In 1988, at the coronary care center of
the San Francisco General Hospital, Dr. Randolph Byrd changed
the way scientists talk about healing. Dr. Byrd took 393
heart patients and randomly assigned them to 2 groups. One group, of 192,
were prayed for by outside intercessors informed of the
patient’s names and clinical status and who committed to pray
regularly. The second group, of 201 patients, did not receive
prayers. The
experiment was set up using a double blind method where
neither the patients nor the staff caring for them knew who
was receiving prayer and who wasn’t. The results were
remarkable:
Prayed for
Not
Required
diuretics
3
7
Had
pneumonia
2
7
Required
antibiotics
2
9
Required
intubation
0
6
Since then, hundreds of similar
experiments have been performed, with similar results. It
seems that it doesn’t matter how the prayer is formed or by
whom, or whether the person praying even believes in God. Consistently, the
results have shown that patients who are prayed for—have
loving, hopeful, thoughts expressed for them by someone on a
regular basis—have recovered faster and with fewer
complications than those who are not.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a
group at McGill University in Montreal did a series of tests
of the effects of
“laying on of hands.”
They had a self-proclaimed “healer” hold containers in
which mice who’d been surgically wounded were placed and found
those mice to heal significantly faster and with fewer
complications.
They had the same person hold containers of water that
would be used to water barley sprouts and found the plants to
grow stronger and taller than control groups. Later, they had other
people hold the water containers and found that the plants
watered with solutions held by people diagnosed with
significant psychological problems seemed to actually do more
poorly than those whose water containers had been held by
“normal” healthy people.
Since then, books like The Secret Life of
Plants have documented hundreds of cases in which plant
growth or behavior has been significantly affected by the
thoughts and words of the people around them. “Hands-on”
healing techniques like Reikiand Dolores Kreiger's Therapeutic Touch have
been taught to hundreds of thousands of people around the
world, many of them registered nurses, rigorously trained in
the rules and principles of traditional, chemical and
mechanical medicine. And in clinical studies and many
documented cases, most of those nurses have seen significant
results from the use of such tools. As one nurse has put
it
I started
practicing TT 15 years ago and used it for a few years
before I began to sense energetically. Even now, I don't
consider myself very kinesthetic, although this capacity has
developed to some degree over time. I don't sense many of
the things my beginning students do. So why did I keep on
practicing? Because I could see that people I worked with
were experiencing the relaxation response, pain relief,
accelerated wound healing, mental clarity, emotional
balance, and/or spiritual connection.
Several studies of “hands-on” healing
have been randomized, double blind, and with a large subject
size. In the best known such study,results strongly supported the use of non-contact
therapeutic touch in accelerating the rate of healing for deep
skin wounds.
There are thousands of anecdotes—stories
of individuals—describing cases of severe illness whose
symptoms have disappeared. Deepak Chopra, a
western-style endocrinologist who discovered ancient Hindu
healing traditions well along in his career, tells many such
tales in his books.And
he tells reverse tales, such as the following:
I saw a
lung-cancer patient who had lived comfortably with a
coin-sized lesion in his lungs for five years. He did not
even suspect it was cancerous, and since he was in his
sixties, the lesion was growing quite slowly. However, as soon as
I told him that the lesion was consistent with a diagnosis
of lung cancer, he became terribly agitated … within three
[months] he was dead. … This patient could live with his
tumor, but he couldn’t live with the diagnosis.
He explains this story, and many
others—both positive and negative—saying that the cells’
“receptors are always willing to cooperate with the mind’s
instructions.” “The whole body,” he says “is a ‘thinking
body,’ the creation and expression of intelligence.”He points out that chemicals called
neuropeptides, described by their discoverer as “molecules of
emotion,”appear in countless cells throughout the body
almost simultaneous with whatever stimulus is affecting the
body or mind. He concludes that they must be “quantum
events”—non-matter brought into matter by the thought.
Healing, therefore, has been demonstrated
to be a function of the pattern of thoughts—and the specific
neuropeptides those thoughts induce in the body.
In his groundbreaking book, Anatomy of an Illness,
the well-known writer Norman Cousins set forth a theory of
medicine that earned him a place on the UCLA Medical School
faculty—but is largely ignored. Cousins had
experienced a serious illness that had baffled his medical
doctors, but which he was able to overcome through a series of
actions that made sense to him, though they had little
medicinal value in themselves. When he described his treatment
in a later article, more than one noted physician jeeringly
ascribed his results to “the placebo effect.”
Cousins was intrigued by the notion and
did some research, coming to the conclusion “that the history
of medicine is actually the history of the placebo effect.” As
he reviewed the “grim array of potions and procedures” that
medical practitioners have applied to illnesses over the
centuries, he began to see that
… people were
able to overcome these noxious prescriptions, along with the
assorted malaises for which they had been prescribed,
because their doctors had given them something far more
valuable than the drugs: a robust belief that what they were
getting was good for them. They had reached out
to their doctors for help; they believed they were going to
be helped—and they were.
It’s interesting to consider this
statement in light of the fact that, in tests where a new
medicine is being tried, the goal is always to find out how
many more people
experience relief from their symptoms with the medicine than
with a sugar pill—the placebo. In fact, according to
some studies, the “normal” relief rate with the placebo is
30-40%—which is a better rate than some approved
medicines.
Physician Larry Dossey, in his book Meaning and Medicine,
summarizes dozens of studies relating thought and
body-condition.
Over and over again, the difference comes down to
belief. People who remain healthy (or become healthier!) under
stress believe they
have control over their situation. People who die without
apparent medical cause believe they are
dying. Immune systems are weakened (and often, death soon
follows) in widows and widowers who believe they are
forever separated from their beloved.
Citing numerous other studies, and some
quantum mechanics, Dossey goes on to suggest that not only is
the patient’s belief a factor, but so is that of the doctors
and those around the patient as well. He proposes a new
“Era” in medicine, which he describes as follows:
Mind a factor
in healing both within and between
persons. Mind
not completely localized to points in space (brains or
bodies) or time (present moment or single lifetimes). Mind
is unbounded in space and time and thus ultimately unitary
or one. Healing
at a distance is possible.
In this model, healing is no longer a
function of finding the “potion or procedure” that both the
patient and the physician can believe in. With such a view of
healing, the two work together not to develop a
program for treating or minimizing symptoms, but rather to
change the patient’s belief about their condition—as did P. P.
Quimby, a hundred-fifty years ago.
