I have only paid occasional attention to the other energy healers because most of their supporting evidence, as presented in books and seminars, is anecdotal, while my own obsession is with the underlying fundamentals of healing.
Many of these healers trace their lineage back to a single revered teacher. Reiki (Japanese for “life force”) was founded by Mikao Usui, who supposedly received healing powers from him in 1922 after three weeks of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama in Japan. Reiki healers, possibly numbering in the millions worldwide, channel universal energy, said to be infinite and intelligent. They channel this energy through their palms, which are placed on or near their clients to stimulate the client’s own self-healing. Some Reiki Masters say they can heal not only from a distance, but also backwards and forwards in time.
Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a Western-based healing system that has been taught to some seventy thousand professional caregivers and is offered to patients in some North American hospitals. It evolved from experiments that Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, did with psychic Oskar Estebany, showing that practical healing significantly increased hemoglobin in the blood of sick people, suggesting an immune response. As with Reiki, TT practitioners hold or move their hands a few inches from their patients, with the intention of activating their immune systems.
In the West, the most popular practical healing tradition is based on the miracles of Jesus Christ, as written in the New Testament in John 14:12. After restoring sight and healing the blade, Jesus said to his followers: “Whoever believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also; and even greater than these he will do.”
Among early Christian cults, healing was an ordinary part of preaching, often using oil and water. European kings like Edward the Confessor of England, who claimed to rule by divine right, exercised the royal touch to heal their subjects. It is even said that Napoleon tested his abilities, without success.
Today, faith healing remains a popular part of the evangelical Christian movement. It is also backed, cautiously, by the Roman Catholic Church, which expects miracles from those who walk the road to sainthood. I have sometimes thought about how convenient it would be for me to reclassify myself as a faith healer, especially when asked in a doubtful voice, “If you can do what you say you can, why haven’t you won a Nobel?” reward?”
The practice of practical healing as a medical rather than a religious or magical rite dates back at least to the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates (circa 460 BC) was known as the father of Western medicine due to his reliance on keen observation and the principle of cause and effect. He summed up his extensive healing experience thus: “It has often seemed to me, while I have been calming my patients, as if there were some strange property in my hands to draw out and remove from the afflicted parts various pains and impurities.”
In the 16th century, Dr. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, historically known as “Paracelsus,” spoke of a healing, magnetic solar force that spread in waves throughout the Universe. “Munia”, as he called it, radiated around the human body in a luminous shield and could be transmitted over a distance. Despite the many healings attributed to him, Paracelsus was not only ridiculed by his peers, but was also negatively immortalized with the epithet “bombastic”, based on his birth name, Bombastus.
Inspired by Paracelsus, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) is also credited with many amazing cures, such as riding a Munich scientist from paralysis and a professor from blindness, simply by running his hands over them. When his disciples discovered hypnotism by experimenting with his techniques, Mesmer’s cures were dismissed as the power of suggestion. In the spirit of the scientific Enlightenment, Mesmer’s name was put into derogatory use through the word “hypnotize” with its connotation of undue influence.
After European medicine moved to the laboratory, a universal energy was rediscovered many times, often with magnetic properties.
In 1791, the Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani, one of the first experimenters with electricity, wrote of a life force similar to electricity and magnetism, which seemed to radiate from the sun. He had an affinity for metal, water, and wood. It permeated everything, pulsing through the human body through the breath and welling up from the fingertips.
In the 19th century, German scientist and industrialist Karl von Reichenbach risked his reputation as the discoverer of creosote and various other chemicals when he declared evidence of a new universal energy, which he named “od” after the Viking god of thunder. odin. The Od circulated freely throughout the Universe and permeated everything. It radiated in a luminous glow from the human body and was vital to health. It was concentrated in iron, sulfur, magnets, and crystals, and driven by metal, silk, and water. Although confirmed by researchers in Britain, France, and Calcutta, orthodox science eventually dismissed the od as a blot on von Reichenbach’s sterling reputation.
In 1903, the French physicist René Blondlot claimed to have discovered a life force, both biological and universal, which he called “N-rays.” This finding was also experimentally confirmed by other French researchers, who noted its many similarities to od. Like his predecessors, Blondlot was ridiculed by his peers.
In 1936, Otto Rahn, a bacteriologist at Cornell University, observed a biochemical radiation of living cells that played an important role in growth, cell division, and wound healing. As he said, “It may be surprising that the radiations had not been conclusively recognized and proven before this. The reason can be found in their very low intensity. The best detector is still the living organism.”
Around the same time, Yale biologist Harold Burr demonstrated that all living systems, from trees to mice to men, are shaped and controlled by invisible electrodynamic force fields that can be measured and mapped with standard voltmeters. He called them “life fields” or “L-fields” and believed that their voltage could be used to diagnose physical and mental conditions before symptoms developed. Burr validated his theory by comparing the L fields of mice injected with cancer with control groups of healthy mice.
Burr’s colleague, Dr. LJ Ravitz, expanded on these findings to show that emotion is energy in motion. He described this energy as electrical and found a connection between low energy states and diseases such as cancer, asthma, arthritis, and ulcers.
In the 1970s, Fritz-Albert Popp, a German physicist, discovered that all living organisms constantly emit small streams of light, which he called “biophoton emissions.” These were stable in their intensity unless the organism was diseased. Cancer patients, for example, emitted fewer photons, as if their batteries were dying. He also discovered that organisms used these light emissions as a form of communication.
After Konstantin Korotkov, a Russian physicist, developed sophisticated equipment to measure Popp’s bioenergy fields, Russian doctors began using his tests to diagnose diseases such as cancer. When Korotkov measured the healers’ crowns as they transmitted energy, he found remarkable changes in the intensity of their emissions, consistent with what Ben Mayrick and I discovered while working with a crudely constructed Kirlian photography device.