EXPERIMENTS WITH HUMANS: REACH OUT AND [PSYCHICALLY] TOUCH SOMEONE
So, how do we go about testing the existence of 'paranormal' healing effects, over and
above the more common (though equally astonishing) self-healing effects? Generally
speaking, researchers have adopted two different approaches: One approach, which I will be
presenting in the next column, investigates healers' influence on non-human organisms,
which wouldn't know a psychic healer from a Neanderthal. Mice or plants, presumably, are
not subject to unconscious suggestion, so we can conduct all kinds of studies without
worrying about placebo effects and such.
The other approach, which I'll be presenting here, is quite straightforward:
experimentally investigating healers' influence on human physiology. One of the earliest
studies of a healer's influence on patients was conducted by Dolores Krieger, a nurse and
teacher at New York University. Krieger thought that healers may help patients by somehow
increasing their overall vitality, i.e., increasing their body's ability to fight off the
illness. Vitality is associated with metabolism and oxygen consumption, which can be
objectively measured by hemoglobin levels in patients blood cells; so Krieger decided to
take blood samples from each patient, before and after the healing session, to determine
whether there were significant changes as a result of the healing.
The healer for this study was Oskar Estebany, a Hungarian who seemed to have an uncanny
ability to treat all kinds of problems by the 'laying-on-of-hands': he would simply place
one or both hands on the person (or near their body) and visualize a positive energies
surging into the patient's body. |
