MYSTERY OF MAGIC HEALING: CAN IT BE EXPLAINED BY MEDICAL SCIENCE?
‘Psychic healing’ and ‘biofeedback system’ of which medical scientists are not so convinced, use no medicines to cure patients. In psychic healing, a patient is cured by a therapeutic touch while in the biofeedback technique, a patient is trained to relax and concentrate. Other concepts of magic healing include ‘spirit healing’ and ‘faith healing’.
The Hindus called ‘prana’ the energy-giving substance or the force that keeps the body alive. In 1971 Dr. Dolores Krieger, now Professor Emerita of Nursing in New York University, found out that there existed similarities between haemoglobin and this particular substance known to the Hindus. Krieger developed therapeutic touch with Dora Kunz, a Dutch-American psychic and healer and also a president of the Theosophical Society in America. Krieger believes that the therapeutic touch has roots in ancient healing practices such as the laying on of hands, although it has no connection with religion or ‘faith healing’. According to her, the healer or the therapist acts as a human energy support system until the patient’s own immunological system is robust enough to take over. Sr. Justa Smith, a biochemist, had also conducted research on the effects of enzymes, particularly trypsin (an enzyme in the small intestine that digests protein molecules) when a healer touched his patients.
Krieger took a test group of 19 sick people and a control group of 9 healthy people to a farm in Massachusetts where during the 6 days of the experiment each sick person was treated by laying of hands by a healer named Oskar Estebany. All medication was stopped and ill and healthy people were given the same diet and the same routine. Haemoglobin was taken in the beginning and at the end of the experiment. The results were astonishing, for changes had occurred in the haemoglobin level of those who were sick. Krieger wrote that her experiment produced impressive evidence in support of something that is at work while hands were laid on the patients. She suggested that the topic should be researched more.
Other experiments of this kind of healing called ‘psychic healing’ or ‘therapeutic touch’ gave similar results. The scientists explain the phenomenon by saying that something yet to be discovered may happen when healers direct their energy to the sick. Whether it triggers off cure for ailments, has given rise to controversy.
It has been reported that at times without even touching the patient, the disease vanished. The treatment with therapeutic touch has supposedly gained immense popularity in America. There the nurses practise this method quite often. Krieger wrote in the American Journal of Nursing that she became convinced that healing by the laying of hands on patients is a natural potential in man. She herself first experimented with it, later expanding her research to include 32 nurses. She assured that the treated group recorded significant changes in the haemoglobin value.
In 1972 Krieger began teaching her therapeutic touch at nursing schools and soon established a national network of nurses trained in the technique. Even though the medical practitioners are unconvinced of her claims, they have failed to disprove it either.
Another magic treatment is ‘biofeedback system’ which trains people to control many bodily functions and processes such as temperature, blood pressure, muscle contraction and even heartbeat. In this technique, founded by Alice Green and her husband Dr. Elmer Green, a patient is connected to a sensitive monitor which provides a record on the relevant bodily activities. The patient is asked to visualise whatever he wants his body to do, for instance, to lower his heartbeat or blood pressure or any other thing. The patient tells his body to do it while he himself relaxes. Then the monitor feeds back the information to the patient that his heartbeat has slowed down by one count or two counts. The reported indications fill the patient with more confidence that leads to his repeating the same more confidently. The signs of disease, ultimately, disappear.
Kansas is the most famous place for the biofeedback system. According to Greens, the founders of the technique, it does nothing to the person, but it is only a tool for releasing a potential. Dr. Green has conducted experiments to examine an Indian yogi seated on a bed of nails.
Meanwhile, a biofeedback system was used to rehabilitate damaged muscles at Emory University in Atlanta. At the Centre for Behavioural Psychiatry and Psychology in Michigan, this system was used to cure migraine while psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Greenspan from the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre in New York has used the system to treat post-surgical cardiovascular patients, achieving a great success by treating 22 patients over a period of 3 months and curing them completely. By the end of the treatment all the patients achieved remarkable improvement in mobility and relief from pain. Dr. Greenspan has included meditation and breathing exercises as well in his biofeedback treatment.
Another 61-year-old patient was suffering from throat cancer and all the medicines had failed to cure him. A physician named (Dr.) Corl Simonton started his experiment with brief mental exercises to be repeated three times a day with meditation for 2 ½ minutes. The patient was to silently repeat the word ‘relax’ with every relaxed breath and relax jaw and throat muscles as well. He was asked to visualise something pleasant, imagine the tumour and particles of radiation bombarding it and finally imagine the cleaning process done by the white blood cells. Following this routine for 7 weeks the growth of the tumour was arrested. The patient was discharged from the hospital, as he was declared fit.
Both techniques, although doubted by medical scientists, are unique in themselves and have reportedly cured many critically ill patients. However, these two branches of healing methods have no relation with either acupuncture, homoeopathy or the traditional age-old custom of magical witchcraft.
Acupuncture, in which thin needles are inserted into the skin, is a form of alternative medicine falling into the category of pseudoscience, and belongs to the traditional Chinese medicine.
Homoeopathy, founded by German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), is also a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine resting upon his inoculation-type treatment of disease by minute doses of drugs that in a healthy person produce symptoms similar to the disease. Hahnemann was one of the first to recognise that many diseases are psycho-somatic in origin. Although his theories have been strongly challenged, he was far ahead of his time in realising that physical illness was all too frequently only the outward symptom of inner psychic and spiritual disease.
‘Spirit healing’
Another concept of healing that could belong to the realm of psychic healing is spirit healing affected by untutored healer-mediums for whom Brazil and the Philippines are reputed. They are dubbed ‘psychic surgeons’ owing to their extraordinary ability to perform risky surgical operations on incurables without anaesthetics and only with most rudimentary, unsterilised medical instruments. As narrated in her fascinating book Every Wall a Door (1973), British journalist Anne Dooley took a trip to Brazil and witnessed the miracle of spirit healing aided by ‘spirit guides’ while the patient, fully conscious, fell no more than pin-prick. She had been shown by a colleague, stupefying colour photographs of extruded eyeballs and had been told how Lourival de Freitas, a handsome, grizzle-haired six-footer and a taxi driver by profession, and one of Brazil’s leading psychic surgeons, had thrust an unsterilised kitchen knife under a girl’s eyelid while he was in a trance and then laid a growth on her cheek. The girl had appeared to feel no pain whatsoever. Freitas never accepted any payment for his work. Dooley said that Freitas removed her own tonsils with a scissor insertion in mouth and even sucked out a coagulated blood clot from her back. She produced in her book photographic evidence of this feat which seems to be medically unbelievable.
Another well-known psychic surgeon of Brazil is José Pedro de Freitas (1921-1971), affectionately known to millions by his nickname ‘Arigó’. He was jailed twice, as such surgeries were illegal in Brazil, but the popularity he enjoyed is said to have rivalled that of another fellow Brazilian, the famous footballer Pelé.
‘Faith healing’
Faith healing, in particular, is a Christian practice of prayer and laying on of hands which involves a strong belief in a supreme being or a divine intervention. Although scientists and philosophers, as in the previous cases, label faith healing as pseudoscience, there have been challenging claims that faith can cure blindness, deafness, cancer, HIV/AIDS, developmental disorders, anaemia, arthritis, corns, defective speech, multiple sclerosis, skin rashes, total body paralysis, and various injuries. Not only prayer, but a visit to a religious shrine too, can effect a cure. The miraculous healing at the Marian shrines of Lourdes in southern France and Fatima in Portugal, as confirmed by physicians, is well documented. Many crutches hanging in the grotto of Lourdes are mute witnesses to those who arrived lame but left cured.
In conclusion, we are told of physicians who advise relatives and friends of critically ill persons whose death is imminent when all means within medical science have failed, to turn to their respective religions and creeds as a last resort. ***
