In this episode, I’m speaking with Miriam Rahav, M.D., a triple-board certified physician in the fields of internal medicine, hospice, and palliative care, along with extensive training in functional medicine.
During this conversation, Dr. Rahav and I catch up for the first time since the height of the COVID pandemic, when she and her team bravely worked on the front lines supporting patients.
We then shift to the primary focus of this episode: neural therapy. Dr. Rahav makes neural therapy easy to understand and gives us some interesting and practical stories of her clinical use of the technique.
If you’ve had a difficult time finding answers for your symptoms, I highly recommend you listen to this episode—neural therapy might be the solution you’ve been searching for.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Rahav and I discuss:
- What neural therapy is, its fascinating history (it’s connected to both Sigmund Freud and the development of anesthesia!), and how Dr. Rahav became interested in this work
- How neural therapy dovetails with the cell danger response, the evolutionary response that can protect our cells but lead to illness and fatigue
- Specific conditions that respond particularly well to neural therapy and the link between neural therapy and the vagus nerve
- Why neural therapy is especially important for people with scars from surgeries or injuries…this is especially true for C-sections or any scars crossing the middle of your body!
- Dr. Rahav’s way of explaining neural therapy to a skeptic—is it research-based? What role does the placebo effect play in neural therapy?
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Dr. Rahav, such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast after– it’s been about four years or so since we last spoke.
Dr. Rahav’s experience during the pandemic
We spoke in the midst of COVID and you were in New York City at the peak of COVID madness, doing work in the trenches, working with sick patients to get people with severe COVID well again. You reached out to me a few days ago to reconnect and, of course, the answer is absolutely, yes, I would love to have you back on the podcast. Give us the update. How has life been?
Thank God we’re out of COVID, the horrible COVID era, [chuckles] and now we’re in a new era in time, which seems to be much better. Give us the update. Give us how things have gone in that span of time from your perspective.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Thank you so much, Ari. I’m so happy and excited to be in conversation with you again. I also wanted to say that part of how I connected you the first time around was that, and maybe you can remember what year that you had published this wonderful book called Red Light Therapy. I was an enthusiastic attendee of a yearly integrative health conference called the Integrative Health Symposium in New York City, which for me as a trainee in residency and then as a practicing physician in New York City was a lifeline to the world and the community that I felt so connected to in the integrative health space.
I was thinking about you today and the sentence from Ecclesiastes attributed to King Solomon, which is, “Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days.” I was thinking about you and how you decided to cast your bread upon the water, which is the wisdom that you learned about red light and its healing abilities and that you cast your bread upon the water, and that I was a recipient years and years ago, even before our first conversation during COVID of that book and how that book is proudly displayed on the shelves of my office in our reception room, how we subsequently got small red light therapy units that are desktop units so that people can experience red light therapy and how I actually have taken quotes from your book and made what we call a chart part.
We explain to people how it works, quoting you and giving you the credit, and that many people have told me and shared with me. We have documented, for example, shining red light on the thyroid and how that opens lymphatic drainage. It’s something that doesn’t require a lot of effort. You invest in an affordable unit, you keep it on your desktop, you do your work and there is the red light therapy. Thank you, all of us, especially me, owe you a debt of gratitude.
Ari Whitten: Oh, thank you so much, that’s really sweet of you to say. I have some good news on that front. I’m not going to share all of the details. Some of it can be found online with a little bit of googling. I have the version 2.0 of that book coming out very soon. In fact, I just submitted the manuscript to– this time instead of being self-published like my original book was in 2017 or ’18, this one is going to be with one of the biggest publishers in the world, which is extremely unusual from what I understand for such a big publisher to reach out to an author of a self-published book like six years after the original publishing date to do an update.
I told them, “Hell, yes, I’m already been working on the update actually.” It turns out for many months I was planning on updating it as a self-published book, but if I have the opportunity to work with one of the biggest publishing houses in the world to do the same thing I was going to do already on my own, the answer is absolute yes, so that’s cool. It’s going to get a lot of publicity. It was intended to be an “update” to the book, but what it’s turned into is a full rewrite of the book, so it is vastly longer and way more scientifically rigorous. Obviously, the research is updated through 2025. I don’t think there’s any 2025 research in it as of right now, it would just be there’s like a month.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: It’s a little early in 2025.
[laughter]
Ari Whitten: Yes, so updated through 2024 research. It’s really scientifically rigorous, really thorough, way, way more in-depth, and more sophisticated than my original version was. There’s one more special surprise, but I’m not going to reveal that one yet, that one will come out soon in a few months when it’s ready.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: You have to pace yourself with all the surprises, but what a beautiful validation of, “For thou shall find it after many days.” Here are the many days after you sent your bread upon the water, and they sought you out because this information is so invaluable. I also love it that it’s information that accessible, that makes healing, which I think is our– the wonderful information that you both generate, create, research, and share, that we are in that shared mission of making wonderful, vibrant, dynamic, radiant health accessible to as many people as possible.
Ari Whitten: Yes. Thank you so much for the sweet words and for bringing that up, I really appreciate it. I’m curious before we get into the main topic we’re going to talk about, which is neural therapy, if you have any words to share thinking back on COVID and the work you did during that era and if there’s– I haven’t talked to you since– I think maybe we’ve exchanged some texts here and there, but I don’t think I’ve heard the full postmortem from you about your work during the COVID era and your thoughts on that.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I think it’s a really interesting thing that in an ongoing way, take occasion to reflect upon definitely within my community, both of practitioners and my community of partners on the healing journey because it met everyone where they were in different ways that tested us in different ways. It’s good to take a zoom out and look at the trajectory. There was the immediate strategy of how do we deal with something unknown?
Part of what I was conjured myself putting it into action, but also seeking other people who are looking for creative solutions, accessible solutions, especially in that time where solutions were not apparently readily available or seemingly so, where within my practice said, “Well, there’s always the hospital,” but this sense of what can I also do to support my colleagues in hospital. We had IV vitamin C as a solution that had worked for various viral syndromes in the past, and we might as well try, “Here goes nothing.”
Then we’re surprised that it was just very, very helpful. As that information, we continue to build that information, it built upon itself. The world was in a very different place. I feel that we’re coming together and that it’s really, really important to come together and to forgive ourselves and each other for being wherever we were. I learned so much about how much health trauma my neighbors and colleagues and different members of the community had.
It was always my intention and continues to be my intention and my life’s work to come up with solutions as the famous quote from John Lennon, “No problems, only solutions.” Yes, we know there are problems, but one of the things that I have spoken a lot with my community is actually about the energy that was part of the COVID equation, which is the vibration of fear, and it engendered a lot of feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.
Our journey including, of course, conjuring the tools is also the sense of, hopefully, the evolutionary vibrational sense of curiosity that there is a challenge, but through curiosity and meeting that challenge, we may together find the solution, and that’s actually about unity. It’s about coming together as a community. There were so many things that I learned in addition to the tools, the zinc, the vitamin C, the fraught ivermectin, [laughs] all of those things that were solutions, but what happened vibrationally when we came together as community, that we could turn a sense of reunion with each other into a conscious appreciation of the gratitude of being together.
As I stayed open and as people came, they said, “Wow, you’re the first person I’ve seen in person or hugged.” In a year, there were plenty of people they’d been holed up, and the power of that connectivity and reclaiming the rites of passage, the celebrations, and, of course, mourning if that was what we were called upon to do and appreciating so much our need for togetherness and valuing it more precisely because of that time when many of us felt we were forced to be separate. I feel there are so many layers to discuss.
In addition to the biology, it’s the interdimensional aspects of healing, I think, that really expanded within my own consciousness in a major way. I’ve a lot to say about it. [chuckles]
Ari Whitten: It sounds like that could be its own four-hour podcast, but thank you for sharing briefly what I’m sure is a very long list of very complex thoughts, so I appreciate that. Again, I really appreciate the work that you did during that time and the way that you spoke out, and the way you risked your own life in the midst of the peak fear when everybody was scared. I was scared, you were scared, everybody was scared of this virus and how deadly it was. At the peak of when it was hitting New York City, which was the worst or one of the worst places in the world to be during that time, you had the courage to go into your clinic and try to help very sick people, so kudos to you.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Thank you, with a wonderful team who stood by my side. It was really a group effort and it was such a beautiful lesson. Even times that feel dark together, each one of us a small light, and together we were a great blazing flame of hope. I was emboldened by my colleagues’ determination to be with me and by the courage of people to try something, Then we’re like, “Wait, it worked?” [laughs] It was such a wonderful time of discovery, truly.
Ari Whitten: Yes, beautiful. Let’s segue into neural therapy.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Yes.
Dr. Rahav’s interest in neural therapy
Ari Whitten: Tell listeners the background on this story of, I guess, two background stories. One is the background of what neural therapy is and how it came to be and then how you came to be interested in it and develop a passion for it.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Wonderful and they intersect. Neural therapy has a really, really interesting background story. It starts with the birth of local anesthetics. The birth of local anesthetics, as far as I understand, actually starts with Sigmund Freud, which is really interesting because Sigmund Freud wanted to, I guess, speak with people about their inner workings in a time when culture, from what I understand, it was much more reserved. He discovered very innocently.
I truly believe that when he and his patient took a little cocaine, that they were far more able to discuss things that– there was a disinhibition that came with that feeling good that allowed for his whole, I guess, methodology and the information that he gleaned therein to emerge. He noticed as a sidebar that he couldn’t feel his face. He thought about that and was very kind of him really to call up an eye doctor, a buddy of his, and say, “I’ve noticed that when I take in this substance, I can’t feel my face. If you had your patients do this, you might be able to perform far more humane procedures.”
That was really the birth of local anesthetics. The caveat was it was habit-forming and then the discovery of another molecule that was related called Lidocaine. The “cain” at the end of the Novocain, the Lidocaine–
Ari Whitten: That’s the first time I put that together in my head, that Lidocaine is similar to cocaine. I had never connected those two things in my head.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Isn’t that amazing?
Ari Whitten: Yes.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: There was the birth of local anesthesia. Then we fast-forward to a story of two family doctors, as I understand it, that were brothers, the Huniki brothers. They had a sister who was suffering her whole life from blinding migraines when these anesthetics, and I believe it was Novocain that had emerged in Germany. I think it was maybe Ferdinand Huniki who decided he might try an intravenous injection of this remedy for rheumatism as they called it. The blinding migraine with the aura and the flashing lights just disappeared and never returned.
By the way, that’s now known as the Holy Grail of neural therapy, which is the lightning healing, the one time with the one magic procedure, and the pain and discomfort and the dis-ease that someone experiences vanishes never to return. It sparked this whole other evolution of research and study. Then from what I understand, there was a neurophysiologist by the name of Fleckenstein who discovered that scar tissue lived at a different– what we call membrane resting potential from normal tissue.
This is actually where neural therapy dovetails a little bit with the work that I know you are extremely literate in of the cell danger response. That part of what the cell danger response actually is, we might say that the cell is in a hibernation mode, but it’s actually a shifting of the electrochemistry to a lower membrane resting potential. The way I describe it in more language than mini volts, is I imagine there is a castaway at sea floating on a raft, and they are too tired, dehydrated, traumatized, starving, even though in the distance there’s a rescue boat that’s realized that they’re there, and they’re on their way to them, and they’re sending bottled waters and little sandwiches and Ziploc bags along the water.
That castaway doesn’t have the ability or the wherewithal to pick up that water bottle and hydrate themselves or grab that sandwich out of the baggie and nourish themselves because they’re too far behind. What that means if we extrapolate that to a lot of what we’re seeing as far as dis-ease currently, is that it’s a cumulative injury, trauma, dehydration, malnutrition, toxicity, and surely COVID or that whole experience, which was a very disrupting and upsetting and isolating experience for many directly and indirectly, has contributed to the sum total of the overwhelm of the nervous system that can lead to either local or systemic cell danger response.
What the mechanism is, back to what Fleckenstein discovered, is that when you– and you don’t need this interestingly enough, you do not need to cause anesthesia. This is the interesting thing. What the side effect, the not anesthesia, side effect of administration of neural therapy or a dilute local anesthetic to a specific area would actually be a hyper-polarization of that cellular membrane because of a transient [crosstalk]
Ari Whitten: As opposed to a hypo-polarization in the cell danger response?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Right, exactly, so that’s the point. The point is that the cell danger response is that it now lives at a lower membrane resting potential, which is a hypopolarization. The mechanism of injury becomes an electrochemical disturbance, what we call in the world of neural therapy an interference field, so the cell itself, but it could also be a group of cells, a ganglia scar tissue. One of the things that evolved out of my own practice, which I can give a little more background of just the evolution of that, is acupuncture points, which is how I started navigating this as well, and that it causes a transient hyper-polarization.
Then that hypo-polarization of the cell danger response just gets transmuted, and it just goes back to a normal resting membrane potential.
Ari Whitten: You just reminded me of a quote I saw recently. Give me a second to look it up because it’s very relevant to the way you just described that. One second, I will find it. There it is. It’s from Ilya Prigogine, who is a Nobel laureate. He said, “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Wow, if that isn’t an apt description of the quantum field, I don’t know what is. Right now, we are coming more and more into awareness of ourselves as part of a quantum field. It’s true, the beauty of neural therapy is it’s really a deeper understanding of the autonomic nervous system. There’s this profound resonance or holographic identicalness of microsystems with macrosystems.
Just so the autonomic nervous system is a quantum expression, which is what that beautiful quote, if we can bring an island, a ganglia into coherence, we can then institute greater order across an organism. Too, by you, dear heart, Ari, challenging yourself because you have challenged yourself to heal yourself and to find the way to lift yourself up. In so doing, you have lifted up countless others. Isn’t that beautifully resonant, holographically, identical process?
What is neural therapy?
Ari Whitten: Yes, very well said. You gave an amazingly well-described background of this whole story. Let’s go really simple and this can be a short answer. On a simple practical level, what is the practice of neural therapy actually look like?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Just to answer one more question, and because I love to give credit to all of my teachers, I want to give all the credit and my infinite debt of gratitude to Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. As Dr. Klinghardt said, “I was simply lucky to train in medicine in post-war Germany.” Neural therapy is just part of the medical school curriculum in Germany. When eventually life and circumstance brought him to North America, he simply brought his medical education with him. As he started teaching, he started teaching it to those who would follow him.
I am one of those in more recent years. In fact, I went to a 10-day-long immersion training with Dr. Klinghardt in 2019. I was already a trained and practiced acupuncturist, not of many years, but I took to it very well and was an enthusiastic user of it. One of the core principles in healing, and this is a really important one, is that we heal in safety. If you know about the cell danger response, we know that when we are in a fight or flight response, that our energy is allocated to the fight or flight response. We also know that to be the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, the automatic nervous system.
This is the one we’re not controlling. It’s the one that’s operating automatically within our body. We know that the other side, the yin to the yang, the balance of the nervous system on the other side, the parasympathetic side, the yin side is the one that’s in charge of resting, digesting, healing, repairing, and detoxification. When we want to set the stage for healing, we necessarily because it’s just the truth of what is, is that how do we help that body get into a parasympathetic place of safety, which is why going back to our vibrational awareness, that it’s not just the what we’re doing, but the how we’re doing it, creating the setting for safety.
In acupuncture school, for example, teachers taught me that there’s a point in the ear that they call it the calming of the spirit or the shen men. Before they start acupuncture treatment, why not just put in the shen men? [chuckles] Set the stage for safety. I’m not a Feldenkrais practitioner, but I’ve heard the same from Feldenkrais practitioners, that all of us in our way, if we’re doing this work, and it might just be intuitive, it might just be the friendly smile and the handshake and the, “I’m so glad you’re here. How are you doing? Tell me, how’s your family?”
The things that we do because people feel our heart and people feel kindness and that sets the stage for safety, which also goes back to why maybe many health issues became so exacerbated during COVID because there was this sense of worldwide lack thereof, so that’s just important to note. Back to how neural therapy applies, what neural therapy does is it will bring an area of the body into coherence. I love, love, love acupuncture, and there’s a beautiful spot on top of the kidney channel that goes just lateral to the sternum right under the collarbone.
It’s kidney 27, and it’s a very harmonizing point. It’s also one that is just rather simple to palpate as an acupuncturist, and it’s right there. It’s a neutral zone, just where we can give a little bit of a dilute protein and have someone experience the physical experience of neural therapy because it’s a very small needle. Some people, for example, if they have a fraught relationship with needles, I will choose not to do it, but if someone is open to the possibility or is familiar with acupuncture, I say it’s a modified acupuncture.
Back to Dr. Klinghardt, what he said to us is, “If you just allow yourself to do this, you’re going to see that it’s going to make a big difference.” By the way, about 30% of all German physicians practice this. It’s really far more accepted, known, and common to see in Europe. There are professional societies, conferences, textbooks.
Ari Whitten: Right, because here in the States it’s seen as fringe and woo-woo. It’s not seen as part of evidence-based medicine.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Interestingly, there was a wonderful physician named Janet Travell, and she actually went to Germany, and she studied neural therapy. For whatever reason, she came back, and she translated it into something else that isn’t woo-woo, and it’s common. Probably most physicians have, if not heard of it, or even administered it, certainly know of it and probably refer for it, which is trigger point therapy. Trigger point therapy is a part of neural therapy. It’s the same idea.
A trigger point is a point that’s tender that tends to have a radiation pattern to it, and that when you find the point, you look for it, someone has back pain, and you go along the back, and you find that point, you’re like, “Yes, that’s going into my shoulder. Oh, yes, that’s reading all the way down to my foot,” or whatever it is, that’s the trigger point. Then you really irrigate it with some Lidocaine and what you’re actually doing is administering neural therapy.
I think what I’m trying to explain is that we can shift our mental fields to understand it a little bit more deeply and understand the electrophysiology of it a little bit better, tie it into our emerging understanding of the cell danger response, and think about other applications other than pain. For example, I’ll just speak to some applications because I think this will just be more practical.
What conditions benefit from neural therapy?
Ari Whitten: That was the next thing I wanted to ask you is what specific conditions it’s useful for.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Right, so I would actually beg the question of what conditions would it not be useful for? Because one of the things that I like to do when I set the stage in the body, it’s like how my teacher said, “Just throw in a shen men, just throw in a neural,” and you can throw it in actually. In acupuncture, we have the Sanjiao or triple burner channel and the triple burner has a 0.17, that’s just under the ear, but I got the download. It’s not a point that’s actually used a lot within acupuncture, but it is actually overlaying the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve is literally the highway of the parasympathetic system. When you give some neural over the vagus nerve, you’re going to allow someone to experience a parasympathetic state. That’s a state of calm and relaxation, which sets the stage for healing. The likelihood therefore of whatever I’m doing, be it giving butyrate for gut healing or a probiotic or detoxification or whatever it is, the ability to receive it when the body is in a parasympathetic state, it’s the special sauce, it’s what works. Some concrete examples that might be a little bit abstract, and I also want to say we’re giving general advice here.
There are bio-individual considerations. For example, the person who I was so convinced that everyone had to have a vagus, point done, but happened to have had as a child a big surgery and a total thyroidectomy, and so she had a scar. When I administered the neural therapy, which is above or distal to the scar, I think in her case, there was an interference field below it. The energy instead of relaxing her, it started looping around, and so I needed to think on my feet and think fast.
I just want to say, this is general information and nothing will substitute for real clinical acumen at the point of care. The fact that many more practitioners out there might already be familiar with this tool, but they can expand their understanding of how to use what they already have to include this operating system, which is really what neural therapy is. I’ll give you an example. Certainly, if someone is anxious, and sometimes we know that anxiety can be related to a disturbance, for example, of the microbiome and something called histamine intolerance, and that a lot of our dis-ease patterns are cyclical, and you can’t get yourself out of anxiety.
When you suddenly have an experience that’s not anxious, it changes everything about your own imagining of yourself because you can’t imagine yourself not anxious and then you’re not. All of a sudden you have an experiential anchor of not being anxious. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with you, even though you haven’t had that experience before. You now know that that’s something your body is capable of. I can’t even begin to tell you how profound that is. Never mind the fact that then we have something to strive for, and we can start the healing process.
It’s like neural therapy can get you to the trailhead of healing and then can walk you along, but sometimes I find that it’s so hard for us to just get onto that trailhead.
What neural therapy feels like
Ari Whitten: What does that feel like subjectively, that experience from the patient’s perspective, to undergo neural therapy and to find that trailhead as you just described it?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I can tell you what I’ve seen. I actually met a new person yesterday for the first time, so lovely, and we were talking about it. I often say I don’t know if this is a first date thing, I don’t know you expect it to come into the office of an integrative provider and have a needle stuck into– it’s a small needle. It’s an insulin syringe. I just want to say it’s a very superficial procedurally [crosstalk]
Ari Whitten: It maybe is not that different in that sense. You’re going to object to the details of this, but it’s not different in that sense having a needle stuck into you than walking into your local CVS where as soon as you walk into– I hear this over and over again from all the older people in my life, whether my parents, my wife’s parents, everybody that I know who’s in their 60s, 70s, 80s, every time they walk into a CVS to get a prescription filled for thyroid medication or something, they’re immediately presented with 17 options to get various vaccinations, so maybe it’s not that unprecedented. If it happens at CVS, it could happen at a doctor’s office.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: It might as well happen in the doctor’s office, touché, Ari.
Ari Whitten: Yes.
[laughter]
Dr. Miriam Rahav: It’s also that it needs to happen in safety, so it’s not a pressure. In fact, if that’s not something that appeals to someone, I don’t want to go there because it reminds me– I have a background actually in education. I was a school teacher before I ever studied medicine. An old Quaker saying about education is what’s learned in pleasure is learned full measure, and so it’s really like that. It’s like learning should be fun and healing should be fun. Somewhere along the way, we’ve got terribly lost [chuckles] too often in education and also in medicine.
Healing when we’re doing it right, it should just be such a joyful journey of discovery and experiencing getting better as its own unique kind of joy which I know you understand because that’s what you share. I’m here to do the same. Anyway, so it’s this feeling and I love using the vagus because people are like, “Wow, it’s like I’m instantly chillaxed. It’s like I’m sitting with my doctor and I had a glass of wine. It’s so strange.” Someone is like, “Is it supposed to be this fun to go to the doctors?” My answer is yes.
Ari Whitten: That’s like Sigmund Freud’s original purpose right there, just to get the patient a little disinhibited so that they can relax and express themselves more freely.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Touché again. That’s exactly so. Also, one of the things that in the functional medicine space where we cast a rather deep and broad net and as far as gleaning biological information is information can get very overwhelming, “Oh, I have this, I have that.” When you look closely, you’re like, “Oh, your B2 could be higher, your folate could be higher. Oh, you’re low in vitamin D.” Sometimes that’s really overwhelming to people, even though for me, I’m like, “Great, perfect. If we didn’t know we can fix it and now we know and let’s roll up our sleeves. This is awesome. Let’s optimize, let’s support, let’s do all the things,” but it can be overwhelming.
Then enter stage left neural therapy. This was last week, I did this on someone for the first time, and she’s like, “I just can’t believe how good I feel.” It was this disbelief. “I just can’t believe how good I feel.” One of the important places, and I want to say this to all the mommies out there who have had C-sections is that C-section crosses very, very important meridians, because it’s that lower chakra. It goes through the midline, which is the Ren, it goes through the kidney channel, and it goes through a very special channel called the Chong Mai, which is often considered like that sea of life, that we know that fertility has so much to do with blood flow. Then you create an interference field right there in the sea of life.
It’s subtle, because there’s these cumulative drops in the bucket that cause that dysregulation of our nervous system. That’s a pretty powerful one. It’s also tied, obviously, to a lot of emotion. That’s also the beautiful thing about neural therapy because it’s a reset of the autonomic nervous system. It’s not just a physical, it’s also an emotional, it’s an interdimensional therapy. Many times what will happen, it doesn’t have to happen, it could happen in session, it could happen later. There is an emotional release, there is an insight. There is a realization, “Oh, this connects to this connects to this.”
Oh, wow. Like someone Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, then we do– by the way, Western neural therapy, the way it’s taught to me by the Germans, goes into ganglion, the stellate ganglion. You don’t have to go into a ganglion. I find because the nervous system is quantum, that even a gentle irrigation above it will filter in. Then all of a sudden, some will say, “My gosh, I just realized I wasn’t able to fully use my voice,” or, “I tried to tell, but I wasn’t believed,” or whatever the insight is that has to do with where we hold energy and what’s stopping it and blocking it physically, or biographically, as opposed to biologically, or both. That there can be that release. With it, this wisdom and insight, and there might be tears, there might be laughter.
It’s a marvelous and incredible thing to witness and experience people just feeling great. When we do this over the C-section, the first time I realized that this is something I should be doing, I was working with a woman who had been trying to conceive her third child after two C-sections for 10 years. Then we had this insight that this would be something important to try. The reason I hadn’t tried it before is because I hadn’t been taught it by Dr. Klinghardt yet. Then I was taught it by Dr. Klinghardt. I said, “I just learned this thing. Do you want to try it?” She said, “Sure.” That baby should be turning four this summer. We have babies born after normal therapy, which is really exciting.
The significance of scar tissue around the midline of your body
Ari Whitten: Wow. I’m trying to remember the exact conversation, but I had a conversation with somebody recently where they were emphasizing scars around the midline as being significant. It was actually the first time that I’ve heard anybody mention something like that. I’d never encountered something like that before. Now I’m hearing something again along those lines from you. Can you delve a bit deeper into that aspect of this story? Why injuries or scar tissue around the midline of the body might be significant?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: It’s a lot more, I would say, expansive than that. It’s this idea– Let me say it this way. Imagine the body as a 12-lane highway. We have these physiological processes and we have a certain bandwidth. Then you have– I don’t know. I’m thinking of people, for example, who maybe they’re slow, they have some genetically mediated slow detox pathway, and then they have a toxin, and then they have a bike accident and they have a scar, but it could be on there, or it could be something charged. Oftentimes, for example, that’s why I spoke about a C-section, if it’s an emergency C-section and it’s tied to a lot of emotion.
Often it’s that combination, whatever, and each one of those events takes up bandwidth. The midline is just, when we think about– That’s why I spoke about the Chong Mai, which is– it’s just lateral to the midline, the Ren and the Du are this loop that cross the midline, and they’re just one of these foundational– it’s the symmetry. They’re all of these embryological symmetries. For example, also the midline, if we’re talking about the pelvis, embryologically is tied to the head. My acupuncture teachers would say, imagine the little bean, like an embryo who is in that little bean shape, where the head is abutting the pelvis.
Then that’s a midline point in the pelvis that when I’m opening up and I’m doing this not for fertility now, I’m speaking about someone in their 70s who had the C-section when they were in their 30s and their brain fog is clearing up that would never clear up before because all of a sudden that connection. The nervous system is quantum and we have a certain bandwidth and we can deal with a lot and we won’t notice any changes in traffic if we go from 12 lanes to 10 lanes, to 8 lanes, to 4 lanes, but we might notice some congestion in 3 lanes and then 2 lanes, and then traffic is coming almost to a complete standstill if we’re trying to squeeze through 1 lane.
When you think about working on a scar, midline or not, if it’s charged and it’s taking up one of those lanes, just opening up one of the lanes of our bandwidth and our autonomic nervous system can catalyze so much more healing and repair. Our journey is to figure out and relieve, and neural is just this minimally invasive, procedurally so safe, and the likelihood of helping someone is great on that risk-benefit equation, risks are small and benefits are great. Midline just has to do with our understanding of meridians, but also I would add that it was also by individual because any scar can be tied to something powerful, which would be bio-individual
The evidence on neural therapy
Ari Whitten: I want to put on my skeptic’s hat here for a moment and ask you a couple of questions from that perspective. Let’s say a– and I’ll say a few things here and you can respond in piecemeal as you’d like. Let’s say a typical conventional doctor is listening to this. I know you’re an MD, but you obviously think very outside the box compared to most MDs. There’s a broader discussion around this, which is like personality types that are either rule followers and people who obey authority versus people who like to think for themselves, who are more contrarian, who like to test novel things and do things their own way.
The broader point that I want to get at is if most typical MDs were listening to this, they might say, “What’s the evidence on neural therapy? What’s the evidence that it does anything good?” The body of evidence isn’t so impressive right now. Now, with that said, there’s a distinction between absence of evidence and evidence of absence. In this case, it’s more a matter of, there’s a lack of scientific research on neural therapy more so than there is this abundance of research that has debunked it or shown that it doesn’t work. The body of research isn’t so strong.
There’s another layer to this story that I think is worth addressing, which is the placebo effect. As you probably know, there’s research on the placebo effect showing that injections of things have a much stronger placebo effect than just simply ingesting a pill. Given that, just even if– A skeptic might say, “How do you know that this is any better than just getting out a needle and a syringe and injecting a saline solution, injecting salt water? How do we know that this is doing anything other than just creating a placebo effect by the person thinking that you are doing some meaningful therapy and then injecting a substance into them, which we know amplifies the placebo effect? How do we know it’s more significant than what could be accomplished by just a placebo injection?”
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I think it’s such a great question. Thank you for asking it. I also think the answer necessarily is going to have to be nuanced because, just sticking in a needle is acupuncture, and acupuncture is validated up, down, and has so many studies because what we learn in acupuncture is it’s not the needle that’s doing the healing. It’s that micro-injury that’s telling the body and the autonomic nervous system, “Put some attention here.” What we mean by attention is also blood flow repair mechanisms, attention energetically is going to then induce the healing response. It’s not the needle doing the healing. It’s the nervous system being called to that site.
There’s that. I don’t think we’re debunking acupuncture at this point. It’s with neural therapy, the worst-case scenario is I’m performing acupuncture. [laughs] Then, to complicate matters further, we have prolotherapy and prolotherapy is actually using D5W or a 5% dextrose solution. There seems to be really– There’s actually really interesting research here. I’m going to have to also say that I’m going to point interested parties to a wonderful organization that I’m part of called the North American Academy for Neural Therapy or NANT.org, where there is literature posted for people to follow.
I will also point further that I don’t think we’re debunking trigger point therapy, and trigger point therapy, as I said, is neural therapy. The difference is that it’s being used exclusively for pain at a specific point. That if you take that same therapy and you say, even if I don’t have pain on a scar, there might be value to performing “trigger point therapy,” maybe technically a little bit different because I’m not trying to go into a painful point. I’m just weaving myself superficially across the scar or just para to a scar if it’s a new scar, for example.
It’s going to be a little bit hard to answer because there are so many overlapping proven mechanistic ways for which neural therapy might work in addition to the one that I said. I will say that there is a body of research out there. Again, we might need to look more across the pond, so to speak, for the literature, because this is a deeply studied operating system and field of medicine with many, many devoted professionals. We haven’t quite downloaded that as being true here in North America.
It’s always a delight and a unique pleasure to meet with my colleagues, especially Dr. Klinghardt, of course, foremost for me. At conferences, we have researchers from different parts of the world who are putting out textbooks and literature. We didn’t plan this a lot in advance, but if we ever want a part two where we collate a lot of that research, it’s there actually. When I’m in conferences, it is always inspiring to see the literature, especially, for example, Dr. Klinghardt, who I’m not fluent in German, who can bring in the literature and pull up all of the studies and give us the skinny–
Ari Whitten: It’s interesting that there seems to be a paucity of research here, but I would imagine if it’s taught in German medical schools, then there should be substantial research over there. Does it not get translated from German?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: The search terms might be not on neural therapy, but the localized use of anesthesia, local anesthesia for this or that, or the other. We might have to expand our search terms to look at what we’re looking at.
Ari Whitten: I see. A couple of practical aspects of this. Then I want to ask you maybe if there’s a topic, before we wrap up, if there’s a topic that’s important to touch on that I haven’t yet asked about. Just getting into the simple practical side of this. I know you mentioned that this could be good for almost anyone, but are there some specific symptoms or conditions that jump out to you as scenarios where people stand to benefit strongly from neural therapy?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I would say maybe it makes sense to speak about conditions where maybe people are not finding benefits elsewhere, because those are our human family who might be feeling a little helpless and hopeless, and that is also by an individual, but I know that having chronic anxiety is its own unique torture, and the ability to feel that nervous system calm down. I have a beautiful woman I work with, I love her so much, and she came to me with many, many years of living with chronic fatigue, Myalgic encephalomyelitis, and is a brilliant person who didn’t have her brain in the way that she knows it can be.
Just with the first neural therapy, she experienced a degree of relief that she hadn’t felt in 16 years, and it was such a relief to know that better was even possible. I would say some of those people out there who have all but lost hope, it’s always a powerful thing to experience. I find that, as I mentioned, we can get into these vicious cycles as far as gut symptoms, because the parasympathetic informs all of rest and digest. Often, and this is also a combination with acupuncture, that we are holding patterns where we hold energy, I find a lot of people hold energy in the jaw, the temporal mandibular joint can get really tight, and many people, we don’t connect the dental health and how we hold our jaw and our teeth to our general health.
What I find is that mechanism, the masseter being the strongest muscle in the body for men and for women, except at the point where our uterus is pushing a baby out. For most of us, almost all the time, it’s the masseter. We have a tremendous capacity to clench our teeth, that tension translated, will translate to the sternocleidomastoid, which is that muscle that is that strip from behind the ear and the mastoid, and goes to the top of the clavicle. That is also the pathway, by the way, for the vagus. When we clench our teeth, we can actually impinge the vagus, and we can get into this patterning of less vagal tone. There’s also lymph drainage through there.
Internally, the vagus also– one of the most important points that we learn how to neural in the European teachings is actually internally in the mouth, in the tonsils. The tonsils are very important for draining the brain. Everything that has to do with neuroinflammation, from brain fog to attention deficit to anxiety, to depression. We don’t think ever of the mechanical way that we might hold our jaw or our lymph drainage, but that is such a huge, huge population of people who might not know that there is this totally third pathway to opening that up.
I can go on and on, but each one of these things, where you’re just trying to take things like the methamphetamines, to just push your body into the stress response and try to coax your body into degrees of awareness, it’s your brain just saying, “Please drain me. Please help me get out of my head for a minute,” literally. It’s so profound, Ari. Maybe there is another conversation where instead of speaking about it generally, we do some case series or something like that, where, because they’re really– and also I have colleagues doing this, and collectively we have incredible stories to share. Babies being born, people’s minds coming back online, people healing from IBS, people solving their anxiety, their co-occurring conditions, or that.
I want to be careful of saying we always look for that lightning healing and that one shot, and done. Oftentimes, it just helps your body get on the trailhead. Who knows better than you? The endless lifestyle marathon that being well really implies. It’s opening that doorway into the kingdom of healing as a possibility that exists for us all.
Practical tips around neural therapy
Ari Whitten: I want to ask you a couple, just very simple questions, practical questions. One is, how many sessions does it typically take for people to see results? Two, how long do results last? Is there a potential for people to become dependent on repeated neural therapy for symptom relief?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I hope not. Classically for scars, it’s believed that six sessions should be able to transmute the interference field of a scar. One of my wonderful teachers, he’s a wonderful neural therapist and studied under Dr. Klinghardt, but has been a teacher and a mentor for many, many years for many neural therapists in North America. Jeff Harris, he’s a naturopath and he definitely works with people who might have recurrent trauma, such as athletes, in the football world, where they get repeatedly banged up. Then the nervous system needs to reset. Again, it’s by individual.
For example, my goal is always– and this is such a famous adage from the world of education, but give a person a fish and they’ll eat for a day, but teach them how to fish. I always want to teach people how to fish. I want people to be able to manage their own and maybe they want the validation of some lab work from me periodically, but they really know how to fish. COVID was an interesting time because so many people were re-injured in complex ways. They might be– I had people who had graduated from neural therapy going from monthly to bi-monthly to once every three months. I want to see that. If I’m doing my job, people should need me less.
I’m always striving for independence. As far as I’m concerned, I have lots of interests and I’m fine if all of my community fires me and I’ll develop a new profession. I have so many interests truly, Ari, it’s not going to be a problem.
Ari Whitten: I don’t doubt that.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I keep on saying, I keep on failing at my goal of getting fired.
Ari Whitten: The last thing is– actually before the very last thing, is there anything that comes to your mind as something important to share with people that we haven’t yet touched on?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I think hopefully what you hear is the message of hope. I would love for us as a human family to move in this direction of hopefulness together and the awareness, also the energetic awareness that this be contextualized as something that’s available for everyone, something that’s accessible to everyone. That we can do this together with hope, with forgiveness. That part of unlocking, when we go to doctor after doctor, we’re never given the empowerment of the validation that how we feel not just the information that’s being parted, but how we feel our relationship with that person, with the vibration of the person and our relationship with the information itself is just as important as the information and that people be empowered to be able to make choices that are self-loving choices from a place where they are allowed to know that if they feel the care, that that’s a good place.
If they feel the love, if they feel the hope that that’s a great vetting mechanism for how they select care and how we can discern integrity in our providers. We all deserve that.
Ari Whitten: Yes. Beautifully said. Last thing is if someone is interested in neural therapy– I suspect there will be a lot of people, a lot of interest in neural therapy after listening to you talk so beautifully about this subject. Where should people go? What should people do? What do you recommend?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: I think NANT is a wonderful place to go. The North American Academy for Neural Therapy. All the providers there are members of that organization and are trained with. There are, for example, practitioners in my office who are training with me who might not be listed there. I think there are more of us than are listed there. There are not enough people listed there. If you’re a provider and you’re interested in this, you’re going to have such incredible joy giving this and opening those rooms to healing and the possibility of healing in so many. I would urge you to join NANT.
If you know trigger point therapy, you’re already, I would say, 80% to 90% there. I know that there’s a wonderful member of NANT who I believe is in Oregon who’s actually an acupuncturist who there’s a growing movement for acupuncturists to be licensed to be able to use hollow needles so that they can enhance their acupuncture treatments with neural therapy. I think my goal is to hopefully– it’s a call to action for individuals interested in this to start calling up providers and saying, “If you don’t offer this yet, would you be willing to train in this?”
Looking for those of us who are already trained on NANT and it’s such a wonderful organization with such a wonderful leadership. So proud to be a part of that community and that we, that organization, grows so that we can meet the needs of our human family would just be fantastic. If someone wants to swing by our office in New York City, me and we have two additional colleagues in my office. They’re wonderful, one, Rachel is a family NP and Kira is a doctor of nurse practitioner, and also that nurses are fully able to do this. Next in our own office is our nurse, Maddie, who’s going to train in neural therapy. Just my office alone, we’re three neural therapists and one in the making. That’s somewhere to start for New Yorkers and the US.
Ari Whitten: Wonderful. What’s the website or the contact info so people can reach out to you if they’re in New York City and interested in seeing you?
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Sure. My practice is Rahav, R-A-H-A-V, Wellness at rahavwellness.com. If you go on to NANT, there’s also a few more people on the site that are in New York. They’re my buddies. We have a New York crew. May it continue to grow.
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. Dr. Rahav, it is truly always a pleasure to speak with you, to connect with you, whether it’s just personal communication as friends or doing formal podcasts like this. I’m always in awe of your beautiful, beautiful heart and the work that you do. Thank you for coming on here and sharing the love, sharing the wisdom. I really appreciate it. It’s always a joy.
Dr. Miriam Rahav: Oh, thank you so much. The joy is so completely mutual. It’s my great honor and pleasure.
Ari Whitten: Thank you, my friend. I look forward to the next one.
Ari Whitten: Me too, I do.
Show Notes
00:00 Intro
00:19 Guest Intro – Dr. Miriam Rahav
02:08 Dr. Rahav’s experience during the pandemic
13:59 Dr. Rahav’s interest in neural therapy
23:00 What is neural therapy?
30:04 What conditions benefit from neural therapy?
33:51 What neural therapy feels like
40:52 The significance of scar tissue around the midline of your body
44:49 The evidence on neural therapy
57:20 Practical tips around neural therapy
Links
Click here to work with Dr. Rahav
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