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Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Put Your Health Literally into Your Hands
How many times have you tapped your fingers against a table without even realizing you are doing it? Were you nervous at that time or preoccupied? How about drumming your fingers on the steering wheel or dashboard while driving? Were you stressed or anxious at that time? What if someone told you that you could actually change your health - both physical and emotional - with that same tapping motion would you believe them? You should. Recent studies have shown that simply tapping your fingers on specific points on your body can help ease anxiety and depression, alleviate pain, and even aid in weight loss.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Background: The manual stimulation of acupuncture points has been combined with components of cognitive and exposure therapies into a clinical and self-help approach known as Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). More than 40 clinical trials and four meta-analytic reviews of EFT treatments have demonstrated large effect sizes with a range of conditions, including pain, PTSD (in both civilian and military veteran populations), phobias, anxiety, and depression.
Objective: This review describes the approach, with a focus on PTSD in veterans and service members, provides an overview of how EFT is most commonly applied, and outlines obstacles and cautions related to its implementation.
Methods: Peer-reviewed clinical trials and meta-analyses of EFT in the treatment of PTSD are assessed to identify the characteristics of the approach that render it suitable for the treatment of PTSD.
Results: The literature demonstrates that remediation of PTSD and comorbid conditions is typically accomplished within brief time frames, ranging from one session for phobias to between four and ten sessions for PTSD. Clinical EFT has been shown to regulate stress hormones and limbic function and to improve various neurologic markers of general health. The epigenetic effects of EFT include upregulation of immunity genes and downregulation of inflammation genes. Six dismantling studies have indicated that the acupressure component of EFT is an active ingredient and not placebo.
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The integration into psychotherapy of protocols using the stimulation of acupuncture points by tapping on them, a form of acupressure, is increasingly appearing in clinical practice. An underlying premise is that the procedure generates activating and deactivating signals which, in real time, impact brain areas aroused by a client’s focus of attention. This makes it possible for a therapist to rapidly facilitate cognitive and neurological changes by shifting the wording and images that accompany the tapping. The approach has been controversial, with both enthusiastic proponents and adamant critics. A total of 309 peer-reviewed, English-language journal articles have focused on this development. The aim of this article is to put these reports into context using a “hierarchy of evidence” model. In a hierarchy of evidence, judgments about the efficacy of a clinical approach are formed according to the relative strength of the types of studies supporting the method. The hierarchy of evidence for psychotherapies that use tapping on acupuncture points includes 28 systematic reviews or meta-analyses, 125 clinical trials, 24 case studies, 26 reports describing systematic observations, 17 mixed-method clinical trials that included a tapping component, and 88 articles addressing clinical procedures, theory, mechanisms, or related issues.