The~itch
in the
Waiting Room
The''Witch
in the
Waiting Room
A PHYSICIAN EXAMINES
PARANORMAL PHENOMENA
IN MEDICINE
Robert S. Bobrow, M.D.
For Ellen, Jeniufer, and Heather, who were with me all the way
Contents
Acknowledgments
How This Book Came to be Written
What Is In the Book?
Part 1
Chapter One
Perspective I: The World We Live In
Chapter Two
I Put a Spell on You: Witchcraft, Voodoo, and Zombies
Chapter Three
Seeing Through the Mind's Eye: Psychics, Remote Viewing, and Telepathy
Chapter Four
Answered Prayers: Distant Healing and Therapeutic Touch
Chaper Five
Auditory Hallucinations: The Voices that Knew What They Were Talking About
Chapter Six
Animal House: Lycanthropy, or the Delusion of Being an Animal
Chapter Seven
Intimate Demons: Cacodemonomania, or Sex with the Devil; Ghost Possession
Chapter Eight
Dying Right on Time: Self-Predicted Death
Chapter Nine
Moving Toward the Light: Near-Death Experiences
Chapter Ten
I Remember It Well: The Collective Unconscious and the Nature of Memory
Chapter Eleven
Partying with the Devil: Satanic Ritual Abuse
Chapter Twelve
Dream On: The Meaning of Dreaming
Chapter Thirteen
When I Snap My Fingers ... Hypnosis
Chapter Fourteen
Xenoglossy: Speaking in Tongues, Coherently
Chapter Fifteen
Deja Vu All Over Again: Children Who Remember Past Lives
Part 2
Chapter Sixteen
One Person's Paranormal Is Another Person's Science: Acupuncture
Chapter Seventeen
Life as a Hologram
Chapter Eighteen
The Orthopedist and the Body Electric: Life's Electromagnetic Template
Chapter Nineteen
The God Helmet and the Temporal Lobes: The Work of Michael A. Persinger
Chapter Twenty
Perspective II: Witches in the Waiting Room, and Everywhere
References
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would never have come to exist were it not for the following people who took it seriously, in order:
Douglas Gasner, the late Jack Froom and the family medicine department at Stony Brook University, Claudia Dowling, John Moffett, Dorothy Leeds, Sharyn Kolberg, my agent Gary Heidt, and Jofie Ferrari-Adler, who originally accepted the proposal.
I would like to thank the following people for taking the time to speak to me: Marsha Adams, Robert 0. Becker, Larry Dossey, Bruce Greyson, Vernon M. Neppe, Michael A. Persinger, and David Shalloway.
And for answering e-mails, sharing stories, or otherwise contributing: Carlos S. Alvarado, Mitch Bobrow, Stephen Engel, Valerie Feldman, Joan Fusco, Yuri Gorokhova, Diane Interbartolo, Danielle Long, Rich Murdocco, Naomi Norman, Karl Pribram, Dean Radin, Nancy Raphael, Glen Rein, Oleg Reznik, R. Mark Sadler, Manal Soliman, and Dennis Totino.
How This Book Came to be Written
The paranormal is what lies beyond the reach of current scientific explanation. Telepathy, reincarnation, UFO phenomena, and witchcraft are a few examples. I myself have never experienced anything paranormal. My interest derives from a general curiosity of all things medical. I became a generalist physician so I wouldn't have to exclude anything from my field of study. Along the years of medical practice I collected, as many of my colleagues do, articles of interest from the medical literature: things that would be relevant to patients' illnesses, or other medical-science items I thought worth noting. My antennae must have been tuned to the slightly unusual, as my collection included data that claimed that water pills prevented osteoporosis and that cigarette smoking reduced the incidence of ulcerative colitis or Parkinson's disease, and data about how donating blood prevented heart attacks. But also, among the many papers I had clipped out, there was research including: a case of a serious disease called lupus being cured by witchcraft; a woman with voices in her head telling her she had a brain tumor, who had exactly that; and a man so convinced he was a cat that no psychiatrist's therapy could change this belief.
As a member of an academic department in a medical school (Department of Family Medicine, Stony Brook University), I was required to give a Grand Rounds presentation about once a year. This was a one-and-a-half-hour lecture to medical students, departmental faculty, and anyone else interested, given each week as part of a medical school's general didactics. I was usually allowed to choose my own topic; and one year, when the time came, I asked if I could talk about paranormal phenomena depicted in the medical literature, and got an okay. There were enough articles already within my collection to form a lecture base. In reality, I just thought it would be more fun to prepare and deliver a lecture on paranormality, rather than on a stolid, "normal" subject like asthma or heart failure.
The lectures begin at 8 A.M. on a Wednesday, to a barely awake audience, many of whom are only there because they have to be there. I had some trepidation about presenting what is often considered as anti-science to this conventional medicalschool gathering. But my talk was quite well received, and I was surprised by what happened afterward: Several members of the department approached me, including the chairman, and told me about paranormal experiences they or a member of their families had had. Buoyed by this unexpected interest in the subject, I wrote up the lecture as a medical paper, and it was published by the British journal Medical Hypotheses; that paper is now expanded into this book.
Perhaps I should not have been surprised by the audience reaction, medical sophisticates that they were. The number of Americans holding at least one paranormal belief has increased sharply during the last twenty-five years, for reasons unknown, to a level where a majority of our population now accepts at least one such belief. In a Neweweek-sponsored 1996 poll, two thirds of respondents believed the power of extra-sensory perception (ESP) to be real; a Gallup poll the same year found that 72 percent of Americans believed in the literal existence of angels.' In Great Britain, the situation is similar: In a 1997 survey, seven out of ten people believed in some form of paranormal activity. And in 1998, a majority of responders believed in telepathy and ESP.2 A 2005 Gallup survey3 finds that about three-quarters of Americans hold some paranormal belief. One has only to look at the TV listings on any evening to see that Americans have a hearty appetite for the paranormal.
My chairman used the occasion of my lecture to tell me about his seven-year-old son, who "saw" his missing cat in a basement room with an old man and other cats. This turned out to be correct-an elderly man on the block took in strays, and their lost cat was mistaken for one. The little boy had also "known" that his friend in Paris was suddenly in distress. This was also correct-the friend, at the time, was being rushed to the hospital with appendicitis.
One of the senior resident physicians, who had a Ph.D. in microbiology-i.e., a research scientist-approached me after the lecture to say that while she generally had no patience with "this sort of thing," she did find my presentation interesting and well researched. Four
months later, at the residents' graduation party, I happened to be sitting at a table with her and her family. It came out that I had lectured on paranormal phenomena, and her sister remarked: "Did you tell him about Uncle Jack?" Their uncle, it seemed, had some sort of precognitive power that was noted when they all drove in a car together, the uncle calling out the descriptions of automobiles that had not yet appeared, but would do so shortly.
Another time, I was working at a public health clinic, when one of the nurses noticed a book on my desk about some paranormal subject. She asked what my opinion was, and I said I was researching it open-mindedly. She came closer, looked behind her to make sure no one else was listening, and proceeded to tell me about two unusual experiences: the time her father saw a UFO while driving home from work one night, and the time she knew exactly when a cancer patient with whom she had been very involved had died. These were things she rarely shared.
I wonder how many other colleagues, given the opportunity, would validate those poll results.
What Is In the Book?
The United States' National Library of Medicine, based in Bethesda, Maryland, holds the world's largest medical library. Its database contains references, and often abstracts, for over 4,600 scholarly biomedical journals covering medicine and related fields, the journals having been chosen by a chartered advisory committee. Not all published journals are included; the Paranormal Rr.,earch Journal and The Journal of the Society o f R!ychical Reoearch, for example, are not. The implication is that the journals that are included meet certain standards for objective review and accuracy.
The National Library's database is loosely known as "the medical literature." It is our profession's Gospel, from which all our knowledge derives, from which our textbooks are largely written. Originally known as the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS), it went on-line when computers made this possible; MEDLARS on-line is called MEDLINE.
MEDLINE is accessible by computer for free at pubmed.gov. The bulk of the database dates back to 1966, but citations sometimes go back to the 1950s. The citations and, frequently, the article abstracts can be retrieved using author, journal title, article title, or subject matter in the search. Most of the research described in this book comes from MEDLINE; that which does not is taken from published works of physicians where I believed the reportage to be meticulous and accurate. All journals referenced in this book are in MEDLINE, unless otherwise stated. Since MEDLINE does not contain a subject matter heading (search term) for "paranormal phenomena," articles were retrieved using individual search words such as "psychic," "witchcraft," or "parapsychology." A number of relevant pieces, although indexed in MEDLINE, would not have been found via search words.
So this book is primarily a compendium of physiciandescribed patient phenomena, where both patient and physician are a bit bewildered about what has happened. Paranormal items not discussed-e.g., communication with the dead-are omitted because I could not find what I considered to be scholarly research on these subjects. The book is not intended to be comprehensive, as there is no all-inclusive medical database to search. These are only interesting pieces of a puzzle that will someday be put together.
Where research into the seemingly paranormal turns up a logical explanation, this will also be presented. Observed phenomena are explained when they can be, or described as accurately as possible when they cannot be, in the hope that in the future, as science advances, understanding will follow. Remember that what is paranormal in one era may become mainstream science in another: A radio in Abraham Lincoln's time would have been perceived as a talking box-nothing more, nothing less, and totally incomprehensible. Acupuncture, endorsed by the government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) at a 1998 consensus conference, at least for efficacy in some pain syndromes, was considered beyond believability and reason when the first reports of pins in the skin providing surgical anesthesia trickled West only forty years ago. Observations that don't make scientific sense today need not be swept under a carpet of denial; tomorrow is another day.
Tart I
one
Perspective I: The World We Live In
We all know that the earth is round. We grew up knowing it. Yet the surface of the earth appears flat and for centuries many believed this to be reality. Astute observations, however, suggested otherwise: Ships sailing away disappeared from the bottom up, and sooner to an observer at sea level than to one atop a mountain; the sun cast shadows of' different lengths at different latitudes on the same day at the same time; the earth's shadow upon the moon during a lunar eclipse was curved.
What is weird about a spherical earth is that travel in a straight line from anywhere on the horizon will ultimately return the traveler to the same spot. We're okay with this, and we've accumulated enough frequent-flyer miles to more or less picture it. What is harder to picture is the idea that space is essentially believed to be the same way: curved, and finite but unbounded. If the technology existed to travel straight up, long enough and fast enough, an eventual return to the same spot, coming from the other side, would theoretically ensue.
The concepts of radio, television, and cell phones no longer elicit any sense of wonder. A sight or sound is transformed into a representative electromagnetic waveform that transmits at the speed of light to a receiver where it is reassembled into its original components. If you don't stop and think about this, it seems quite natural. But talking boxes and remote viewing were not natural to anyone before the twentieth century. Many shifts in existing beliefs were required, beginning with the realization that electricity and magnetism were related. They were considered separate entities until 1820, when the Danish physicist Oersted noted that a (magnetic) compass needle moved when an electric current passed nearby. During the next decades came the discoveries that these forces generated electromagnetic waves that propagated at the speed of light and that light, too, is an electromagnetic wave; that sparks generated such waves; that circuitry could be established to modulate and manipulate these waves. Now millions can watch a distant war, live, on what we call TV, and consider this normal. Or have a phone conversation between New York and Tokyo, as easily as speaking to someone in the next room, when sound itself, at the speed of sound, would take some nine hours to go that distance.
Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER) is a way of stimulating atoms to generate a light beam whose waves are perfectly aligned, like synchronous swimmers. Its possibility was predicted by Einstein, but its reality waited several decades until sufficient technology and ingenuity were brought to bear. Laser light creates pictures known as holograms-there's probably one on your credit card-and holograms have some unusual properties. These images are formed when a laser is split into two beams, one of which illuminates the subject and bounces off toward the film. The rest of the beam is sent back by a mirror toward the film, where the two beams cross and their interference pattern is recorded. The resulting hologram is three-dimensional, and airy part of it can be used to regenerate an image of the entire subject (albeit, when using a relatively small part, with some loss of detail). This is not your parents' photography, and it is reminiscent of the human body, where every cell contains the DNA capable of'reproducing the entire person.
Then there's Einstein's relativity. You don't need to understand it; you just need to know that, so far, it has been borne out scientifically. It dictates, among other things, that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing, and are interconvertible; that time does not progress at the same rate for everyone, everywhere; and, as Einstein himself put it: "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."~
Given the reality of all the above, much of'what I'm going to tell you about in this book should not seem so strange. These physicians' careful observations are generally met with denial by the scientific community. But if we had always dismissed such observations, rather than trying to understand them, we would now have no TV, no lasers, no
Internet, and a flat earth.
Two
I Put a Spell on You: Witchcraft,
Voodoo, and Zombies
Loosely defined, witchcraft is a ceremonial marshaling of evil (or negative) spiritual forces, a sort of flip side of prayer (which focuses positive spiritual energy). But prayer and witchcraft are not so easily or neatly polarized. People have been known to pray for the misfortunes of their enemies, and witchcraft has been used for healing and positive outcomes.
Belief in witchcraft reaches back into antiquity. Its existence was noted in Sumeria and Babylonia, in ancient Egypt and Greece, and among the Celts, centuries before Christianity. During the Roman era, laws were passed to criminalize its practice. In America, every schoolchild knows about the Salem witch trials where many innocent citizens were put to death because they were accused of casting spells and consorting with demons.
Interestingly, some scientists now believe that the fits, spells, and paranoia experienced by Salemites in 1692 were brought on by poisoning. Most of the accused witches in Salem had similar symptoms: psychosis, hallucinations, crawling sensations of the skin, twitches and spasms, headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea. These are also the symptoms of ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus blight that forms hallucinogenic substances in rye, and subsequently in bread. The hypothesis that the Salem witches had suffered from ergot poisoning was first published in a 1976 article in the journal Science, "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?" by Linnda R. Caporael. She provides compelling evidence that the Salem witch trials coincided with a weather pattern that could easily have produced large quantities of ergot on rye, which at that time was used to make the community's bread. When the symptoms of ergot poisoning began to appear, some Salem residents, unable to explain such symptoms, jumped to supernatural conclusions.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 1