Reducing Fear
By Joey Berlin
Originally published 12:41 p.m., June 17, 2008
Updated 12:41 p.m., June 17, 2008
There’s hating to go to the dentist — a feeling shared by pretty much every tooth-owning citizen in the free world — and then there’s having a real phobia of going there.
Emporia State University psychology professors Julius Cohen, James Persinger and Jon Sward recently presented the results of a study that examined how fear of dental treatment might be reduced, or eliminated, by the affected person without psychotherapy or drugs. What the relatively new procedure does involve might seem unbelievable: self-applied tapping.
Tap, tap, tap on certain meridian points of your body for as little as four minutes, the study showed, and eventually you can significantly reduce or even eliminate your fear. The treatment is one of a number of Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, that can purportedly be used to treat a host of physical and psychological problems.
On the surface, EFT might sound too metaphysical to be believed. But the EFT movement, founded by Stanford engineering graduate Gary Craig, is gaining believers in the medical, psychological and philosophical communities, including noted mind/body medicine author Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Cohen, Persinger and Sward are believers too, and their study of 44 ESU students showed that one session of self-tapping can reduce the fear of dental treatment by as much as 30 percent.
“I don’t think anybody fully knows (why it works),” Sward said. “From a Western science perspective, there are some French neurologists who have studied the meridian systems that the Chinese describe (in the body). The French people use radioactive isotopes; they can be tracked, and they clearly get picked up, and follow some kind of pathway through the body that’s pretty close to where the Chinese say these energy meridians are.
“The French researchers think it’s a subtle electrical system in the body. ... But in terms of exactly why the procedure works, I don’t think anybody knows. People don’t know why acupuncture works, per se. ...”
A veteran student of EFT and the way it has helped people overcome many problems, Cohen began the ESU study after collecting a series of articles on dental fear over the years. He said the phobia intrigued him.
“Because I had read years ago, in 1994, a statement made by an ... American Dental Association expert, who talked about the fact that there were 30 million people in the United States who were afraid to go to the dentist, because of their fear of being hurt, fear of pain,” Cohen said.
The ESU students were given extra credit in exchange for their participation in the study in 2005. The students tapped on the instructed meridian points and, Cohen said, experienced an overall 72 percent improvement in the short session. After each tapping session, the students were asked to evaluate their fear on a scale from one to 10.
“They tap five spots on their face, and two on their torso, and there’s two spots on their hand,” he said. “The torso is called the kidney spot ... and then there’s a spot under the arm, which is related to the spleen meridian.”
Cohen, Persinger and Sward presented the trio’s findings at the recent Kansas School Counselors Association convention in Topeka, drawing a large crowd.
The ideas behind Emotional Freedom Techniques are laid out on the Web site www.emofree.com, where Craig, the site’s host, admits that he’s “neither a psychologist nor a licensed therapist.” He writes that he became interested in personal improvement through psychology at age 13, when he realized “that the quality of my thoughts was mirrored in the quality of my life.”
Emofree.com quotes M.D. and author Eric Robins as saying, “Someday the medical profession will wake up and realize that unresolved emotional issues are the main cause of 85 percent of all illnesses. When they do, EFT will be one of their primary healing tools ... as it is for me.”
Sward said the most remarkable thing to him is that he doesn’t believe he’s met anyone yet who went into the EFT process thinking it was going to work.
“So it isn’t placebo,” he said. “Or at least, it’s not primarily placebo. ... I mean, it can’t be, because I mean, people start in the opposite perspective of they don’t really believe this’ll make any difference. And they’re always surprised when it does.”
He said he didn’t think dentists would know how to evaluate the kind of research he, Cohen and Persinger have done; he thought it would make more sense to submit their findings to a psychology or counseling journal.
Articles and video detailing the use of EFT are available at emofree.com.
“It’s like anything — it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time,” Sward said. “And there are certain nuances and subtleties, learning to work with it. With people who don’t really know what they’re doing, just tapping on themselves, it’ll work about 50 percent of the time. That’s pretty high.
“When you learn some of the little nuances, you can get the success rate up around 85 to 90 percent — remarkably high.”