Imagine being treated for cancer, burns, or high blood pressure without the help of drugs or surgery. Imagine even being healed of those illnesses simply by someone who wants you to be healed. That is the premise behind psychic healing, laying on of hands, therapeutic touch and/or distance healing.
In my third novel, which is still in the idea stage, psionic officer Doug possesses psychometabolic powers like those described in the Complete Psionic Handbook of D&D (1), including healing, adrenaline control, and fine-tuning. cellular, which means that it could cure someone’s illness or wounds
Is there really such a phenomenon that opens the doors to miracle cures? Or is it still firmly confined to the realm of Dungeons and Dragons?
The research on the subject is staggering, with nearly as many proponents as detractors. Even the Catholic Church has entered the fray, taking a strong stance against Therapeutic Touch (2). In his article for the Catholic Medical Association, P. Guinan states that “therapeutic touch” (quotes used by Guinan) is not a practice employed by the Catholic Hospital Pastoral Practice, after an extensive review of the scientific literature.
While the term “therapeutic touch” is used interchangeably with “laying on of hands” throughout his article, it seems that research in general has actually been splitting hairs and going in different directions, producing notable gaps between the various idioms. .
An article in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (3) reported that claims of therapeutic touch (TT) “are unfounded and the subsequent use of TT by healthcare professionals is not justified.” The authors state that TT was renamed because the original name, laying on of hands, was deemed inappropriate for modern society. Therefore, they limited their research to articles that included keywords such as TT or touch therapies.
However, a close inspection of the JAMA article reveals some interesting revelations. The starting point is that the first author mentioned under the title was a sixth grader in Loveland, Colorado at the time, and she was only 9 years old when she completed the first tests on her. It was she who designed and performed the tests cited in the article. The methods he developed were simplistic (i.e., which “healing” hand is closest to the subject’s hand) relative to research conducted by proponents of psychic healing, who employed a variety of scientific techniques, such as electrocardiography (EKG ), ultrasound (4) and even polygraphs (5).
The second noteworthy aspect of the article is that almost twenty percent of the references were cited doctoral theses or master’s theses. As a Ph.D., I know firsthand the intense scrutiny a student’s research receives from the faculty and advising professor. I am also aware of the pervasive politics and bureaucracy that a student must endure and abide by during the journey and hopefully completion of graduate school.
The third and most interesting feature is the absence of articles that reference ubiquitous names in psychic healing (as I have found in my research review), such as Oskar Estany, Dr. Bernard Grad, William Braud, and Marilyn Schlitz.
According to the website williamjames.com, in 1959 Dr. Bernard Grad conducted studies on Oskar Estany, a former cavalry officer in the Hungarian army. Estany was reported to have extraordinary healing powers, discovered while he was treating army horses. Dr. Grad’s research showed that mice that had part of their skin removed healed significantly faster with Mr. Estany’s treatment than injured mice that were not treated by him.
Smith (6) studied further demonstrations of the skills of Hungarian medicine men and discovered the capacity of the medicine man to stimulate the activity of the enzyme trypsin measured on a known substrate in vitro. Statistically significant stimulations of enzyme activity consistently repeated over a three-week period.
Dolores Krieger, who developed TT (and later criticized by the JAMA article) studied Estany using hemoglobin levels as indicators of her talents (7). According to Varvoglis, Estany applied his “laying on of hands” (placing one or both hands on or near the patient’s body) to forty-nine people suffering from a wide range of unspecified illnesses. Hemoglobin levels in the ‘treated’ group were statistically significantly higher and remained elevated for a full year than those in an untreated group of twenty-nine patients with similar health problems.
Much of Dr. Grad’s research and articles with and without Mr. Estabany can be found listed by Dossey and Schwartz (8) and Ostrander and Schroeder (9).
W. Braud and M. Schlitz of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas are also discussed by M. Maher (4), James (5), Varvoglis (7), and Dossey and Schwartz (8), but not in JAMA. article as mentioned above nor in Guinan’s review. Interestingly, detractors go to great lengths (or not so much) to debunk the psychic healing myth, claiming that there is little to support it, yet ignoring important contributions to the study of the phenomenon.
Braud and Schlitz’s work on mental imagery is well documented using a polygraph to record the electrodermal activity of the ‘receiver’ or distant subject. The influencer or ‘sender’ imagined the distant subject in appropriate relaxing or activating scenarios. Based on the results of thirteen experiments, the phenomenon in this image is relatively reliable and robust (5), which seems to support the aspect of telepathy rather than psychic healing. Still, his research shows that intention alone can affect human physiology from a distance (4).
In their book “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain”, Ostrander and Schroeder (9) documented the abilities of Colonel Alexei Krivorotov, from the Georgian capital of Tblisi, who worked together with his son, a doctor. The authors described how Col. Krivorotov moves his hands “about two inches” from a patient’s body. The patients reported feeling great heat in the colonel’s hands, although tests showed no changes in temperature in either Krivorotov’s hands or the patients’ skin. Ostrander and Schroeder curiously drop the colonel at this point in the book without further discussing the end results of the patients he tried to cure.
Maher et al (4) conducted extensive research on ‘Healers’ and ‘Patients’ in 1992, who were residents of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The main focus of their research was on the tactile thresholds (sensitivity) of the fingers of healers, patients, healer simulators, and patient controls. Their results “provided significant data that were consistent with the insights of the healers.” They stated that the evidence “provides no more than a preliminary indication of the usefulness” of this research and suggests “refinements for future rigorous testing,” such as the use of larger groups of subjects. In other words, they weren’t overwhelmed.
According to reports, the famous Russian psychokineticist Ninel Kulagina (also known as Neyla Mikhailova) could cause third-degree burns to her stomach (9). This lends credence to the idea that psychic powers can affect body tissue as well as enzymes. But was the stomach the only place where Mrs. Kulagina could produce these burns? Were the burns the only injury she could cause?
So, as the question was asked in my previous article, “Could Jean Gray turn into a storm?” (10), what is being affected here, or what process is the psychic healer using to heal? Doctors employ thousands of surgical procedures and thousands of medications to cure our illnesses, aches and pains. However, very few, if any, of the healers mentioned here had any outstanding prior medical training. So if they don’t know the ins and outs and intricacies of our bodies, how can they heal? Could psychic healers be in command of our own natural resources and body defenses to heal us?
Looking at the research presented as a whole, it appears that our brain is the main thing that keeps us healthy and heals us. Whether it’s psychic healing, the laying on of hands, or therapeutic touch, perhaps it’s simply the proximity of a caring person that helps allay our anxieties and fears and allows our brain to relax and do its job, believing it will. . works. There seems to be a growing mistrust of the medical profession, founded or not, and a movement towards alternative treatments. As D. Kraig stated in the Llewellyn Encyclopedia and Glossary (11), “We are responsible for our own health.”
1. S. Winter, Complete Handbook of Psionics, TSR, Inc. 1991.
2. P. Guinan, “Therapeutic touch is not a Catholic hospital pastoral practice,” Linacre Quarterly, February 2004, pp 5-14.
3. L. Rosa, E. Rosa, L. Sarner, S. Barrett, “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch.” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 279, No. 13, April 1, 1999, pgs. 1005-1010.
4. M. Maher, I. Vartanian, T. Chernigovskaya, R. Reinsel, “Physiological Concomitants of Laying on of Hands: Changes in Tactile Sensitivity in Healers and Patients.” Parapsychological Association, 1992.
5. W. James, “Psionics: Practical Application of Psychic Awareness.” http://www.williamjames.com/Science/PSIONIC2.htm.
6. T. Bunnell, “The effect of ‘healing with intent’ on the activity of the enzyme pepsin.” J Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, no. 2, p. 139-148, 1999.
7. M. Varvoglis, “Psychic (Distance) Healing.” Parapsychological Association, June 7, 2000.
8. L. Dossey, S. Schwartz, “Therapeutic Intention/Cure Research Bibliography.” http://www.stephanaschwartz.com/distant_healing_biblio.htm.
9. S. Ostrander, L. Schroeder, “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain,” Prentice-Hall, Inc., NJ, 1970.
10. A. Scott, “Could Jean Gray Become a Storm?”, EzineArticles.com; published on September 4, 2007
11. D. Kraig, “Psychic Healing.” http://www.llewellynencyclopedia.com