Though this book has officially reached its conclusion, you may still have questions about aspects of the content. I have included here a selection of frequently asked questions and answers, some of which have already been answered in the text but are repeated here for convenience as a reference. Additional frequently asked questions and answers can be found at www.drgaryschwartz.com.
What is energy healing?
Coming after the previous two hundred or so pages, you may be surprised to discover that I don’t consider this a simple or obvious question.
In its most basic and limited sense, energy healing can be thought of as the application of energy techniques to medicine and healing. Whether the healer is gently touching the subject, placing her hands a few inches or a few feet away from the subject’s body, or working with a subject who is hundreds or thousands of miles away, the focus is on the implicit concept and mechanism of energy as applied to medical treatment.
Examples include therapeutic touch, healing touch, Reiki, Johrei, Bio-Touch, acupuncture, Qigong, and aspects of yoga and Ayurvedic medicine.
This sense of energy healing can include the use of biomedical devices that generate electromagnetic fields—including light and sound, as well as electricity and magnetism—or material objects that transmit and receive fields of energy, including minerals, crystals, and homeopathic preparations.
But in a deeper and more comprehensive sense, energy healing can be thought of as being the role of energy in all healing processes. From this perspective, herbs, drugs, physical manipulation, and even surgery involve energetic processes in healing.
Finally, if we put on our metaglasses and envision energy as being the capacity to affect anything, then emotions, thoughts, and intentions can be thought of as energies that can have local as well as distal effects on the body, mind, and spirit. This definition can be extended to include spiritual healing approaches such as Sufi healing and Christian Science.
Whether you prefer a narrow definition of energy healing involving primarily steps 3 and 4 on the ladder of energy explanations, or a broader, more comprehensive definition of energy healing that includes steps 5 through 7, including spirits and even the Source, depends upon your comfort in envisioning the many levels implicit in the concept of energy.
How does energy healing work?
The leading theory that explains how energy healing works involves the concept of resonance—including what is called “sympathetic resonance” and “harmonic resonance.” Resonance is a universal process typified by two tuning forks; if they are of the same size and structure, when one is struck, the other will spontaneously vibrate as well. The second tuning fork is said to resonate with the first. In sympathetic resonance, a small vibration in one system, over time, can foster an increasing vibration in a second system. In harmonic resonance, the vibrations can resonate over a number of frequencies that are harmonics, or multiples.
Resonance is the foundation of all energetic communication. It is the fundamental process of connection and sharing, and the basis for how antennas work. When two or more processes are in resonance, they are literally in tune with one another. Healers often talk about becoming attuned to energy and attuning to their patients.
New companies such as the General Resonance Corporation are exploring how resonance can be employed to enhance the effectiveness of conventional medicines as well as to create “energy medicines.” Scientific books such as The Living Energy Universe and Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, and clinical books such as The Healing Field and The Reconnection, illustrate how resonance is the quantum-field mechanism underlying life, growth, evolution, and health.
How can I learn about energy healing?
With the advent of the Internet, there is now a vast and growing collection of Web sites that offer extensive materials: reading materials including scientific and self-help books and articles; audiotapes and CDs of healing exercises; videotapes and DVDs of lectures and demonstrations; and innovative devices, software, and other means of creating and measuring energies, including tuning forks and electromagnetic meters. A list of useful Web sites is presented in the recommended readings section.
Do some people have a natural gift for energy healing?
The answer appears to be yes. Just as there are natural musicians who can play music by ear, there are natural healers who can heal without training.
We don’t need to be told that the better a jazz musician’s techniques and skills are, the better is her or his ability to create music by ear. The same conclusion appears to apply to improvisational energy healing. The better a healer’s techniques and skills, the better her or his ability to perform energy healing creatively and effectively.
I have witnessed a number of natural healers who had no formal training in healing achieve remarkable results. I have also heard accounts from credible people about natural healers at work—including young children—and their stories deserve to be taken seriously.
One example concerns my administrative assistant, Clarissa Sayre, and her son, Jake, who has cerebral palsy and has difficulty forming sentences when he speaks. Below is a section of the e-mail she wrote to me describing two instances where Jake healed her headaches:
Last year Jake, [my husband] Ed, and I were at dinner at the Macaroni Grill. Dining was very busy because of the gem show in Tucson and there was the hustle and bustle of talk about it. It was a very eclectic crowd. Although I never develop headaches, one was brewing very strong. So strong, in fact, I couldn’t even eat.
Jake, looking concerned, asked, “What matter?” (His communication was improving.) I told him that I had a headache. He then verified, “Ouch?” I answered, “Yup!” He then proceeded to put his index finger and his middle finger on my forehead and in a matter of moments my headache was completely gone. I sat there in amazement and said nothing, convinced that it was mind over matter and the pain would soon reappear. Five minutes passed and I continued to eat. I then told Ed out of earshot of Jake that there was no way that could have possibly happened…but it did. The headache did not recur.
This weekend I had a headache that would just not go away. I sat in the recliner massaging my head just hoping it would go away. I rarely get headaches, so the few I do get, I want them gone! Ed, who was on the couch, told me to come over by him and he would give me a massage instead of me doing it myself. As I made my way over to Ed, Jake asked, “What the matter?” I told him I had a headache. He reached up and grazed his hand from my forehead to my temple to the side of my face and continued in some sort of form. It was gone. I shook my head, to myself, and lay down in disbelief, thinking that this cannot be true, that once again he relieved a headache.
When Jake was born at twenty-six weeks’ gestation (three and a half months early), he wasn’t able to maintain his temperature, he was on a respirator, etc. etc. While in the NICU they allowed an experimental interaction called “Kangaroo Care.” The theory and research showed that if you put a naked preemie onto the bare chest of its mother, that the mother’s temperature would rise to compensate for the baby, that the mother’s heartbeat would assist in regulating the baby’s heartbeat and circulation as well as her respiration patterning the baby’s in hopes of decreasing the need for oxygen from the ventilator and bringing down any carbon dioxide. Jake did very well with “Kangaroo Care.”
To this day Jake, nine years old and soon to be ten, can sit on my lap, my temperature rises, and I will become immediately fatigued and fall asleep. I jokingly say that he is sucking the energy out of me! There may be more truth to that than I am aware of. Having CP, he uses a lot of energy having tight muscles, etc. He uses any reserve calories that he has just to maintain any muscle that he may build in strength and to fight viruses etc. etc. Could it be that he takes what he can to stockpile? Perhaps with my headaches, he is giving back some of what he has taken…hmmmmm.
Why are some people so skeptical about energy healing?
This is a complex and multifaceted question, and the answer is not simple.
First, some people were taught that energy healing is impossible, and they strongly believe that what they were taught is the final word. When they are confronted with solid scientific evidence to the contrary, and even have direct personal experiences, this may cause them extreme discomfort including anxiety, anger, and denial.
Some superskeptics suffer from I what I call PESD—posteducational stress disorder. The collection of symptoms are similar to, but typically much milder, than PTSD—posttraumatic stress disorder.
Second, there is wide range of economic implications concerning energy healing. Health-care professionals who have no background or skills in these techniques sometimes feel threatened because they lack the skills, and they may be concerned that their patients might seek other health-care providers, affecting the economics of their practice.
Another economic implication concerns potential threats to the bottom line of drug companies to the extent that patients may reduce or eliminate their use of medications following successful healing-energy treatments. Also, the economics of hospitals can be threatened because they perform money-making surgeries that may not always be advisable or necessary.
Medical researchers are typically supported by grants and contracts from NIH and drug companies. Because energy healing is controversial, there is an unfortunate built-in resistance to funding research if it occurs at the expense of conventional biomedical interventions.
Third, there are philosophical and spiritual implications to energy healing. If we are all interconnected by energy and consciousness, as proposed by Einstein and Planck, and supported experimentally by contemporary scientists such as Radin and Sheldrake, then there are vast implications for how we practice medicine as well as how we live our lives. Some of these philosophical and spiritual implications were discussed in chapter 19. There are people who dislike these implications and reject them out of hand.
Finally, superskeptics often point out, rightly so, that there are fraudulent and unethical individuals who practice energy healing as a scheme for taking advantage of people who are suffering. These practitioners may encourage patients to avoid conventional medical treatment when it is in fact warranted. What superskeptics do is overgeneralize from these bad apples and assume that if a few apples are rotten, then all the apples must be rotten.
What about experiments that appear to contradict some of our findings?
Experiments can fail to replicate for numerous reasons. Sometimes experiments fail because there is no phenomenon to discover, or the phenomenon is not very strong or reliable.
However, experiments can sometimes fail because the investigators did not take into account certain variables that are necessary to document or reveal the phenomenon. Some unanticipated variables may actually produce reverse or negative effects.
For example, a study was published in 1998 in the distinguished Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that reported that healers could not sense the presence of an experimenter’s hands. The authors claimed that their study was the first to have tested whether therapeutic touch practitioners could detect the energy of another person’s hands (they were mistaken—see below). They further claimed that their failure to obtain positive results in this basic science study called into question numerous clinical studies (including double-blind studies of wound healing) that had shown positive healing effects.
However, my examination of their study revealed a number of potential problems: (1) the experiment was conducted by a young adolescent girl for her science-fair project, (2) she was the only experimenter, (3) the girl flipped a coin to determine which trials would be left-handed versus right-handed (an unreliable procedure), (4) one of the authors was a founding member of a skeptic’s organization (www.quackwatch.org), and (5) the practitioners who were tested actually did significantly worse than chance. In other words, an unbiased analysis of the data revealed that the healers were correct less than what would be expected by chance when the girl’s hand was above their left or right hands.
Though the authors (presumably the adults) reviewed—and discounted—dozens of clinical studies published in the literature, they failed to mention prior published basic science research conducted by my colleagues and me (described in chapter 4). Our studies included (1) adult experimenters, (2) multiple experimenters (more than twenty), (3) a counterbalanced order of trials (as well as a greater number of trials, making the experiment more sensitive), (4) a variety of experimenter beliefs about the possibility of energy detection, and (5) the finding that our subjects (who were not even trained as healers) did significantly better than chance.
As you may recall from chapter 5, our research (as well as research by others) indicates that sensing energy includes the capacity to detect conscious intention in addition to the ability to detect the presence of physical energy. Though school science fairs each year produce some surprisingly insightful experiments, no one expects an adolescent to understand the rigors demanded of a trained professional scientist. The mystery is what led JAMA to publish the experimental results of an unqualified adolescent—results that were then picked up by the media and reported widely, relying on the authority of that respected journal, with the unfortunate outcome that many people were left with false information that appeared on its surface to be authentic and reliable.
Are politics involved in the publication of energy-healing experiments?
Sadly, the answer is yes. At the present time, mainstream medical journals as a rule tend to publish negative studies, even if they are flawed, and reject positive studies, even if they are conducted pristinely.
I have substantial personal experience in this area. None of the editors of Science, Nature, or the British Medical Journal was willing even to send the Baldwin and Schwartz Reiki-sham rat experiments out for scientific peer review (chapter 14). Similarly, none of the editors of Science or Nature was willing to send the Creath and Schwartz plant biophoton imaging experiments out for scientific peer review (chapter 12). In fact, the editor of JAMA declined to publish a letter to the editor that we wrote concerning mistakes in the girl’s energy-detection study and the fact that previously published experiments had produced positive results, on the grounds that “this was not of significant interest to their readers.”
Editors have the prerogative to decide which papers are allowed to be reviewed and ultimately published. They are the gatekeepers. At a time when I was conducting mainstream mind-body research in the 1970s, my colleagues and I published a total of six papers in the journal Science because the editor at the time was open to psychophysiological research. I have firsthand experience in understanding the scientific and political aspects of research publishing.
This is the primary reason why less prestigious journals such as the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and Explore have been historically the primary vehicles for communicating research findings on energy healing.
Are there any negative effects or undesirable side effects of energy-healing treatments?
Energy-healing treatments, when practiced carefully and wisely, create few, if any, negative or undesirable side effects. As a rule, energy healing is gentle, and ethical healers practice the “do no harm” philosophy.
However, people sometimes experience an increase in their awareness of their symptoms, and even an exacerbation of their symptoms, as the healing process unfolds. As people increase their energy awareness, they become more sensitive to energy sensations and therefore they will potentially become more aware of aches and pains as well as pleasures and joys.
In other cases, people may seek energy-healing treatments hoping to avoid conventional medical treatments and therefore potentially miss receiving essential medical diagnoses and treatment. As with any treatment modality, the key is discernment and wisdom—to know when and how to apply it.
Is healing energy “intelligent” and “alive”?
Many groups and traditions—ranging from shamanism and Reiki to Sufism and Christian Science—believe that the healing energy is intelligent, alive, and even conscious. Though some traditions express energy-healing effects in more spiritual and even divine language, the concept of energy is implicit in their logic and thinking.
Reiki practitioners, for example, set the intention that what happens in a healing session is for the patient’s best and highest good, and then they leave it to the intelligence of the energy to determine what happens. They believe, for example, that the energy “knows best.” They even believe that whether a patient receives symptomatic relief or not involves spiritual processes concerning the person’s growth and learning beyond the physical.
Many cultures, including the Polynesians and the Hawaiians, believe that “mana” (their term for energy) is universal, intelligent, and the basis for life. Though it is beyond the scope of this book, the hypothesis that energy is both alive and intelligent is in principle scientifically possible and, moreover, can be tested in the laboratory. We are beginning to conduct research on what we term “implicit intelligence” to test our theory that even quantum fields have an intelligence that can be revealed under optimal scientific conditions. The challenge for all of us is to maintain an open mind, to not be lazy, as Richard Dawkins puts it, when it comes to imagining scientific possibilities, and to be willing to entertain these challenging possibilities as part of an emerging energy vision.
Has Gary Schwartz become a believer in energy healing?
I have conducted too many successful experiments, witnessed too many healings by gifted energy healers, and personally experienced too many healings myself as both a research practitioner and patient to justify sustaining an agnostic position regarding energy healing as a general phenomenon. At some point, there comes a time when the evidence is too great to be ignored. Also, I have come to understand that steps 3 through 7 on the energy-healing ladder are not only all scientifically plausible, but there is strong evidence supporting the conclusion that energy healing can operate at multiples levels of fields and processes simultaneously. Though this makes life more complicated, it describes a universe that is much more interesting and magnificent.
At the same time, I appreciate the responsibility to be cautious and humble about drawing conclusions, especially in specific cases. The history of science reminds us to keep an open mind at all times. To repeat once again the valuable Einstein remark quoted earlier, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
How is energy related to spiritual healing practices like Christian Science?
I’m personally intrigued by the parallels between religions that focus on healing—in particular, Christian Science—and both contemporary physics and the emerging science of energy healing. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, came to the conclusion that “Spirit is the real and eternal” and “the only true substance,” while matter is “the unreal and temporal” and a “false belief or illusion.”
Eddy’s belief about spirit and the illusion of matter sounds curiously similar to Einstein’s vision about energy being the basis of matter.
Christian Scientists who have researched and written about the history and impact of their religion have collected stories suggesting that Einstein visited the church’s reading rooms on numerous occasions and was supposedly convinced about the ideas offered in founder Mary Baker Eddy’s principal work, Science and Health. Books by church members attribute to him quotes such as “Science and Health is beyond this generation’s understanding. It is the pure science” and “If everyone realized what is in that book, you would not have enough room anywhere to accommodate the people who would be clamoring for it.”
Today we accept the existence of invisible fields of energy, the spontaneous emergence of fundamental particles in the quantum vacuum, and the zero point field as well as the existence of billions of galaxies in an expanding universe. If our scientific, medical, and religious institutions are to survive and evolve, they must be open to revising or discarding fallacious beliefs in the face of new evidence.
This includes the emerging possibility, mentioned previously, that energy may be intelligent and express consciousness. And it includes the emerging possibility that healings accompanied by profound transformation of consciousness involve more than mind-body effects. Whether healing energy is viewed from the Japanese perspective of Reiki or the American perspective of Christian Science, the belief in a universal intelligent force may be more than a superstition.
Though beyond the scope of this book, evidence supporting spiritual energy healing, enlightened by contemporary knowledge in physics and psychology, is leading us to an ever-expanding vision of nature and human possibility. There may a deep truth to the poetic phrase “It’s not me, it’s the energy; and it’s not you, it’s the universe.”
Can energy healing take us to spiritual healing?
Every indication, as far as I can tell, points in the direction of energy healing leading to spiritual healing. What shamans and spiritual healers refer to as “spirit” overlaps what physicists and energy healers refer to as “energy.” Shamans and spiritual healers see spirit as conscious and intelligent, essentially equivalent to what energy healers sometimes refer to as “conscious energy” and “intelligent energy.” Conscious and intelligent energies become conscious and intelligent entities, and that takes us to spiritual healing and a larger spiritual reality. What religious people call the Great Spirit, Yahweh, God, or Allah energy and spiritual healers label as universal intelligent energy or infinitive intelligence. The late Dr. David Bohm used the term “implicate order,” and Dr. Edgar Mitchell designates the “quantum hologram.” All of these can be integrated with modern concepts in dynamical-systems and network theory and lead us to an evolving vision of a living-energy universe.
As Dr. James Levin put it, “Energy is the voice of spirit.” This statement is worth pondering. It may be more than a metaphor. It may be a fundamental truth.
What’s love got to do with energy healing?
The answer to this question is simple: everything. Love is the common denominator, the core intention, the foundational state of being that nurtures all healing, growth, and transformation. Just as Sir Isaac Newton envisioned the universal field of gravity to be a ubiquitous expression of God’s love in the universe, we can apprehend the essence of unconditional attraction and caring as being the foundation of creativity, sustainability, and adaptability. When we put on our metaglasses and envision what “metalove” is, life, nature, and the unfolding universe become a seamless manifestation of an implicate and infinite Loving Source.
Can science address the question of the biophysics of love and metalove? If we use the history of science as our guide, there is no justification for being anything less than carefully, yet enthusiastically, optimistic.
Some thirty years ago, I paid more than forty thousand dollars for a PDP-11 computer that took up an entire room. It required special wiring and air-conditioning. It came with sixteen kilobytes (thousand bytes) of memory—I paid five thousand dollars for an extra eight kilobytes of memory. The extra memory itself was the size of a suitcase. The computer was programmable primarily in machine language. It used a Teletype printer and stored programs on paper tape and reel-to-reel magnetic tape. It did not have a calendar, contact list, spreadsheet, word processor, or PowerPoint. I had to program the graphic display to put simple graphs on the screen.
Today I have a battery-operated electronic device that combines a cell phone and megapixel camera with a computer that has a calendar, contact list, spreadsheet, word processor, PowerPoint, and many other software packages. It has a two-gigabyte memory chip. It connects to the Web effortlessly. It plays digital music and displays video in real time. It connects wirelessly to a printer that produces gorgeous documents and pictures in millions of colors. The computer fits in my breast pocket. And it cost less than four hundred dollars.
The integration of theory and technology that has evolved mainframe computers into pocket PDAs illustrates the capacity of the human mind to discover how the physical world works, to create new opportunities for humanity, and to provide novel solutions that extend the implicit capabilities of our body, mind, and spirit. It is this power of mind that has allowed science to make the invisible visible and use this once-hidden mystery for greater and greater things.
Can science evolve to the point where it merges effortlessly with spirituality and in the process makes visible the as-yet-invisible force of love that is hypothesized to be the foundation of healing, life, and evolution? I listen to my PDA cell phone ring, I see Rhonda’s picture come up on the screen, and I think to myself, Why not!