Conclusion: Healing is Real

This is far from a complete review of bio-PK research, but it does serve to illustrate that people -- ‘psychics’, ‘healers’, even us normal folks -- can influence a wide variety of biological systems, simply through thoughts, intentions, and visualizations. These bio-PK effects, we have seen, are by no means restricted to situations in which subjects are right in front of the biological system; experiments involving ‘distant-healing’ protocols seem to work as well as proximate healing.

So we can no longer brush psychic healing under the rug by labeling it ‘placebo’; nor can we account for it by referring to known physical energies which emanate from the healer’s body (e.g., ‘magnetism’). Even an explanation based on telepathically suggested self-healings, it seems, is inadequate: we would be hard put to imagine subjects telepathically communicating with bacteria and convincing them to stop growing.

What then is the true nature of this healing ‘energy’? What force can reinforce blood cells, impede bacteria growth, or accelerate the growth of grass from 500 miles away? We don’t know. Healing is one of the many mysteries haunting psychical research. We know the phenomena are real, but we cannot explain them - at least not in terms of current biology or physics. But I suspect healing points to something fundamental about the relationship between mind, life and matter.