because they relieve pain and nerve tension, because they produce a form of analgesia, or pain-deadening, similar to that which follows the injection of water or some anesthetic solution into a sensory nerve. If you stop and think for a moment many examples of this inhibition—as it is called—will recur.
One of the most interesting, from our standpoint, was that of a young school teacher, subject to cataleptic fits, who, when she felt one of her fits coming on, stepped on her right toes with all the weight she could throw on the left foot, at the same time grasping the right wrist firmly. Often those near—if notified in time—would produce the pressures for her. In this way the young woman managed to break up or prevent all except severe and sudden attacks.
It was subsequently found that this patient had a chronic irritation in the right ovary, and also a strained condition of the muscles of accommodation in the right eye. When these conditions were cleared up by proper remedial measures and correction, the cataleptic attacks ceased.
The fact of relief having followed in many instances her “inhibiting” the right-sided zones indicated the possible source of trouble. And by painstakingly examining the organs in these zones the cause of her condition was located and finally overcome.
So, as a means of diagnosis zone therapy has an immense value. Its curative effects, however, are most valuable and significant. Many of the gravest nerve conditions—conditions which failed to respond to the most skilled medical treatment obtainable anywhere—have been completely and permanently cured by the application of the proper pressures—properly made.
I recall a very grave case of neurosis—a writer’s cramp—accompanying a neurasthenic condition. This lady—unusually alert and intelligent—was a physical and nervous wreck. Sleepless, harassed by “nerves” in their most aggravated form, she was unable to hold a pen, or to write more than a few minutes at a time, until, on account of the pain and twitching of the arm, wrist, and fingers, she was forced to desist. She could no more have picked up and threaded a needle—let alone have sewed with it—than she could have operated an aeroplane. She was also nearly deaf from a middle ear trouble.
Several months’ treatment, using the aluminum comb across the front and back of the hands and on the finger tips, and daily employment of the tongue depressor for four or five minutes, brought about a complete change in the patient’s condition.