(From the book TAPPING by David Feinstein and Donna Eden, with David relaying this account):

I recently finished treating a woman who had just been diagnosed with cancer. She arranged for a series of energy psychology sessions with me, concurrent with scheduled radiation for malignant masses in her lymph nodes and at the base of her tongue, just above her vocal cords. The diagnosis was a rude surprise as she had no history of smoking or other exposures that are known to contribute to this type of cancer.

Focusing at first on her fears and the physical discomfort caused by the radiation treatments, it soon emerged that she was blaming herself for having gotten cancer. On questioning, she didn’t believe that this was a particularly rational belief, but she nonetheless felt it strongly. I asked if she could remember other times that she felt unfairly blamed. A powerful incident from her childhood immediately came to her mind. At age 10 she was held responsible for something terrible, but she was unable to defend herself because it would implicate others in her family. She was the active target of this unfounded blame for years, but she felt she had to swallow the truth.

Once the tapping eliminated the emotional charge carried about these experiences, we explored a lifelong pattern of her not being able to tell her truths and linked them to these formative experiences. The therapy then examined possible connections between her suppressed verbal expression (“shoving my truths down my throat”; “keeping what I need to say under my tongue”) and the subsequent cancer in the area of her throat, tongue, and vocal cords. 

After each round of tapping, I asked her to imagine what was happening in her throat area as a quick gauge of the effects of that round. Then she would do another round of tapping, focusing on the images she was seeing in her throat at that point. She continued this tapping and imagery as homework. At first she saw heavy black tar and cobwebs. I noticed during the sessions that her self-blame about having “given” herself cancer was transforming into self-compassion as she recognized the possible connections between her childhood situation and her illness. 

As the emotional charges on various aspects of the associated issues were lifted during the next two therapy sessions, the imagery changed until she had a sense of spaciousness and light moving through the area. The tar and cobwebs were gone. This corresponded with improvements in her CT scans that far exceeded her oncologist’s expectations, particularly since she had discontinued radiation against his advice due to grueling side effects, and she also refused a recommended course of chemotherapy. Rather than increasing in size, all the masses had shrunk, some up to fifty percent. 

Three months later, she went in for another round of CT scans. When her oncologist told her she was completely cancer-free, she enthusiastically went to “high five” him, but he uncomfortably said “I didn’t do anything . . . I don’t know what happened!” But she felt she knew. She believed the tapping work was instrumental. Along with her enhanced ability to express difficult truths rather than “shoving them down my throat,” her biochemistry had shifted dramatically, as reflected in the cancer-free diagnosis. Her most recent CT scan as of this writing, two years later, still showed her to be cancer free. While you should never assume that tapping alone can cure a serious physical illness, tapping has often been a powerful adjunct to other treatments. 

You can view portions of this treatment here. You will see 34 minute of excerpts from the first three tapping sessions, at which point the cancer was clearly receding (as indicated by the CT scans), on the way to complete remission within a couple of months.