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Psychic Healing: Miracle Cure or Dungeons and Dragons?

Imagine being treated for cancer, burns, or high blood pressure without the help of medicine or surgery. Imagine even being cured of those diseases simply by someone who wishes you to be cured. That is the premise behind psychic healing, laying on of hands, therapeutic touch, and / or distant healing.

In my third novel, which is still in the idea stage, psionic officer Doug possesses psychometabolic powers such as those described in the D&D Complete Handbook of Psionics (1), which include healing, adrenaline control, and cell tuning, which means It could cure someone’s illness, illness or injury.

Is there really such a phenomenon, which opens the doors to miracle cures? Or is he still firmly confined to the realm of Dungeons and Dragons?

The research on the subject is staggering with nearly as many advocates for it as debunkers against. Even the Catholic Church has entered the fray, taking a firm stance against Therapeutic Touch (2). In his article for the Catholic Medical Association, P. Guinan states that “therapeutic touch” (quotes used by Guinan) is not a practice employed by the Pastoral Practice of the Catholic Hospital, after an extensive review of the scientific literature.

While the term “therapeutic touch” is used interchangeably with “laying on of hands” throughout your article, it appears that research in general has been parting the hairs and going in different directions, producing noticeable gaps between the various idioms.

An article in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (3) reported that therapeutic touch (TT) “claims are unsubstantiated and that additional use of TT by healthcare professionals is not justified.” The authors claim that TT was renamed as such because the original name, laying on of hands, was deemed inappropriate for modern society. Therefore, they limited their research to articles that included keywords such as TT or touch therapies.

However, a close inspection of the JAMA article reveals some interesting revelations. The starting point is that the first author listed under the title was a sixth grader in Loveland, Colorado at the time, and she was only 9 years old when she completed her first tests. It was she who designed and performed the tests cited in the article. The methods he developed were simplistic (i.e. which ‘healing’ hand is closest to the subject’s hand) relative to research by advocates of psychic healing, who employed a variety of scientific techniques, such as electrocardiography (EKG) , ultrasound (4) and even polygraphs (5).

The second noteworthy aspect of the article is that almost twenty percent of the references cited were doctoral dissertations or master’s thesis. As a Ph.D., I know firsthand the intense scrutiny that a student’s research receives from the faculty and advisor professor. I am also aware of the pervasive politics and bureaucracy that a student must endure and hold on to during travel and hopefully graduation school completion.

The third and most interesting feature is the absence of articles that reference ubiquitous names in psychic healing (as I have found in my research review), such as Oskar Estabany, Dr. Bernard Grad, William Braud, and Marilyn Schlitz.

According to the website williamjames.com, in 1959 Dr. Bernard Grad conducted studies on Oskar Estabany, a former cavalry officer in the Hungarian army. Estabany was reported to have extraordinary healing powers, discovered while treating army horses. Dr. Grad’s research showed that mice that had a portion of their skin removed healed significantly faster with Mr. Estabany’s treatment than injured mice that were not treated by him.

Smith (6) studied other demonstrations of the skills of Hungarian healers and discovered the ability of the medicine man to stimulate the activity of the enzyme trypsin measured in a known substrate in vitro. Statistically significant stimulations of enzyme activity were consistently repeated over a three week period.

Dolores Krieger, who developed TT (and later shattered by the JAMA article) studied Estabany using hemoglobin levels as indicators of her talents (7). According to Varvoglis, Estabany applied his “laying on of hands” (placing one or both hands on or near the patient’s body) to forty-nine people suffering from a wide range of unspecified diseases. The hemoglobin levels of the “treated” group were statistically significantly higher and remained elevated for a full year than for an untreated group of 29 patients with similar health problems.

Much of Dr. Grad’s research and articles with and without Mr. Estabany can be found listed by Dossey and Schwartz (8) and Ostrander and Schroeder (9).

W. Braud and M. Schlitz of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas are also discussed by M. Maher (4), James (5), Varvoglis (7), and Dossey and Schwartz (8), but not in JAMA. article as mentioned above nor in Guinan’s review. Interestingly, naysayers go to great lengths (or not so much) to debunk the myth of psychic healing, claiming that there is very little to support it, yet they ignore important contributions to the study of the phenomenon.

Braud and Schlitz’s work on mental imaging is well documented using a polygraph to record the electrodermal activity of the ‘receptor’ or distant subject. The influencer or ‘sender’ imagined the distant subject in appropriate relaxation or activation settings. Based on the results of thirteen experiments, the phenomenon of these images is relatively reliable and robust (5), which seems to support the aspect of telepathy rather than psychic healing. Still, his research shows that intention alone can affect human physiology at a distance (4).

In their book “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain”, Ostrander and Schroeder (9) documented the abilities of Colonel Alexei Krivorotov, from the Georgian capital of Tblisi, who worked together with his son, a doctor. The authors described how Col. Krivorotov moves his hands “about two inches” from a patient’s body. The patients reported feeling great heat in the colonel’s hands, although tests showed no temperature changes in either Krivorotov’s hands or the patients’ skin. Ostrander and Schroeder, curiously, leave the topic of the colonel at this point in the book without further discussing the final results of the patients he attempted to cure.

Maher et al (4) conducted extensive research on ‘Healers’ and ‘Patients’ in 1992, who were residents of Saint Petersburg, Russia. The main focus of his research was on the touch thresholds (sensitivity) of the fingers of healers, patients, healers simulators, and patient controls. Their results “provided significant data that were consistent with the insights of the healers.” They stated that the evidence “provides no more than a preliminary indication of the usefulness” of this research and suggests “improvements for future rigorous testing,” such as the use of larger groups of subjects. In other words, they weren’t overwhelmed.

The famous Russian psychokinetic Ninel Kulagina (also known as Neyla Mikhailova) could reportedly cause third-degree burns to the stomach (9). This gives credence to the idea that psychic powers can affect body tissue, as well as enzymes. But was the stomach the only place where Mrs. Kulagina could produce these burns? Were the burns the only wound he could produce?

So, as I asked myself the question in my previous article, “Could Jean Gray turn into a storm?” (10), what is being affected here, or what process is the psychic healer using to heal? Doctors use thousands of surgical procedures and thousands of medications to cure our ailments, aches and pains. However, very few, if any, of the healers mentioned here had noticeable prior medical training. So if you don’t know the intricacies and complexities of our body, how can you heal? Could psychic healers be controlling our own natural resources and defenses to heal us?

Looking at the research presented as a whole, it appears that our brain is the main thing that keeps us healthy and heals us. Whether it is psychic healing, laying on of hands, or therapeutic touch, perhaps it is simply the proximity of a caring person that helps to dispel our anxieties and fears and allows our brain to relax and do its work, believing that it does. will do. works. There seems to be a growing distrust of the medical profession, whether founded or unfounded, and a movement towards alternative treatments. As D. Kraig said in Llewellyn Encyclopedia and Glossary (11), “We are responsible for our own health.”

1. S. Winter, The Complete Psionics Handbook, TSR, Inc. 1991.

2. P. Guinan, “Therapeutic touch is not a pastoral practice of a Catholic hospital” Linacre Quarterly, February 2004, pp. 5-14.

3. L. Rosa, E. Rosa, L. Sarner, S. Barrett, “A close look at the therapeutic touch.” The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 279, No. 13, April 1, 1999, pp. 1005-1010.

4. M. Maher, I. Vartanian, T. Chernigovskaya, R. Reinsel, “Physiological concomitants of laying on of hands: changes in tactile sensitivity of healers and patients.” Parapsychology Association, 1992.

5. W. James, “Psionics – Practical Application of Psychic Awareness”. http://www.williamjames.com/Science/PSIONIC2.htm.

6. T. Bunnell, “The Effect of ‘Intentional Curing’ on Pepsin Enzyme Activity”. J Scientific exploration, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 139-148, 1999.

7. M. Varvoglis, “Psychic Healing (at a distance)”. Parapsychology Association, June 7, 2000.

8. L. Dossey, S. Schwartz, “Therapeutic Intent / Curative Research Bibliography.” http://www.stephanaschwartz.com/distant_healing_biblio.htm.

9. S. Ostrander, L. Schroeder, “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain”, Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey, 1970.

10. A. Scott, “Could Jean Gray Become a Storm?”, EzineArticles.com; Published on 04/09/2007

11. D. Kraig, “Psychic Healing.” http://www.llewellynencyclopedia.com

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