Of mice and men

I haven't read very much about experiments in psychic healing, although I know that many such experiments have been carried out, and quite a few have obtained positive results. In his recent book The End of Materialism, veteran parapsychologist Charles T. Tart describes one such experiment, which was performed back in 1965. The experimenter was a biologist named Bernard Grad, a professor at McGill University.

Tart tells us, "Grad was a cancer researcher who got interested in psychic healing, especially when he met an immigrant to Canada, Oskar Estabany, who had a reputation as a healer." Estabany would lay his hands on his patients -- both human and animal -- and apparently accelerate the healing process. Grad's question was whether the healing was accomplished by some psychic mechanism or simply by the emotional benefits of Estabany's soothing touch. To answer this question, he designed experiments intended to isolate the psychic mechanism, if any.

Tart continues:

Grad carried out two classic studies (1965), one in which the "patients" were wounded barley seeds, the other in which the "patients" were wounded laboratory mice. Let's look at the latter.

The laboratory mice were deliberately wounded by having a fold of their inherently loose skin plucked up and then a small chunk cut off with scissors. This produced a skin wound, which was a useful kind of illness to work with experimentally, because the size of the wound could be precisely measured by putting a piece of tracing paper over it and outlining the edges of the wound. Then a device called a planimeter could be used to objectively measure the actual area of the wound. Forty-eight mice were thus wounded and randomly assigned to three groups....

Aside from mental suggestion when people are the patients, we might conventionally hypothesize that the laying-on-of-hands healing might also involve some kind of chemicals emitted through the healer's skin, chemicals that might have a healing effect. This would be useful to discover if it were indeed the case for some healers, but Grad wanted to isolate his mice patients from anything but a psi healing effect. Thus each mouse received an individual treatment, but to prepare for the treatment, a research assistant (who didn't know what group the mice were to be in) would take a mouse from its cage, put it into a paper bag, and staple it shut so that the mouse was no longer handled directly. Few chemicals can readily penetrate a layer of dry paper in a short time.

Maybe just being put in a paper bag has an effect on a mouse? But all three groups of mice were put into paper bags.

For the experimental group, Estabany would then come in and hold the bagged mouse in the palms of his hands for twenty minutes twice a day, while visualizing the flow of healing energy. When done, Estabany would leave the room, and then a research assistant would come it and put the mouse back in its cage, released from its paper bag. In the control group, once the mouse had been bagged, it sat on a shelf for the same amount of time Estabany gave healing treatments to the experimental mice. This controlled for being bagged per se.

The possibility also existed that the warmth of the healer's hands could be responsible for promoting healing, so in the third, "heat control" group, another assistant, not known to have any healing abilities, held the bagged mouse for the same length of time.

Grad had decided in advance that the degree of healing of the wounds, measured by how much they had closed up, would be measured after two weeks. The statistical analysis of areas showed significant differences. It's pretty clear even from a second set of wound tracings that the controls and heat controls showed similar, moderate degrees of wound healing, but the experimental group treated by Estabany showed far more healing. [pp. 170-173]

Tart's book reproduces charts showing the wounds before and after psychic healing. It is obvious even to the naked eye that the healer-treated wounds fared much better. Of these 14 wounds, fully ten have been reduced to the size of a pinprick, while the remaining four are slightly larger but still much improved. By contrast, both the regular control wounds and the heat-control wounds are noticeably larger. Of these 28 wounds, only one is the size of a pinprick, and many of the others are two or even three times larger than the largest of the healer-treated wounds. Naturally, Grad didn't just eyeball the results; he relied on planimeter measurements to determine the exact area of each wound.

Note the care taken by Grad to address possible objections to the experiment. The mice were bagged so that chemicals from human skin would not affect them. Even the control mice were bagged. One set of control mice was exposed to the heat of human hands. It is hard to imagine how the experiment could have been more elegantly designed.

Tart goes on to describe Grad's barley seed experiment, which was equally well designed and equally successful.

More on Grad's work can be found in this Google Books entry and in this one (which includes discussion of a much larger follow-up study with 300 mice, also with positive results).

Comments

Spiritual healing is very easy to do - anyone can do it:

http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/spiritual_healing

[william]

“There are a number of factors that can influence the effectiveness of spiritual healing:”
· “The amount of healing force the healer is able to conduct.
· The skills of the spirit guides directing the healing force conducted by the healer.
· The karmic needs of the recipient. If an illness is intended to teach something to the recipient, then spiritual healing may help the recipient understand the lesson rather than help with the illness.”

The idea that anyone can do spiritual healing appears to have some conditions that could be viewed as limitations. This quote if from the website suggested by anonymous. We have little knowledge at this time why sometimes such healing methods such as laying on of hands works with one person and often with another person it does not work.

The materialist would say this healing is due to the placebo effect but then what is the placebo effect if not mind over matter. Does mind over matter imply paranormal or supernatural implications?

The placebo effect will remain a scientific mystery until we view all as consciousness including matter.

[michael]

The spiritual healing paradigm is one of the most successful in parapsychology. For a good account see Daniel Benor's investigations:
http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com/HealingResearchVolume1.html

The placebo effect does not explain results in mice described in the blog post by Michael Prescott (above).

The placebo effect also does not explain why spiritual healing works in some cases when mainstream medicine doesn't or when spiritual healing produces improved results when used in conjunction with mainstream medicine. Any possible placebo effects would be produced by the mainstream medical treatment in the absence of spiritual healing.

[http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/]

Also of interest:

http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers#researchers_boyle

Sir Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was one of the most brilliant scientists of all time....Boyle was the father of modern chemistry, the founder of the Royal Society of London, and the author of Boyle's Law.

Boyle investigated the spiritual healer Valentine Greatrakes. At first Boyle was skeptical, but his investigations convinced him of the genuineness of Greatrakes abilities. Boyle's lab notebooks from 1666 contain notes on his observations....

'This day a woman came among other Patients to be curd of a great thicknesse of hearing she complaind of, & he haveing put his fingers in her ears, and (as I remember) a litle strookd them, she complaind no more of her deafnesse...'"

[Tony M]

A little synchronistic:

http://www.examiner.com/x-27763-Skepticism-Examiner~y2009m10d28-Can-cancer-cures-come-from-healing-hands

[william]

“The placebo effect also does not explain why spiritual healing works in some cases when mainstream medicine doesn't or when spiritual healing produces improved results when used in conjunction with mainstream medicine. Any possible placebo effects would be produced by the mainstream medical treatment in the absence of spiritual healing.”

I am not sure this is a valid statement but will reflect upon it in days to come and see if my initial response is in line with my giving this comment more thought. The very application of spiritual healing may or may not be in some instances due to the placebo effect. Do even know at this time the full implications of the placebo effect; how can we state when it has occurred and not occurred.

The placebo effect may be spiritual healing either self-induced or from others. Maybe some form of changing our vibration level using our mind or others using their ability to change our vibration level to a healthy level of vibration. I see in the future technology that may be able to change one’s vibration level to a degree for healing purposes. I.e. back to a level that was the original vibration level in that person when that person was healthy.

I see acupuncture and hands on healing approaches as a form of this returning this vibration level of a person back to a healthy level.

[Michael Prescott]

"The placebo effect also does not explain why spiritual healing works in some cases when mainstream medicine doesn't or when spiritual healing produces improved results when used in conjunction with mainstream medicine. Any possible placebo effects would be produced by the mainstream medical treatment in the absence of spiritual healing."

Conceivably, a given patient could be more predisposed to believe in New Age healing than in conventional methods, so he would be more likely to experience a placebo effect in the former case.

Of course, no one really knows what the "placebo effect" is or how it works, so as an explanation, it raises more questions than it answers.

"Conceivably, a given patient could be more predisposed to believe in New Age healing than in conventional methods, so he would be more likely to experience a placebo effect in the former case."

Conceivably. You'd have to look at the participants in any particular study to see if they were selected for belief in spiritual healing beforehand.

However any scientific study (like the one you mentioned above) would have to have controls (which it does) to see if the effects were really due to spiritual healing or a placebo effect.

My experience with spiritual healing at Spiritualist churches is that most recipients are pretty "normal". They expect the doctor to take care of their medical problems and they take spiritual healing like they do vitamins. A health nut might get placebo induced remission from cancer due to faith in the power of vitamins, but an "normal" person probably wouldn't. Most recipients of spiritual healing in my experience have as much or more faith in modern medicine than they do in spiritual healing. No doctor would say, "I won't cure you because you need to learn from being sick", or "because your time on the earth plane is up", but spiritual healing allows for both of those possibilities.

I also don't see how the placebo effect can explain spiritual healing effects on mice, other animals, and infants.

[ncu9nc]

Qigong healers can sense the qualities of the energy field of cell cultures.

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2009/06/sensing-qualities-of-qi.html

Explain that with the placebo effect!

It's slightly off topic but I updated my page on eminent researchers with 2 more Nobel prize winners: Marie Curie (2 Nobel's, Chemistry and Physics) and Pierre Curie ("just" Physics). They studied Eusapia Palladino. I love this quote from Pierre:

"The only trick possible is that which could result from an extraordinary facility of the medium as a magician. But how do you explain the phenomena when one is holding her hands and feet and when the light is sufficient so that one can see everything that happens?[13]"

http://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers

One more point. It's one thing to read about studies and fantasize about alternative hypotheses. It's quite another thing to give or receive spiritual healing and experience it for yourself.

If you want to understand the phenomena fully you have to experience it too.

When you receive healing you can sometimes feel an "energy" penetrating your body. There is nothing else like it.

When you give healing sometimes your hands feel unusually hot and you may feel odd tingling around your head. These things don't normally occur during meditation or relaxation exercises.

Odd sensations are not proof or paranormal phenomena, but they are something that need to be explained by controlled experiments not by conjecture and hypothesis.

Placebo effects are actually more than a single phenomenon. Some effects are understood biochemically to some extent but other effects are not understood at all. In some cases the "placebo effect" might not be a rational explanation for a proposed paranormal phenomena but in fact could be a paranormal phenomena in its own right.

[Becky]

I believe that the power of ones mind is the huge factor in their healing. Lynne McTaggart, author of "The Intention Experiment," Featured in Dan Brown's new book- The Lost Symbol has actually conducted mini scientific experiments that actually prove that this is true. In one experiment a patient suffered severe burns to his hands after a gas explosion at work. While his colleague, who had similar burns, opted only for orthodox treatment at the hospital, Daniel decided to also ask for help from the intention group.

Astonishingly, his hands dramatically improved in six days — weeks before that of his work colleague. His doctors wanted to study him as a medical miracle.