It will sometimes happen that a pc has a session and then three or four days later becomes physically ill.

It will be found that when an auditor obtains a floating needle (F/N) on locks without erasing the basic on the chain that the manifestation or somatics may recur in minutes, days or years. For they have only keyed out.

The auditor may feel that auditing did it. It didn’t. The auditing given would have to be non-standard for this to happen, but the auditing is not to blame.

It is sometimes risky to audit past an F/N on the same chain. A Scientology auditor never would audit past an F/N. A Dianetic auditor has to recognize that the pc has only run a lock and ask for an earlier incident.

According to my friend Dr. Stanley Lief, over a century ago Hahnemann developed a healing technology known as homeopathy which administered minute doses of medicine. The original theory seems to have been that the disease or illness was still in the body and would be released. The person would be wildly ill again and then permanently recover. This is probably a poor statement of the whole subject of homeopathy and its basic techniques may have worked well but have been lost.

A floating needle is also obtained by erasure of the basic on a chain. That is the F/N one wants in Dianetics.

In any event, the phenomenon has application here.

We would say that the mental image picture of the incident was stopped at a “stuck point” and that it would “run out” of itself if it were unstabilized.

A floating needle is valid only between 2.0 and 3.0 Tone Arm position on a meter. Above or below that Tone Arm reading, the F/N is called an "ARC Break" needle.

A touch assist can do this. The person may become wildly ill after one and then recover.

A real F/N also carries with it GOOD INDICATORS. A cheerful happy pc.

What apparently happens is that the chain of incidents becomes unsettled and the same incident on the chain in which the person has been stuck for a long while runs out physically. It completes itself, which is to say, it finishes its cycle of action.

When the Tone Arm is below 2.0, the incident chain has not been erased.

At a hospital where I studied, this was part of the things I observed.

When the Tone Arm is above 3.0, erasure has not occurred.

Medicine sometimes will not work on a patient. It works on others but not on a particular one.

When the Tone Arm is up at 4.4 the pc has made it more solid and has not erased the basic on the chain.

If that particular one is given mental attention even as mild as brief Freudian analysis, it will be found that medicine will now work on the person.

On the second time through, if the TA rises, you know there is an earlier incident.

This formed one of the first application discoveries I made. From it I inferred that function monitors structure and proceeded to investigate mental actions and reactions in the field of illness. From this came Dianetics some years later.

Mental therapy prior to 1945 was so ineffective, consisting only of 19th Century psychoanalysis and Russian and East European psychiatry, that no one else seems to have observed, then or now, that “mental blocks” are able to obstruct medical treatment of a real physical nature.

The Dianetic Auditor is not concerned with "rehabilitation" of the overrun. In Dianetics it only means the engram chain is in restimulation and has not been erased.

The proof is that when one even reduces the mental block slightly, medicines such as antibiotics or hormones will now be effective when they were previously ineffective on some patients.

When the basic erases, the TA will fall or rise to the area between 2.0 and 3.0 and the needle will F/N. One then stops promptly on that chain. He can reassess and run another chain now.

It is this factor which gives purely medical treatment a somewhat random appearance. The patient is “stuck” at some point in time. Even inadequate handling of him mentally (such as a touch assist or a poorly or partially done session or even a “bad” session) “unsticks” the person from the frozen or fixed “stuck” point.

One of three things can now happen:

COGNITION means a pc origination indicating he has "Come to realize". It's a "What do you know. I …" statement.

1. The person can be treated medically for his illness with greater effect.

Cognitions usually occur immediately after an erasure. They sometimes occur while running the chain. But when they occur with very good indicators the chain is almost always gone.

2. The person in two or three days gets apparently sick or sicker but eventually recovers and is not subject to that exact sickness again – (it “ran out”).

You can expect the rapid end sequence of (1) Erasure (2) F/N (3) Cognition in a well run Standard Dianetic session.

3. No further result is noted.

That's all you really need to know about it in Dianetics.

These data are very useful to a Dianetic auditor or a medical doctor. A person can be ill and the illness not surrendering to the usual treatment. Brief mild Dianetic auditing can be done. The medicine may now work.

An auditor who specializes in keying out locks at the first F/N will find occasionally that his preclear becomes ill in two or three days from some occasional but longstanding illness which then “runs out” and doesn’t appear again.

[This HCO B was replaced by HCO B 1 August 1970, which was cancelled and revised by BTB I August 1970R which was cancelled by HCO B 1 August 1970RA, Revised 21 October 1974, F/N and Erasure. This latest revision is on page 117.]

An auditor who gives a non-standard, very poor session may find a preclear occasionally becoming ill within the next three or four days. The auditor and others blame the auditing.

Any auditing is better than no auditing.

Standard Dianetics is much more powerful than old Dianetics and should only be done by auditors trained to do it exactly.

Sessions which are non-standard should be corrected as soon as possible, certainly within two days or you may find the preclear beginning to go through an illness cycle.

The cycle was waiting to complete itself for a long time. The auditing unsettled it. It “ran out” physically because the pc was moved in time in the incident in which he has been “stuck”.

An understanding of this phenomena is necessary. It is useful data. Audit a pc badly, audit a pc too much to F/Ns on locks only, give a pc too many touch assists and you will find now and then that the occasional pc becomes physically ill, runs a temperature, etc. Before blaming yourself too much, realize the pc has often been ill in the past, that the mental cause of it has been loosened up and manifests itself and runs out physically. It is not fatal. That illness won’t recur again as it has in the past.

However, that it is not fatal to the pc is no excuse not to do a good standard job of auditing.

If Standard Dianetics is used with no departure from its technology and procedure the phenomenon will not occur and no pcs experience a physical aftermath.

Standard Dianetics taught precisely, done precisely, only makes people well.