Conscious Choice: Energy Healing? Says Who?

January 2004 | Body & Mind Health

Energy Healing? Says Who?

by Julia Mossbridge

About a month ago, I was the recipient of a healing in which the practitioner summoned "healing energy" to affect my physical health. I’ve had plenty of seemingly paranormal experiences like this, but as a scientist, the first question I ask about such encounters is whether they were really what I thought they were. Could I have been fooled? This most recent healing of mine was so clearly effective that there was no point in asking the question, "Was that real?" Instead I became compelled by the question, "How does energy healing work?"

I’m not the only one who is making this shift; in 2000, the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine reported a review of randomized clinical trials of several types of alternative healing methods. Energy healing, or therapeutic touch, turned out to be the most effective method, producing statistically significant healing results in 7 out of 11 stringently controlled trials — around 65 percent (rates of healings on animals can be even higher). To put these findings into perspective, know that the response rate for a widely prescribed drug for bipolar disorder, lithium, is also around 65 percent. There are numerous research labs trying to understand how lithium reduces the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Shouldn’t there be as many trying to understand how energy healing works?

There are a few select research groups out there pursuing the question. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has recently posted a new Web site devoted, in part, to experiments that may eventually explain how it works (www.noetic.org). Additionally, the National Institutes of Health is beginning to fund carefully controlled studies that address the issue (nccam.nih.gov). Moreover, there are thousands of energy healers with first-hand experiences who can help guide our explorations toward understanding what "healing energy" really is.

Like many other healers, Chicago-area energy healer Eileen Curns entered healing work following a miraculous healing of her own body. She was in the hospital with tuberculosis so bad, she says, that there were holes in her lungs. "I still have the X-rays!" she proudly told me. A church group prayed for her, and although she didn’t know the time of their healing mass, at one point she felt "like someone stabbed a knife through me." She screamed, and the doctor took X-rays again. Curns remembers the doctor reading the X-rays, then returning to her bedside, white as a ghost. He said, "You’re fine. Your lungs are absolutely perfect; the holes are gone." Later she learned the time of the healing mass coincided with the exact time of her healing experience.

Curns talks about this healing as if it were an energy healing; and energy is the same metaphor she uses in her work with clients. When she first sees a client, she says "I put it up to God. I ask,‘What should I do with this client?’ Often I’ll then experience a wave that shakes my body, like a current of energy — so much that my muscles can’t handle it. It goes into the client, and that creates the healing." Curns’ intuition is that this energy is not hers; she acts as a conduit for the healing energy.

Her intuition may be right on track, and "healing energy" could be more than a useful metaphor. Research studies from multiple labs have shown that hands of energy healers, such as qigong practitioners, emit large, pulsing electromagnetic fields from their hands during healing sessions, about 1,000 times larger than the strongest known human bio-magnetic field. Similar results have been obtained from the hands of therapeutic touch practitioners who do not physically touch their patients (for bibliography, see www.stephanaschwartz.com/healing_biblio.htm).

According to a recent review by Lian Sidorov in the Journal of Theoretics, energy healers seem to sweep these energy fields through a range of frequencies, essentially scanning for injury. Once an injury is found, apparently a frequency is somehow selected that in some way heals the wounded area. Sidorov goes on to say that similar kinds of energy could be responsible for telepathy and intuition, experiences I’ve also been unable to explain.

This is exciting to many people, but I find myself torn between two worlds. I know certain paranormal phenomena exist, so I can’t join the many scientists who outright dismiss them. But, as a scientist myself, wrapping my brain around the concept with a scientific perspective is challenging. Nonetheless, if electromagnetic energy is capable of moving between people in an intelligent way, it opens up a whole new world of scientific exploration and I suspect it could well be the scientific discovery of the 21st century. Just call it intuition!

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library www.unfolding.org).

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