Where It All Started

Back at the turn of the century I began wondering:

  • Why some people made fast recoveries and others did not?
  • Why some people recovered fully from severe trauma and others never recovered from minor aches and pains?
  • Why some people needed ongoing treatment and others needed only one or two visits? Of course some people needed no treatment at all.

At that stage in my career, I had already been testing muscles full-time for 15 years and teaching muscle testing to health professionals for 5 years. However, frustrated that I was missing something I immersed myself in the neurology textbooks and learned all I could about how muscles really worked.

I studied the neuromuscular reflexes, especially the myotatic and withdrawal reflexes. One day I noticed that the charts which mapped muscle control all showed that changes in input actually PRECEDED output. That’s when something clicked. I wondered if proprioceptive input actually controlled motor output.

Then the patient who would changed my life walked in.

Lesley had severe muscle inhibition. She was the ideal test for my new ideas. As you can see from the video below (shot in terrible VHS), the diagnosis was spot on and her eighteen years of deteriorating health ended instantly when the faulty afferent input was removed.

This was the beginning of a very long journey, one which continues to this day.

A journey to work out individual differences in health and the reasons why we respond differently to sometimes identical stressors. A journey to help each of us optimise our own health.

The result is Afferentology.