Tapping can cure postoperative pain.
As a medically trained professional I find this hard to believe. In fact I bring it up during hospital rounds with my nursing and physician colleagues who rip the idea of tapping to shreds and make it seem like anyone who believes that tapping works is a colossal moron who should be disemboweled and carted through the city streets.
Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but their tone says it all. If it’s not a pill or a surgical procedure it can’t possibly work. This is the general sentiment of the medical establishment.
But I was intrigued. It’s such a weird thing and so many people profess that it works. Were these people some kind of strange alien cult? Are they all just crazy? I needed to find out.
I first heard of tapping when I was on a leadership program for the International Council of Nurses in Geneva, Switzerland. I met a woman who had built a business around tapping as a therapy. She was French and had a little bit of an accent, but despite her perfect English I had a hard time understanding what she was saying.
“Are you saying that you tap someone to get rid of their migraines? Tap? Tap as in T-A-P?” She must have thought that I was the moron.. She proceeded to show me the ritual for tapping which started with tapping her hand then her head, face and chest. It took her seconds to go through the process. She said the process of tapping could eliminate the migraine immediately. And she further claimed that tapping could help physical and mental pain.
At this point I thought she was out of her mind. I smiled politely and immediately scanned the room looking for ways to escape the conversation.
The problem was, her claims that tapping could get rid of migraine pain, physical pain, emotional pain were so outrageous I had to look into this technique. I figured I would find a bunch of “Soul Savers” hacking the idea of tapping for the very low price of $99 a session and I could write it off as a bunch of crazy and move on.
Except that isn’t what I found at all.
Here’s what I found:
A literature search (Feinstein, 2012) identified 51 peer-reviewed papers that report or investigate clinical outcomes following the tapping of acupuncture points to address psychological issues.
Want to know how it works? Check out my interview with Tapping Practitioner Areefa Ali, she will tell you how to do it at the 11 minute marker.
