Psychic Healing

Psychic healing has been observed, studied and researched by scientists. It has also been advertised by the fraudulent and opportunistic. Although nobody has devised a way to measure a psychic healer's honesty, it is true that much of your body's response may be coming from your own mind.

A Scientific Viewpoint

• According to Mario Varvoglis, Ph.D., in a paper published in "The Annals of Internal Medicine," some scientists who have been studying the phenomenon known as psychic healing, or distant healing, have concluded that psychic healers can affect patients' bodies, even at a distance.
  In fact, researchers are more convinced by healing that takes place at a distance because it seems more certain that the patient himself isn't causing any physical changes. Medical science has long known about the placebo effect, wherein a person who is given an inert replacement for a medicine, a "sugar pill," experiences the same results as a person who is given the actual medicine. Researchers theorize that when a psychic healer is physically present with a patient the same placebo effect might cause physical changes that occur. In other words, the patient is causing his own body to change, or heal, just because the psychic healer is present.
  Varvoglis points to an experiment conducted in the 1970s in which subjects and healers were physically separated, and the subjects didn't know when the healers were concentrating on them. The researchers used a physical response that they could measure objectively---the Galvanic Skin Response, because it indicates changes in the sympathetic nervous system. They found that the subjects' GSR levels changed by 10 percent. They also taught the subjects to control their own GSR levels through biofeedback, with a resulting change of 19 percent.
  Varvoglis concludes that, although biofeedback resulted in a greater percentage of change, the difference wasn't that substantial. "What's really surprising here," he writes, "is that the influence of another person, from a distance, would be in the same ballpark as the influence we have on our own physiological system."

Faith Healing

• Although scientists now think there might be some validity to psychic healing, the dramatic changes supposedly brought about by some high-profile faith healers don't stand up to investigation. James Randi, the well-known magician who has devoted his life to uncovering sleight-of-hand advertised as psychic phenomena, exposed Peter Popoff, among others (see Resources). Popoff, a television faith healer, was fed information about his audience members by way of an earpiece. His wife got the details from prayer cards that the audience members filled out and relayed them to him by way of a radio transmitter.

Psychic Mediums

• You can find thousands of people who claim to be psychic simply by doing a search online. Psychic healers abound, offering services from Reiki to crystals, with your choice of in-person consultations or telephone sessions.
  In this field perhaps even more than others, you should follow the time-honored advice, "Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware)."