Marjorie Fisher of Evanston uses an electrotherapy pad to alleviate arthritic knee pain. Applying the pad 2-3 times per week for about an hour, she says, keeps her painfree.
June 2004
Energy Rush
Science meets spirituality as the subtle energies emanating from the human body are harnessed by Western medicine.
by Mandy Burrell
For nearly 20 years Donna Ganza felt and looked like the living dead. “My appearance was gray and lifeless,” she says. “I had no energy, no animation, no color and I felt depleted.” Medical diagnoses included chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, hypoglycemia and a long list of other chronic illnesses. Ganza who’d long dreamed of becoming a doctor but dropped out of pre-med due to her unrelenting illnesses played the part of patient perfectly. “I was very compliant and did whatever anybody wanted me to do,” says Ganza, of Matteson, Ill.
Yet years of medical tests and treatments, prescription drugs, homeopathy, nutrition, body work and counseling failed to restore her health. She still tears up when she recounts those days. “I felt like I was a burden to my family,” she says. “I raised my daughter from a couch.” Ganza’s health struggles also put a financial strain on her family since she was too exhausted to hold a job and her husband’s insurance often failed to pick up the tab for her treatments.
Ganza remembers many times when she wanted to die. But five years ago, at 52, she finally put her health struggles behind her. She even completed the rigorous coursework necessary to become a naturopathic doctor and has since built a thriving practice of her own. Healthy and robust, she travels regularly for work and never seems to catch “what’s going around.”
Significantly, Ganza credits her recovery to pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF), delivered to her in eight-minute doses twice a day by a machine called the Quantron Resonance System. To most people, including many of her doctors, Ganza’s explanation for her sudden healing sounds like so much “New Age” garbage. But Ganza — and a growing number of Americans who seek energy healing in addition to or in lieu of conventional medical remedies — are convinced otherwise. “This is not woo-woo,” she says. “This is solid science.”
Ganza’s right — at least according to a number of university-accredited medical scientists who study electromagnetic fields. While most of today’s conventional medical community continues to rely on the allopathic medical model the treats the symptom, rather than the source of disease, some U.S. scientists suggest that it’s time for Western medicine to understand the connection between the human energy field and its healing process.
In recent years, a small but growing body of solid research — including randomized, double-blind studies (the “gold” standard in Western medicine) has begun to do just that. Preliminary evidence shows that energy therapies do support better and faster healing. Perhaps more important, many of these studies are designed to help scientists understand why that is. Such pioneering research is demystifying the body’s energy field, establishing it as a legitimate part of the human system and explaining how doctors can tap into it to help patients heal faster and stay healthier.
A Matter of Interpretation
By definition, energy comes in many forms, but is nothing more and nothing less than usable power — the catalyst, and the result, of every metabolic process that occurs in life. It’s a basic concept taught in high school chemistry classes. Yet over time the purely scientific meaning of “energy” has gotten muddled. According to energy expert William Pawluk, M.D., an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, “People use the word indiscriminately, so that now it’s a loaded term.”
Indeed, various spiritual and metaphysical teachings invoke “energy” in the same way that others invoke God, and seek from it peace, love and universal understanding. Hence, the scientific community is refining its own language for talking about energy healing.
For better or worse, the association between energy and spirituality offers one explanation for why scientists have shied away from energy research. “[Academics and scientists] live within a highly political framework,” says Nelson Marquina, Ph.D., a chiropractor and an adjunct associate physics professor at Virginia State University. Marquina intimately understands the politics because he consults with companies that manufacture and market electromagnetic healing devices, helping them to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “If I am an FDA reviewer, and I need to pass judgment on [a new device or therapy], I will be concerned about my livelihood, my own career path, what my colleagues have to say about me,” Marquina muses. “If I endorse something that is laughed at by mainstream medicine, the question becomes, ‘Do I stick my neck out?’”
Taking the Leap
The good news is that many Western scientists are sticking their necks out, usually after witnessing for themselves various energy healing techniques. Take, for instance, Charles McGee, M.D. In the late ‘60s, McGee graduated from Northwestern University and set up a practice as an obstetrician/gynecologist. McGee learned about acupuncture on a trip to Hong Kong in the ‘70s and, coincidentally, found a brochure about acupuncture waiting in his mailbox when he returned home. Had McGee not seen acupuncture’s therapeutic benefits firsthand, he likely would not have ordered his first set of needles.
This introduction sparked McGee’s exploration into alternative therapies, leading him to start an integrative medicine practice. Now retired, he does his own research into the potential healing energies of heat and light.
McGee says he’s personally witnessed extraordinary healings by masters of qigong, a hands-on Chinese healing technique. He’s also read hundreds of Chinese studies that underscore its powers. Yet, “[Western science] won’t believe that things have been seen. They want studies,” says McGee. And not just any studies, but studies conducted in the West. “Anything out of the East is considered suspect,” he says.
While McGee avidly pursues energy therapies, he believes he and others like him are pariahs in the Western medicine world. “[Conventional doctors] don’t want to play golf, go fishing or play bridge with you,” he says. “You’re out there on your own.”
He does take some comfort in knowing that historically, new discoveries often have been met with ridicule and scorn. “Anything new and different gets shot down for at least 30 years,” he says. “It’s human nature.”
Justifying the Scrutiny
Fact is, electromagnetic healing was around in the West at least 200 years ago. Between the late 1700s and early 1900s, physicians developed and used a variety of electrical healing devices — all without FDA approval because the agency hadn’t yet been created. A 1902 catalog from Chicago-based Sears Roebuck peddled electric rings for rheumatism, electric belts, even electric liniment. The devices may have had therapeutic benefits, but no scientific studies backed up their lofty claims.
Skeptics soon began to question such devices — and, unfortunately, when they threw out the bath water, the baby went with it. Electrotherapy was declared quackery, and the debacle led to a climate of scrutiny, which many agree persists to this day. Healthy skepticism has its place, says Pawluk, a national authority on the clinical applications of pulsed electromagnetic fields. “People have a brainstorm and create a device that they say does Z, but we need to know if they’ve done the research that proves it does [Z].” Such research protects consumers, as well as the integrity of Western science.
But some equate the FDA with a pair of “golden handcuffs.” Marquina, for instance, writes applications for FDA approval of devices that use lasers, sound and electromagnetic fields to heal. Based on documented experience — but not randomized, double-blind studies, which are expensive to design and implement — Marquina believes that some of these machines can treat diseases such as glaucoma, hypertension and even cancer. However, in order to gain FDA approval for them, he says he must “come off very meek,” making understated claims about his devices. “It’s going below the radar screen,” he says. “I tried the other way, and I got bounced back like a hot pancake. This way, I get my foot in the door to have an audience and come up with clinical data later.”
For Marquina, “getting the foot in the door” means gaining FDA approval to sell devices. Corporate profits then fund further studies, allowing companies to substantiate larger claims about the devices, much like drug companies fund research. However, drug companies have billions to spend upfront on research, courtesy of investors who are bedazzled by their “silver bullet” claims. On the flip side, companies that Marquina works with are considered more of a long shot, leaving them with few research options until investors start to take interest in the potential for energy healing.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a division of the National Institutes of Health) funds research into all alternative healing modalities, from supplements to reiki. But perhaps most telling of energy research’s struggle for funding is that the center allocated only four percent — about $4 million — to research energy therapies including both biofield and electromagnetic techniques in 2003. “It’s a drop in the bucket,” laments Marquina.
Amazing Discoveries
Fortunately, there exist institutions like the Samueli Institute, a privately funded foundation where scientists, such as Wayne Jonas, M.D., the institute’s director, are doing solid research into energy healing — and uncovering some very interesting findings.
Scientists know that electromagnetic energy travels not only at the cellular level, but also at the subatomic level, because its properties take on wave-like characteristics that pass through typical boundaries such as skin and cell walls. Scientists have measured these waves, showing that energy fields radiate around and beyond the body. One question researchers are trying to answer is whether the energy accessed in electromagnetic healing therapies, which typically employ the use of devices, is the same as the energy accessed by healers applying human touch or intention, termed biofield therapies.
To explore this, and the potential healing properties of both, Jonas and his colleagues are using imaging techniques to observe cellular functions in real-time. In the experiment, a group of cells in a test tube is exposed to the “bioenergy” of a hands-on healer. A control group of cells is exposed to a “sham” healer, who simply goes through the motions without intention. Based on this study, Jonas’ observations indicate that biofield energy therapy appears to consistently help cells increase calcium and ATP, both key chemicals in a cell’s functioning and healing process. “We’re fairly confident this is a real phenomenon, though additional studies are needed,” says Jonas. “We plan to measure what is coming off these healers’ hands to see if it involves ... electromagnetic fields that we know influence cell function.”
Some scientists believe that a greater understanding of the body’s energy field will eventually give doctors the ability to detect cancer by “reading” the energy field of a patient, where the cancer shows up before it ever manifests in the body. Indeed, studies have shown that tumors, which are out-of-control masses growing in the body, resonate at a higher electromagnetic frequency than normal cells. The real world significance of this is that invasive biopsies would become a thing of the past.
Most scientists pursuing energy healing research, including Jonas, believe that allopathic medicine does and will continue to have its place. But they also believe that studying energy therapies can help scientists and doctors create optimal healing environments for their patients. “These practices have been around for thousands of years so it’s about time we apply our scientific tools to find out what’s going on here,” says Jonas. “Even if it ends up being just very powerful placebo effects, we still should be able to explore that and learn how it can contribute to the healing process.”
Beyond Science
The significance of understanding how energy healing works goes beyond medical applications — and many of the scientists working to further the field know that. “I want others to tune into the idea that we are more than just a sack of electrolytes, flowing through veins and arteries and skin and ligaments,” says Marquina.
So while he’s happy to be working in a field that helps people make physical transformations, he’s deeply motivated when he sees that they also make a spiritual connection. “I know that we are energetic beings. That means we are connected to everything and everybody,” says Marquina. “Yet as long as people feel bounded by the skin, they cannot feel this connection.”
Marquina and many of his colleagues imagine the day when everyone on earth understands their intrinsic, energetic connection to everyone and everything else. It’s a beautiful concept, but if it sounds “Pollyanna-ish” to you, as Marquina puts it, consider this final gem: The strongest source of energy in the body isn’t the brain. It’s the heart.
Mandy Burrell is the associate editor of Conscious Choice magazine, and an enthusiast of reiki.
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