Embracing the Biofield
ALTHOUGH THE CONCEPT OF a subtle energy field organizing and influencing the human body is far from new, it has been only in the past several decades that modern medical science has fully embraced the idea in both theoretical and clinical practice. In fact, for most of the twentieth century the entire notion of a biofield was largely held in ridicule, continuing a long-standing tradition that reached deep into the nineteenth century, when all such research was invariably associated with the auras, séances, and other trappings of the nineteenth-century spiritualism movement.
In the 1840s, the distinguished chemist and geologist Karl Ludwig von Reichenbach worked with a handful of subjects who seemed to be able to detect some kind of human magnetic field, which he dubbed “Odic force.” A contemporary of Reichenbach’s ascribed the subjects’ perceptions to hypnotic suggestion, and his work was quickly discounted.
A half-century later, while working with the newly developed X-ray machine and experimenting with a special blue filter, the British physician Walter Kilner observed an unusual radiation around living subjects. In an effort to disassociate his discovery from the tainted term aura, Kilner called this field a “human atmosphere.” In 1911, Kilner published his work in a book entitled The Human Atmosphere. The following year the British Medical Journal lambasted his work, saying, “Dr. Kilner has failed to convince us that his aura is any more real than Macbeth’s visionary dagger.”
Ouch.
Skeptics notwithstanding, the discoveries kept coming. In the twentieth century, central among these was the work of a dogged researcher who conducted his unconventional work, ironically, at one of the nation’s most respected medical colleges. Harold Saxton Burr, M.D., served on the faculty at Yale University for nearly fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century. Along with his duties teaching conventional anatomy, Professor Burr also dedicated thousands of hours to research, publishing nearly one hundred scientific papers. He is best known for his discovery that all living organisms, both plant and animal, are shaped and influenced by distinct electromagnetic (EM) fields that could be measured and mapped using sensitive voltmeters.
Dr. Burr’s hypothesis was that this EM field maintained the essential identity of the organism: much as iron filings scattered on a piece of paper will assume the shape of a magnet held underneath the paper, the nutritive elements in our bloodstream and other products of metabolism take the “shape” of our organism as dictated by its underlying biofield.
In the 1940s, the Russian electrician and inventor Semyon Kirlian developed an extremely sensitive camera apparatus that captured images of these biofields in the form of high-voltage, high-frequency electronic cycles. First gaining widespread recognition in the early 1960s, Kirlian photographs revealed a compelling pattern of electron energy radiation taking the form of an aura enveloping the organism, much like Earth’s magnetosphere, which had only recently been discovered. (Interestingly, the magnetosphere bears a striking resemblance to the human form.)
At the same time that Kirlian’s photographic evidence was becoming known in the West, an American orthopedic surgeon named Robert O. Becker, M.D., was investigating the possible relationship of electrical properties of the body with the healing of fractures. Why was it, he wondered, that a newt or salamander could regenerate a lost limb, but a human could not?
Dr. Becker soon discovered an interesting phenomenon. The electrical polarity at the end of the severed nerve in the limb of a salamander is opposite that of higher organisms, such as dogs, cats, or humans. Might this play a role in why certain species (like salamanders) are able to regenerate limbs, and others (like humans) are not? And if you changed the electrical polarity at the end of a human nerve, could you possibly stimulate new growth there?
As it turned out, you could. Dr. Becker’s findings led to the development of the electronic bone growth stimulator (EBGS), a tool that is used today in orthopedic medicine to assist in severe breaks from which the bones would not otherwise be able to regenerate properly, such as fractures in very large bones like the femur, or in cases where the damage has been left too long for normal healing to take place. The EBGS has also been tested as effective in speeding the healing of vertebrae fusions and back pain.
An epic milestone in the story of energy medicine occurred in 1971, when President Richard Nixon initiated a mission to open up diplomatic ties between China and the West. Six months before the president’s historic visit, an advance team arrived in Peking (now Beijing) to begin laying the groundwork, accompanied by a small press corps that included the veteran New York Times reporter James Reston.
Several days after his arrival in Peking, Reston began experiencing intense abdominal pain. Within hours he was undergoing an emergency appendectomy at Peking’s Anti-Imperialist Hospital. The surgery was successful, but the patient soon began experiencing acute postoperative pain. Much to Reston’s astonishment, the treatment consisted solely of two methods: acupuncture and moxabustion—the insertion of needles and burning of aromatic herbs on key acupuncture points. The patient’s discomfort vanished; the treatment was completely successful.
A week later, Reston wrote about his experience in the New York Times, and the Western world had its eyes opened to a whole new understanding of how human beings are constructed—and how they may be treated.
The clinical practice of acupuncture, especially (though far from exclusively) for the treatment of pain, soon began to move outside the small circle of Oriental medicine practitioners treating their Asian communities. As its reputation spread, Western practitioners began receiving training as well, and the practice flourished. Today there are tens of thousands of licensed acupuncturists in practice in the United States, with similar numbers everywhere in the Western world.
The scientific community, however, was not so quick to embrace the validity of the core concept behind acupuncture and acupressure. It was not until more than a quarter-century later that acupuncture finally received a stamp of approval from the U.S. government’s primary agency for medical research.
In November 1997, the National Institutes of Health convened a twelve-member panel of experts representing a range of fields including biophysics, epidemiology, family practice, internal medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, physiology, psychiatry, psychology, public health policy, and statistics. Twenty-five additional experts presented evidence to the panel and a conference audience of twelve hundred. In its report, the panel praised acupuncture for its demonstrated lack of side effects and cited evidence for its efficacy in conditions ranging from postoperative dental pain and nausea from chemotherapy to addiction, arthritis, and stroke rehabilitation.
“Further research,” added the report in its conclusion, “is likely to uncover additional areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful.”
Perhaps the most promising among these efforts has been the Neuroimaging Acupuncture Effects on Human Brain Activity project at Harvard Medical School (discussed in chapter 4), which published its first paper in 2000 and has been ongoing ever since. Using fMRI and positive emission tomography (PET) scans to show the impact of acupoint stimulation on the brain, the project has shown that key acupoints can cause a calming of the limbic system—the brain’s stress-response system, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and others—within seconds of treatment.
Over the past two decades, energy medicine has emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers in medical practice. Today more than one hundred of the nation’s premier medical institutions have programs that include some aspect of energy medicine and energy psychology, many of which did not exist at the turn of the new century. For example, following are a dozen prominent medical institutions, listed together with the subsidiaries or departments they have recently created that all employ energy medicine:
These top institutions and dozens of others like them use various energy medicine methodologies, for example, in their approaches to cardiac, surgical, and postoperative care, and are increasingly exploring their application to conditions of mood and mind, such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
It’s hard to grasp why there should have been so much resistance to this direction in medicine because, despite the decades of controversy, there is nothing radical about the idea that human beings are electrical in nature.
For example, when doctors want to assess the health of your heart, they might run an electrocardiogram (EKG). Why? Because they can see the relative health of the heart’s function by reading a chart of its electrical output. Likewise, we use an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure your brain’s electrical activity, and electromyography (EMG) to measure the electrical activities of the muscles. We also know we need to maintain a certain balance of sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and other electrically charged minerals (ions), called electrolytes, in the blood and body tissues. Why? Because the signals in all our nerves are electrical impulses.
In fact, every aspect of the body is electrically managed and oriented; the human being is a fundamentally electrical phenomenon. And embracing this understanding in our approach to healing has provided what turns out to be a crucial missing element in our age-old quest for greater peace of mind, overall well-being, and optimum performance as human beings. It provides, in other words, a linchpin in our capacity to dispel that pervasive fog of distress and become more fully and richly ourselves.