Healer Science - Research Highlights

Laying -on-of-hands healing has been practiced throughout the world for thousands of years. In the late 1700s, Franz Mesmer theorized that a subtle life-energy of a magnetic nature was exchanged between healer and patient during laying-on-of-hands. Mesmer also discovered that water could effectively store this subtle force for transfer to sick patients in need of healing.

In the 1960s, Dr Bernard Grad essentially replicated Mesmer's findings that healing energy from laying-on-of-hands could be transfered to water. Grad found that healers' were able to cause a slight but measurable decrease in surface tension. Grad, however went further to show that this subtle energy could actually stimulate the growth rate of plants, the rate of wound healing in mice, and the prevention of goiter development in susceptible animals. Grad's results with healers and accelerated wound healing were later replicated in another laboratory.

Dr. Robert Miller of Atlanta, Georgia, is a research chemist who has studied the biological effects of healers. Miller has been able to confirm Dr Grad's discovery of the healer's ability to disrupt hydrogen bonding in water. Miller also found a significant similarity between the energetic affects of magnetic fields and the field-effects noted with psychic healers.

At the same time period that Grad's work became public , a number of studies were published which demonstrated the ability of high-intensity magnetic fields to accelerate enzyme kinetics. Among the researchers in this area was Dr. Justa Smith, now director of research at the Human Dimensions Institute at Rosary Hill College in New York and chairwoman of the Chemistry Department. Before Dr Smith investigated effects of the laying on of hands she had a scientific background of research into the effects of ultraviolet light and high magnetic fields on enzyme activity. She found that the healer⁴ was able to increase the enzyme reaction rate over time, and that the longer the healer held the test tube of enzymes, the more rapid the reaction rate. Similar effects on enzymes, had been noted with high intensity magnetic fields. The strength of the magnetic fields utilized were approximately 13,000 gauss 26,000 times the intensity of the earth's magnetic field. The type of change in enzyme activity activity noted after exposure to healers was always in a direction of greater health of the cells, and thus of the organism. Whatever the enzyme used the healers always caused changes in activity which would result in a push to greater health and energy balance of the sick organism. This healing energy appeared to have an almost inate intelligence in the way it could therapeutically distinguish between test tubes of enzymes.The magnetic fields could only produce a nonspecific increase in the activity of enzymes. On the other hand, the energy fields of the healers could cause variable changes in different enzymes².

Healer associated fields demonstrate similarities to magnetic fields, yet are almost undectable with conventional EM recording equipment. Dr smith was originally unable to detect any magnetic fields around healers' hands using sensitive gaussmeters. However, recent eperiments by John Zimmermann with highly sensitive SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) detectors which can measure infinitesimally weak magnetic fields. These devices have measured increased magnetic field emmission from the hands of psychic healers during healing in the order of hundreds of times stronger than normal body activity. Dr. Justa smith's research suggested that healers have the ability to selectively affect different enzyme systems in the direction toward greater organization and energy balance. By speeding up different enzymatic reactions², healers assist the body to heal itself.

Dr. Dolores Krieger, now Professor of nursing at New York University, found confirmation of her hypothesis that healers induced bioenergetic changes in patients they treated. In her studies elevations in blood hemoglobin levels were found to reliably indicate true bioenergetic and physiologic changes induced by the application of healing energies. Because measurement of hemoglobin is easily accomplished in most clinical laboratory settings, Krieger had found a reliable biochemical yardstick by which she could analyze healing energy interactions.

In England, researcher Maxwell Cade has reported similar biorhythm entrainment between healers and patients. Utilizing a special device known as a Mind Mirror, a computerized EEG power spectra analyzer, Cade also discovered a unique complex brainwave pattern found only in advanced healers, that became prominent in the brainwaves of patients during the healing process. Cade measured these unique healing-induced brainwave synchrony patterns³ between patient and healer during times when the healer was both in direct contact as well as at a distance from the patient. This confirms that the higher dimensional nature of energies involved in healing as well as the energy resonance hypothesis of healing. Spiritual healers operate primarily at the negative space/time levels of people's higher dimensional components which feed, organize and support the molecular/cellular structures of the physical body.