Now, I'm not saying that all psychic healing is necessarily a placebo;
far from it. What I'm getting at is that the many, many anecdotes and testimonies about
miraculous healings, even if genuine, don't permit us to infer what kind of mechanisms are
involved -- whether the healing was based on 'normal' psychophysiology, or whether it
involved a truly 'paranormal' element. Generally, it is very difficult to distinguish
psychic healing from self-healing.
Of course, you might ask yourself -- so what, as long as it works? Who cares if healing is
really a fully internal process, the 'healer' being just a convenient trigger of
self-healing, or if it is a genuinely paranormal process actually caused by the healer's
intentions, thoughts, or energy?
Well, for one thing, scientists do care: the theoretical or metaphysical implications, if
you will, are mind-boggling (that's one of the reasons there's so much resistance to
accepting psi phenomena in general). But, beyond this, there are also some very practical
issues: a world in which people can only affect their own bodies through mental means is a
very different world from one in which they can affect each other at a distance.
For
example, if we were sure that psychic healing is just self-healing, then all we need to
do, in order to encourage such self-healing, is to understand the psychological and
interpersonal factors that trigger it. On the other, if the healer really 'does' something
to the patient, then we would want to understand how to enhance or amplify that healing
'power' -- and, also, how to protect ourselves from its possible misuses. |
