| In the last section, I began to present research addressing
the complicated issue of ‘psychic healing’ - the apparent ability of certain
people to cure others by mental or ‘psychic’ means, as through prayer, healing
affirmations, visualization, the ‘laying on of hands’, and so forth. What
distinguishes these approaches from all other forms of cure - including those based on
homeopathy, herbs, acupuncture, and so forth - is that psychic healing does not seem to
involve any known physical substance or energy. True, some healers do claim that the cures
they effect are based on a kind of ‘magnetism’ -- channeled, for example,
through their hands. But, from the perspective of classical science, at least, there’s
little evidence that they are indeed emitting an energy with strange curative properties.
The preferred explanation, in orthodox medicine, is that most of these cures must be based
on suggestion and self-healing: they must be placebo effects, triggered by the healers’
strange words, gestures and rituals, and by the patient’s ‘openness’ and
suggestibility. Now, while I think there’s good reason to believe that placebo
effects DO play a role in many such healings - just as they play a role in orthodox,
allopathic medicine - I also believe that placebos cannot be the whole story. As I showed
in the last column, we have a large number of laboratory experiments which were designed
to exclude explanations based on placebo effects, and which show that people can affect
others at a distance. In these studies, subjects acting as ‘patients’ are hooked
up to electrodes which monitor small fluctuations in some aspect of their physiology -
e.g., body temperature, blood pressure or skin conductivity - while ‘healers’
attempt to influence the person’s physiology from a distant room. The short ‘influence’
periods are randomly interspersed with short ‘non-influence’ periods (at which
time the healers no longer focus on the distant person). Thus, by comparing say, the
patients’ skin conductivity during ‘influence’ periods with that same
measure during ‘noninfluence’ periods, researchers have found that patients’
physiology shows a ‘reaction’ or ‘response’ specifically at the moment
healers are focusing on it.
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