Autonomic Response Testing is a simple, yet highly effective biofeedback assessment technique used to determine disturbances in your body and possible remedies that your body biologically accepts. The foundational principle is that muscles become tight when stressed, by virtue of nerve stimuli, and relaxed when not.¹

It is an extension of the physical exam – an advanced form of muscle testing. Muscle testing has been used by thousands of practitioners for many years and used primarily by doctors of chiropractic background beginning in the late 1960′s. ART has taken the art and science of muscle testing to an entirely different level.  For the clinicians who find themselves working with more difficult and confusing cases, ART offers a fairly quick and amazingly accurate method of digging deeper, providing a more accurate path to choose, and saving huge amounts of patient time and money for diagnostic work up.²

ART is non-invasive, non-electronic, and can be used to assess people of any age. It is a most valuable functional assessment tool in determining the root cause of health disturbances.

The “autonomic” in ART refers to the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system responsible for all the automatic functions of your body, day in and day out, such as your heartbeat, rise and fall of blood pressure, breathing, digestion, assimilation of our nutrients, detoxification of the body’s toxins, healing, balancing of our hormones, proper immune system responses and many more that maintain life function. Detectable and treatable problems within this part of your nervous system are present in all body dysfunction and all chronic diseases.³ ARTesting is an extremely efficient way of evaluating the body’s autonomic nervous system’s response to a specific stressor or a group of stressors.

Modern disease conditions, caused by unprecedented levels of toxic stressors, have become progressively more complex. The most commonly accessible diagnostic systems often fail to meet the needs of the modern patient. We can analyze the complexity of our own kind in a way no synthetic or third party process can. Pioneers of the modern biofeedback community have thus developed intricate physical exams, able to evaluate the current state of a person’s autonomic nervous system and bio-photon field. These exams reveal extremely valuable information concerning a person’s health and the most effective strategies for restoring it to its optimal state.⁴

Biophysicists such as Fritz-Albert Popp, PhD, have discovered that the body produces photons of light called biophotons.  These biophotons are stored and released from the nucleus of our body’s 70 trillion cells. And these biophotons carry information within and between cells.  Dr. Popp has written and published eight books and more than 150 articles in scientific journals (International Institute of Biophysics) about these.  Our body’s biofield is an accumulation of electromagnetic frequencies emitted from all of our cells, tissues, organs, and glands. Also called the bio-photon field, it is the summation of photons being emitted in and around our body. It is an organized manifestation of visible and ultraviolet light that is imperative to our cellular communication systems and thus all biological processes. The ANS receives information from our biofields.

A great analogy here is how light is used with fiber-optics to carry the electromagnetic signal of our voice to someone in Europe, for example.  Light carries information in the form of electromagnetic signals.  Scientists have calculated that one color of a beam of light can carry 200 terabits (terabit = one trillion bits) of information per second.  (The entire Library of Congress has only 30 terabits of information in it). ⁵ It is this light that we utilize in ART to get information from the body.

Autonomic Response Testing (ART) and Matrix Reflex Testing (MRT), developed by Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, PhD, and Louisa Williams, ND, respectively, are the most sophisticated developments of this kind of biofeedback testing, allowing the practitioner to evaluate and engage in a patient’s health unlike no other diagnostic system.

Treatment of the underlying issues using remedies also identified with ART to be compatible to the patient, corrects the function of the autonomic nervous system and bio-photon field, allowing the body to self-regulate and self-heal. Attending to these “blockages to cure” is an imperative aspect of restoring our innate healing intelligence to create optimal wellness.⁶

How does ART work?

Small samples of toxins like heavy metals, microbial-derived frequencies, foods and preparation of food additives, vials of environmental and microbial toxins are just some of the stressors we use with ART.  These substances are introduced into the patient’s biofield with the help of specialized light-transmitting devices called Signal Enhancers.  There is no direct physical contact with the potential stressor.  Only electromagnetic signals of the substances carried by photons of light are allowed into the biofield.  If the body recognizes any of these signals as a stressor, through a neurological process carried from the ANS to the brain and the brain back to the body, a change in muscle tone can be observed.  This change in muscle tone can be evaluated with a very simple muscle test. Because there are no two of us exactly alike, the treatment will vary with each individual.  ART is also very effective in helping the practitioner to detect the uniqueness in each patient and help to determine the most efficacious treatment plan.  Although the diagnosis might be very similar between patients, it is extremely rare that any two individuals receive exactly the same treatment protocols.  We are all clinically, genetically, socially, environmentally, and fundamentally unique.⁷