At the request of many patients, friends and colleagues I am posting a short, detailed write-up of how muscle works. The explanation is spread out over two separate posts as it is based on two different principles. This is Part 1: The Physics of Bioelectric Fields.

As one of the world’s leading proponents of muscle testing, I am often asked how it works. This used to take a long time to explain and when pressed for time, I would defer the question by stating: “Unless you’re a Biophysicist, its probably not going to make sense to you”. Then one day I said that to someone who turned out to be a Biophysicist but it didn’t make sense to her either. That was an eye-opener for me.

Over the course of our conversation, I realized why muscle testing didn’t make sense to her and also, why it hasn’t made sense to anyone else since it was invented 50 years ago. By the end of our talk I had explained it to her satisfaction in the language of modern scientific theory and she understood it for the first time. More importantly, I had worked out once and for all how to explain muscle testing simply. 

What follows is a condensed version of what we talked about.

Asking the Right Question

When the functionality of muscle testing is worked out mathematically, it results in a number so large that it requires scientific notation to express (55 x 10²¹). The word for 55 x 10²¹ is 55 sextillion (e.g. million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion), which looks like this:

55,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

To put this in perspective, if a $1,000,000 house is expressed as 1 x 10⁶, then 55 x 10²¹ would not only buy every house on our planet, it would buy every house in the galaxy.

But the answer “55 sextillion” doesn’t seem to correspond with the question “How does muscle testing work?” and it turns out this is because we haven’t actually been asking the right question.

Since muscle testing was invented in the 1960’s, whether we realized it or not, we’ve actually been asking “Why does muscle testing work?” This has lead to a set of literal answers that can be grouped into categories:

• Physical: when you put something in front of your body your arm goes down
• Anthropomorphic: your body can talk, your body doesn’t lie, your body is telling you what it needs
• Spiritual: the universe is informing you of its deepest desires
• Universal: the zero point field is registering truth or falsehood, reality or non-reality at the nexus between matter and energy

Each of these explanations answers why the arm goes down but none of them explains how the arm goes down. None of them connects muscle testing back into what we call modern scientific theory. The scientific and medical communities are only now beginning to understand how muscle testing works because we’re only now seeing that for the last 50 years, we’ve been missing the point.

Invention vs. Discovery

To understand how profoundly we’ve missed the point, let’s compare the canon with the rocket. The canon was invented somewhere around 1000 A.D. but it took almost 700 years for Sir Isaac Newton to articulate (in 1687) that there were in fact universal laws of nature which made the action of the canon possible (the Laws of Momentum and the Law of Gravity). The canon missed the point, Newton got the point, and this not only made possible the invention of the rocket, which is a canon turned upside down, but also the heliocentric solar system (Earth revolving around the Sun), the galaxy, modern scientific theory, etc.

In science, an invention is an application of a set of laws where a discovery refers to the laws themselves. Unlike the inventions of the canon and rocket, Newton didn’t invent motion and gravity; he discovered that they had been happening all along (e.g. that they were true in all cases).

Muscle Testing was invented in the 20th century and as with the canon, we missed the point. The point wasn’t that someone’s arm went down. The point was that the thing that made the arm go down was completely invisible: that should have been a clue. The invisibility of it all is strongly reminiscent of the Laws of Motion and Gravity, which took so long to discover because they were invisible as well.

If there were a law taking place, what could it be? What law of nature makes muscle testing possible that has been unarticulated for all of human history and completely overlooked by modern science? That’s the right question to ask, that’s the point and now we can get somewhere.

The Law of BioElectric Fields

If the law of nature that makes muscle testing possible were summarized in rough sentence-form, it would look like this:

“Organisms produce a uniform bioelectric field proportionate to their size which registers fluctuations in its environment via binary shifts in electrostatic charge.”

Let’s call this the Law of BioElectric Fields. To my knowledge, this is the first time in history the concept has been expressed as a law of nature. Like the Law of Gravity it has been happening all along, but it doesn’t appear to have been articulated as a law prior to this article.

It is traditional to express a law of nature mathematically (e.g. Gravity is Fg=G m1m2/r2 or the famous E=MC²). To develop a corresponding mathematical formula for bioelectric fields, we would need to calculate exactly how proportionate the field was to the size of the human body, and to precisely what extent it expressed fluctuations in its environment as binary shifts in electrostatic charge, and then differentiate for other organisms in the tree of life (e.g. the plant kingdom, etc.). However, this is not intended to be a thorough explication of the law so much as a clarification that there is a law in effect.

The human body has a bioelectric field that responds to its environment in the same way the pixels of a television set change colour if you hold a magnet near them.

Absence of awareness that there is a Law of Bioelectric Fields explains some of the historical disbelief when its applications, such as the invention of muscle testing, were put into practice. After all, how could muscle testing have made sense if bioelectric fields and the law governing their function were completely unknown? That’s the main reason its only making sense now, 50 years later.

Even so, the existence of bioelectric fields is not completely unknown, and is not without precedent in nature.

Examples of BioElectric and GeoMagnetic Fields

If you’ve ever had someone rub their shoes on a carpet and give you a static electric shock, you have personally experienced the bioelectric field in action, although outside of this example there usually isn’t enough electrostatic charge in the field to result in a spark.

Kirlian photography has been snapping well-documented images of bioelectric fields since the 1950’s. Most dictionary definitions of Kirlian photography admit that it “captures electrical coronal discharges” but then add “and hence, supposedly, the auras of living creatures.”

The “supposedly” is very interesting. It is an example of the sort of sociolinguistic tension that arises when a phenomenon of nature is observed to exist which has not yet been formally condoned as a law of nature by the reigning scientific paradigm. This is nothing new: in the 1600’s, the Sun supposedly revolved around the Earth.

Bird Flocks: The human eye isn’t evolved to see electromagnetic radiation, neither its own bioelectric field nor the earth’s geo-electromagnetic field. This is one of the reasons muscle testing defies logic and has escaped academic scrutiny until now: we have a visual bias, don’t see what the problem with that is, and are uncomfortable believing what we can’t see. Birds can sense the geo-electromagnetic field via magneto-receptors in their beaks, that’s how they fly in formation and know where to migrate. Its also how homing pigeons know where home is.

The Aurora Borealis: The northern lights are the earth’s geo-electromagnetic field made temporarily visible to the human eye by solar radiation. On a planet that didn’t have northern lights, you would have difficulty convincing anyone that there was an invisible electromagnetic field up in the sky. That’s the challenge with muscle testing: our bodies don’t light up like Christmas trees during increased solar flare activity, so there’s no visual evidence that we have a bioelectric field.

While we understand how the earth’s geo-electromagnetic field is produced, until now it has been completely unknown how the body’s bioelectric field was produced. A common misconception is that substances themselves have their own bioelectric fields, and act upon the body. Unless they’re alive or radioactive, they don’t.

Part 1. The Biophysics of Muscle Testing

Our body’s bioelectric field is created by sodium potassium (NaK) pumps within each cell. The job of these pumps is to rapidly cycle ions (charged atoms) of sodium (Na) and potassium (K) in and out of each cell, maintaining the cell’s electric charge. The numbers are almost mind boggling: The NaK ions cycle hundreds of times per second through each pump, there are millions of pumps in a single cell and trillions of cells per person. The total ionic cycles per second, per person, is an average 55²¹, which represents enough of an electrostatic charge to produce a bioelectric field that extends 3 to 5 inches beyond the body.

Here’s what a sodium-potassium pump looks like, its quite unassuming considering what it does.

Biologists, biochemists and particularly biophysicists are fully aware of these pumps, they’re just not aware that the cumulative effect of the pumps is to produce a measurable bioelectric field. Before now, it was the understanding that any excess electrostatic production was a side effect of the NaK pumps, too negligible to be worth serious consideration. It comes as a surprise to many scientists that the field these pumps produce is large enough to extend 3 to 5 inches outside the body.

A bioelectric field this large is the point. Imagine a civilization that spent its history looking so closely at droplets of water that it never realized they collected into water bodies. Imagine that people who believed in rivers were called mystics, and that nobody, even the mystics, ever suspected there were such things as oceans. This is how it is with bioelectric fields.

They are a blind spot in modern science and like all blind spots, we can’t see them, and since seeing is believing, they’re simply not believable. It may sound oversimplified when expressed so bluntly, but this is exactly the thought process taking place in the mind of the skeptic. What skeptics are actually revealing is that they don’t understand physics, in the same way skeptics in the 1700’s couldn’t believe that the Earth orbited the Sun.

For anyone interested, here are my calculations for the number of cycles per second within an average human bioelectric field:

1. The Smithsonian Institute has released a statement (2015) that they calculate the average human body to have 37.2 trillion cells. I’ve used that number.
2. Each individual cell has anywhere from 80,000 to 30 million sodium potassium pumps. I’ve factored in a low average of 10,000,000 pumps per cell.
3. Each pump cycles sodium and potassium ions at a rate of 150 to 300 cycles per second. For this calculation, I’ve use the bottom end of the range:150 cycles per second per pump.
4. I have not factored in the number of sodium and potassium ion channels in each cell membrane, just the pumps.

37.2 trillion cells x 10,000,000 NaK pumps x 150 cycles/second = 55.8 sextillion cycles per second, also expressed as 55²¹.

Getting the Point

For all of human history, the field has been too faint for our senses to notice. This is why we discovered black holes in other galaxies before we discovered our own bioelectric field. However, even in its faintness, it acts as a two-way bridge that conveys electrostatic information, in the form of impulses (measurable in Hertz) into and out of our bodies. This many ionic cycles happening every second in a single human body represents enough electrodynamic movement to generate a small bioelectric field that extends 3 to 5 inches outside our bodies, pooled more at the core where the body is thicker, and thus where more ion exchange is taking place.

This is the first half of what makes muscle testing possible but the exciting thing isn’t that it explains the physics of muscle testing: it is the discovery of an entirely new law of nature (e.g. the Law of BioElectric Fields), one that could be even more significant to the 21st century than the Law of Gravity was to the 17th. Here is why:

Implications

Since life depends upon health and health requires sensory awareness, our lives are defined by our sensory limitations. It is one thing to acknowledge that our outer senses are inadequate to know through sight, smell, taste or touch what is in our best biologic interests. It is quite another to realize that we have inner senses which can all be monitored and interpreted through the bioelectric field: the digestive, circulatory and endocrine systems, the skeletal and muscular systems and each individual organ and endocrine gland, not to mention dozens of brain structures all register their own unique vitamin, mineral, protein and fat requirements as well as metal toxicities, tissue needs, enzyme deficiencies, circulatory capacity, inflammatory levels, parasite load and bacterial balance.

Precisely because we haven’t known how to interpret information from these inner senses it has been traditional to overlook them, ignore them, write them off or disguise our lack of understanding in impressive diagnostic medical jargon, classified as thousands of diseases, conditions, syndromes, dystrophies, sclerosises, cancers, -plasties, -plasias, -itises, -osuses and allergies. In the 20th century, we have discovered (invented?) more medical conditions than at any time in history and yet not a single cure has been put forth since the polio vaccine in 1954, and technically a vaccine isn’t a cure.

A detailed comprehension of the body’s inner needs would quickly lead to the resolution of every health condition in existence. The significance of this fact cannot be understated.

Retrospective

In 1969 3 billion people saw 3 men fly a rocket to the moon. Meanwhile, back on earth, muscle testing had already been invented. Those 3 billion people (now 7 billion) have spent the last 50 years in awe of Astrophysics but have missed the ride in BioPhysics. 

In our supposedly medically advanced society, the World Health Organization still lists 9 of the top 10 causes of death worldwide as medical conditions that stem from our inability to understand what is going on inside our bodies. The existence of a bioelectric field makes it possible to better understand these conditions for the first time in history, and may lead to the elimination of much unnecessary suffering and death. This is where muscle testing comes in.

A Giant Leap for Mankind

It is a small step for one person to use muscle testing. But when an entire society adopts it and uses it to their advantage it will propel us into the biomedical equivalent of the space age. All that’s required is understanding and use, shared among friends, and friends of friends. It starts with you.

We can agree that there are bioelectric fields which function according to a predictable law of nature but that’s only half the story. The inevitable question is: “Yes, but how does the bioelectric field affect the muscles?”

To appreciate the relationship between the bioelectric field and the muscles, we need to examine the other missing link in modern scientific understanding, covered in the post:

How Muscle Testing Works: Part 2

The Missing Link

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