Who she is: A holistic doctor based in Arlington, VA, Dr. Kimberly Muzinski brings two decades of experience to her Integrative Chiropractic and Natural Medicine.
What she does: With her business partner and husband, Dr. Scott Muzinski, the docs take a cohesive, holistic, whole-body approach to care, including chiropractic, acupuncture, nutrition and lifestyle management, and mind-body health, to help patients achieve their individual health goals. Muzinski’s specialty is helping patients discover the underlying blockages to optimal health, whether they be structural, nutritional, energetic, or emotional.
Why she does it: When unlocking emotional blocks, the magna cum laude graduate of the Logan College of Chiropractic uses Neuro Emotional Technique (NET)—a mind-body stress-reduction tool that combines a number of techniques and principles from traditional Chinese medicine, chiropractic, and applied kinesiology to help improve behavioral and physical conditions.
“This gentle technique helps us assess whether an emotional blockage is what is interfering with someone’s emotional and physical health,” Muzinski explains, noting it is a holistic approach to well-being focusing on imbalances in the structure of the skeletomuscular system, unresolved negative emotional blocks, toxins in the body, and deficiencies in nutrition. “So, if someone has chronic or recurring back pain or headaches and migraines, this is a technique that can uncover whether it’s actually an emotional blockage that’s interfering with the healing process.”
THE POWER OF UNLOCKING THE EMOTIONS
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Author
Truly Amazing Women
Hope Katz Gibbs: Let’s start with the issues NET can treat.
Dr. Kim Muzinski: NET addresses physical and behavioral stress-related conditions, such as headaches, body pains, phobias, general anxiety, self-sabotaging behaviors, organ dysfunctions, and more. It’s important to note that NET does not cure or heal the patient. It is a tool that includes muscle testing and talking through issues that helps remove emotional blocks so the body can repair itself naturally.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Can you give us an example of a patient whom you’ve treated with NET, and how it has helped them heal?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: I recently treated a young woman who was very fit, but kept having lower back pain that just wouldn’t go away. She also had a history of kidney stones. Last year, she was hospitalized for a week to treat a raging kidney infection, and the antibiotics weren’t working.
She called me because she felt I could help to get her over the hump. Using NET, we discovered that the area in the back where her pain was located correlated to her kidneys—this is the area in the spine where the nerves link to the kidneys. The emotion that correlates with the kidneys is fear, or paralyzed will. We then talked it through, and it turned out that her dad had brain cancer, and after recurring trips to the hospital, he died. She had a fear response that she’d never get out of the hospital. Once we identified the emotional issue, she began to respond to the antibiotics.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Can you give us another example?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: In another case, I had a patient who came to see me every few months, and reported having severe laryngitis for weeks on end. We tried using NET to figure out if there was a emotional reason for the ailment. It turned out that the day she came to visit me was the anniversary of her mother’s death. As part of the upper respiratory system, the larynx sits on the meridian system that correlates to the emotion of grief. Once we identified the issue and cleared the block, her voice actually came back within a span of five minutes.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Those are dramatic results. How long has this technique been used, and how exactly does NET work?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: NET was discovered in the 1970s and is based on the physiological foundations of stress-related responses. The healing process happens when a person recalls an event in which a stress originally occurred. The technique enables us to look at the overall outline of the subtle body. We work with meridian systems and other reflex systems, and use them as diagnostic and treatment methods. For NET purposes, these primarily follow what’s going on with the different meridian systems, which represent the different organs in the body.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Does NET require much force?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: No! It’s a very simple and gentle technique that starts by having the patient lie down on a massage table.Then we use an applied kinesiology muscle test, which is not a strength test but a neurological function test, developed by George Goodheart, right, a chiropractor who founded applied kinesiology. If we’re working with you, we ask you if the issue to be worked with has to do with love, money, or you. From there, your body gives us information that we need to figure out where the blocks are and when they first appeared, and then we talk through ways you can work through them.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Isn’t the process based on the principles of physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s work?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: That’s right. We all remember learning about Pavlov’s experiment with dogs. It’s the concept of classical conditioning, and Pavlov in his digestive research found that the dogs would often begin salivating in the absence of food and smell. He quickly realized that this salivary response was not due to an automatic, physiological process. Based on his observations, Pavlov suggested that the salivation was a learned response.
The physiology of the mind-body dynamic can work in a similar way. In most cases, an emotional response to a given stimulus is normal and healthy. However, there can be instances where this normal emotional response fails to complete its full cycle (extinction does not take place), and then we can have an aberrant response to a future similar stimulus.
Hope Katz Gibbs: What are the four components of each NET assessment that you do with a patient?
Dr. Kim Muzinski: In a nutshell, these include:
Emotional Response: The Emotional Response is detected in minute proteins in the body called Information Substances, which are comprised of neuropeptides, hormones, and other specialized information molecules that permeate our entire body, including our DNA. While Emotional Responses were once thought to be only in the mind, they now have also been proven to be in the body—they are physiological. This dynamic has been scientifically validated.
Pavlovian Responses. While most of us think of Pavlovian Responses applying to animals, humans too are conditioned—sometimes by one event. While conditioning is normal, under most situations, so is the physiological counterpart—the fading or elimination of a conditioned response. This is called extinction. Extinction of most conditioned responses is normal. However, sometimes extinction does not take place, and we utilize NET to assist the body to carry on with this process.
Repetition Compulsion. One of Freud’s contributions was Repetition Compulsion, which describes the phenomenon that occurs when once we have been emotionally conditioned, we unconsciously seek to repeat a like situation in the future in an attempt to master or resolve the conflict.
Memory and Physiology. It has been proven that when we remember an event from our past, the body replicates the physiology that occurred at the time of the event. By remembering an event, the central nervous system, the parasynaptic nervous system, and almost assuredly the meridian system can be modified. This dynamic has been scientifically validated.
Hope Katz Gibbs: Science aside, this is a very personal process, right.
Dr. Kim Muzinski: It is! NET is a journey of discovery, and therefore different for everyone. The key is that it releases the charge on the trigger that is causing the frustrating emotion—be it resentment, fear, grief, or something else that causes a negative reaction—be it emotional or physical.
When I’m doing the technique, I never know what is going to come up. The information comes from the subconscious. It is worth trying NET just to experience it—even once. Your deep questions can be answered about what’s blocking you, and then you can release them, and move on.
For more information abut NET, and other holistic services offered by Dr. Kim Muzinski, visit myholisticdocs.com.
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