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This month I want to report on the progress of the North American Academy of Neural Therapy (NAANT) in creating an educational program. This is not an easy project as it requires consensus on what neural therapy is, and that is not always clear. Every physician who incorporates neural therapy into his or her practice does so in a particular way. This will be individual and depends on his or her training, past experience and outlook. What is true for each individual is also true of whole medical traditions and thus we have differences in how neural therapy is practiced in Europe, (even parts of Europe), North and South America. These differences are not bad; in fact they can enrich the body of neural therapy, and open eyes to new possibilities. Hence the value of international conferences. However, in developing an educational program, some consistency is needed, if only to prevent redundancies. Practically speaking, a physician seeking education in neural therapy needs to know if he or she will be learning something new when enrolling in a new course. North American neural therapy education to the present has been piece‐meal, offered by various physicians, beginning with Dietrich Klinghardt in the 1980s, and invited teachers from Europe and South America. The only other source of teaching in the English language is the Heidelberg program, but only a handful of North Americans have taken advantage of this. The NAANT board (which includes me) has been considering various possibilities in developing an educational program. Existing programs in Europe and South America have been evaluated, but in the end, it was decided that we need a "made in North America" solution. Our priority has been to create something that takes into account the economic and time constraints of busy North American physicians. (A rapidly changing medical‐legal‐economic climate is putting enormous pressure on those few physicians still in private practice.) In other words, our goal is to produce an introductory neural therapy course that will equip the student to practice at least some neural therapy right away. We are assuming most of those interested will be experienced physicians for whom the technical aspects of injecting will be a matter of course, at least for the beginning levels. The goal then will be to present a "new way of thinking", the ideas, and the basic science that makes neural therapy come alive. We also want to present something new by integrating some of the advances coming out of the New World, e.g. the understanding of non‐linear dynamics in neural therapy by Beltran, Pinilla and Koval in South America, the osteopathic concept of somatic dysfunction as an interference field, the use of energetics in diagnosis, etc. into the body of neural therapy that emanates from Europe. On June 9th, the executive of NAANT met in Chicago for a day‐long discussion of this project. Out of this came a consensus of what will be taught and how it will be taught in an introductory two‐day course. The plan is this: The lecture part of the course will be divided among five experienced neural therapists. Why so many? ‐ so that the content can be critiqued by the rest of the faculty and optimized for future courses. Having a large number of teachers will also give the students more individual attention in the practical sessions. We also plan to train a teaching faculty so that future introductory courses will be taught by pairs of instructors in different locations across North America. Energetic testing (autonomic response testing) for interference fields will be taught early in the course as part of the physical examination. Our reasoning is that busy North American physicians need to be fast‐tracked into making accurate diagnoses quickly. Neither physicians nor their patients have the time and patience for multiple test injections. (This of course is not to discount the importance of careful history‐taking and examination.) Readers of this newsletter will know that I frequently use energetic methods of treatment in place of procaine injections. However, during this and future courses, injection of procaine will be considered the standard of care, ‐ if only to align ourselves with the standards of our international colleagues and the Heidelberg Declaration. ----------------- Letters: Some years ago I did a study of 64 patients suffering headaches and/or cervicalgia, all of them with wisdom teeth One of the conclusions was that the classical medical classification of headaches made no sense because there was no difference in the response to odontological treatment and subsequent NT treatment of the gum scars between migraine, tension headache, cluster, etc. I got a prize because of that study at an orthodox medical congress in Buenos Aires. I don't think that NT is simply a different weapon for treating disease. I think that NT understands disease as a disorder, a loss of order of self organization circuits, (self-organization circuits ‐ biologic not economic). When understood this way, the diagnostic terms of classic medicine lack sense. We should say, for example, "any" symptom related to its cause (interference field). Also, to me, it makes no sense to speak of autonomic nervous system activity as the main area of NT action. The nervous system was divided for didactic purposes, but in fact it acts as a whole. The whole body‐mind‐spirit cannot be divided. With NT we are working on the whole. What happens is that the disease manifestations and also NT responses are seen through the manifestations of the autonomic nervous system. Thank you for your newsletter. Pablo Koval Buenos Aires Argentina Plantas fascitis is a very common condition in an orthopaedic office. We see many patients with heel pain every week. 80% of these plantar fasciitis are coming from pelvic interference fields. But neural therapy on the fascial insertion of the calcaneus and interference fields in the pelvis is recommended. 20% are related to ancestral energy related to adrenal glands. Many times, tonsil neural therapy has an excellent effect on this energy. Carlos Chiriboga Guayaquil Ecuador ----------------- Sincerely, Robert F. Kidd, MD, CM |