Everyone in the house tested negative. It was likely that her germ wasn't actually tuberculosis, but something related and more benign. However, her X-ray changes two months earlier had been striking and indicated a serious lung problem, one that would not have been expected to resolve quickly by itself. And the woman, having departed from the ranks of conventional medicine, was not going to get a follow-up film. Another day in the practice of medicine, where not everything you see makes sense.
• At the university where I teach, I overhear our social worker commenting that he's been subpoenaed to testify in a child custody trial; he had been seeing the family for counseling. The child's father was a member of a local Long Island satanic cult. He wouldn't give the six year old, who was diabetic, his insulin, claiming that his cult's powers were all the child needed. (He understandably lost custody of the child.)
Then the social worker, seeing my interest, volunteered a personal story. It seems that he has an identical twin brother. Once, while this social worker was delivering a lecture, a sudden severe knee pain, for no ostensible reason, arrived with such force that he had to stop lecturing. His twin brother, at that very moment as best as they could piece it together later, had been hit by a car.
The doctors I train and work with come from all over the world. Writing this book, it was easy to ask about, say, reincarnation beliefs in their native lands. As expected, Christians and Moslems subscribed to an afterlife, but not one on this earth. Hindus accepted reincarnation, but remained preoccupied with the hassles of this life rather than some other one. When 1 asked a doctor from Cameroon, in Africa, about his attitudes toward reincarnation, he smiled and said "I am my great-grandfather." While Cameroon is predominantly Christian (as is this doctor), tribal ways are somewhat retained, and newborns are taken to the local medicine person, who proclaims who they are (i.e., who they used to be). Usually it's a former member of their own family, but I was told that, about 30 percent of the time, it's a "newcomer."
One of my colleagues is a Coptic Christian from Egypt. Having written about the sightings above a church in Zeitoun, Egypt, I asked her if she had ever heard anything about this. Well, she had actually been there! She had been a child of about nine and had gone with her mother. She had seen the doves, but was afraid of seeing the Virgin Mary and looked away. Her mother, and everyone else who was there, did see the Virgin, and the people surrounding the church saw her, I was told, from different angles, appropriate for where they were standing (like a hologram).
Her mother had an umbilical hernia at the time-a two-inch in diameter opening where her navel should have been that allowed for a bulging sphere of innards pushing through. They stayed at the church until four A.m. and then went home. When her mother awoke the next day, her hernia was gone. The open hole had been replaced by intact scar tissue. (This is not something that would happen under the rules of medical normalcy.) My colleague is extremely level-headed and competent. She practiced obstetrics in Egypt before coming here. As far as she is concerned, a miracle had been wrought upon her mother, and nothing will ever convince her otherwise.
This is reminiscent of an account by American surgeon Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1912 for a method of surgically attaching blood vessels. In 1903, he wrote The Voyage to &nurde<+, in which he recounted a healing miracle he witnessed when a dying, tuberculous teenager returned to life before his very eyes. Carrel went as a skeptic, and returned as a believer.
An emergency-room physician at my university gives a lecture on domestic violence. He makes the point that it's quite common, but you have to ask the patient about it; they don't usually volunteer this information. When he's lectured around the country, emergency-room doctors often claim never to have seen a case. They never asked. At the clinic, we did the following study: Patients were randomly seen in a room that had several posters about domestic violence on display and by a physician wearing a pin that suggested interest in the subject. Other patients were seen in a different room under usual conditions. During the study period, four of 148 women in the first room spontaneously came forth with stories of abuse. None of the 173 patients in the second room mentioned anything. (These numbers are statistically significant.)
The point is, our patients suffer domestic violence, use alternative medicine, and have paranormal experiences. If we don't know about it, it's because we're not interested. But we should be interested, because these things can affect health.
An old friend of mine, whom I ran into after many years of separation, told me the following story after he heard I was writing this book. His father died in 1975. Two days after the death, my friend got into his car, which, strangely, would not start. Suddenly he saw his father sitting in the passenger seat, real as life yet transparent like a ghost. The father spoke, reassuring his son that he was still with him. The father also advised giving something in his apartment-a potted fern-to the next-door neighbor. My friend had never been to this apartment (his dad had just moved in recently), and didn't know of the plant or the neighbor. Soon the father disappeared, and my friend was able to start the car. The plant and the neighbor were a reality. When my friend appeared at her door with the fern and told the neighbor that his father wanted her to have it, she said "Your father was a remarkable man."
Stories like this have no scientific value. They're just anecdotes, common as witches on Halloween (or in my office). You could collect thousands of similar experiences. It's impossible, at this date, to verity whether my friend acquired information he truly did not have. I bring it up for a different reason: "ten year,' elapsed before my friend told another living soul.
It is unfortunate that most people need to conceal something so common and so normal as a paranormal experience. If we don't understand such things now, sooner or later we will. Hiding them is a burden and a scientific step backward. I'd like to see science and medicine take them more seriously and study them as any naturally occurring phenomena would be studied.
In a 1980 study published in the rlntertcun Jnnrnal of Psychtatry, University of Florida psychiatrist Stanley Dean and colleagues surveyed psychiatry professors and residents-in-training, other medical faculty, and medical-school deans. The question was "Should psychic studies be included in psychiatric education?" More than half said yes. In the paper's discussion, the authors state that "Our results indicate a high incidence of conviction among deans of'medical schools and psychiatric educators that many psychic phenomena may be a reality, psychic powers are present in most or all of us, nonmedical factors play an important part in the healing process, and, above all, studies of psychic phenomena should be included in psychiatric education...."
Psychic phenomena are not easily studied. Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., research director of the California-based Institute for Noetic Sciences, is one of the few alternative medicine researchers who get NIH grants. She and her colleagues have done a lot of work with what they call distant intentionality: Can the intentions of one person create any physiologic changes in a second person some distance away? This is the basic premise of distant healing.
The setup consists of taking couples, often related, like husband and wife, and placing one member in a soundproof, electromagnetically shielded room, while the other member sits outside of this box in a nearby room. The outer person, let's say the husband, sees a closed-circuit TV screen, on which live images of the inside person, the wife here, are occasionally projected. He thinks about his wife when he sees these images. Meanwhile the wife is having her skin conductance measured. This is essentially a measure of perspiration, evoked by barely perceptible emotional responses. Lie-detector testing uses the same principle.
Thus, if the husband thinks of his wife, and the wife reacts with a minute amount of emotion, this is measurable, objectively. (It's sort of like the superstition of your ears turning red or ringing when people are talking about you.) When Marilyn Schlitz places the couple in their appropriate stations and records the data, distant intentionality-the mental inf
luence of one person on another-is consistently real and measurable. Schlitz designs and conducts the experiments out of a thesis that distant intentionality exists.
But when a colleague of hers, who is skeptical about this claim, does precisely the same experiment, no correlation can be demonstrated. They work with couples who are randomly assigned to either researcher; the same equipment is used. When the believer is the observer, distant intentionality happens, consistently. When the nonbeliever observes, no connection is found, consistently. So the results are consistent by researcher, albeit inconsistent when both examiners' findings are lumped together.
Can the attitude of the onlooker affect the outcome? Is this a peculiarity of psychic research? What happens, for instance, if you study angina pectoris, the squeezing, choking pain one gets when heart muscle isn't getting enough blood, threatening a heart attack?
Harvard physician Herbert Benson published a paper in the Neu, in 1979: "Angina Pectoris and the Placebo Effect." As I've mentioned previously, close to 40 percent of people who think they've been treated improve, even if' the treatment consisted of little sugar pills. Benson reviewed five therapies for angina, all of'which looked promising at first, but all of'which were subsequently discarded for inefficacy.
These included Vitamin E, two medications, and two surgical procedures. All were found to be about 80 percent effective in initial reports. Often the parameters of effect were not just subjective, but included measurable entities like exercise tolerance, reduced nitroglycerine usage, or favorable electrocardiogram changes. What these positive studies had in common was their authors' enthusiastic belief that the treatments would be useful.
When follow-up studies were done by physicians who were not so sure that these things worked, the same treatments had no effect beyond that of sham treatment. All five therapies were abandoned. They had worked when the observer believed they would work; they failed when the observer assumed they would fail. Benson cites a reference quoting a prominent nineteenth-century French physician: "You should treat as many patients as possible with the new drugs while they still have the power to heal."
So belief in something affects outcome, whether you study people feeling another's thoughts, or life-threatening angina. Maybe this is why religious believers have trouble tolerating non-believers in their midst. I've always been surprised at the number of very promising, well-done medical studies that cannot be subsequently confirmed. Independent confirmation has always been considered a scientific gold standard. Perhaps the attitudes and expectations of the researchers should be included in publications, the way funding sources and affiliations are.
It is of course possible that researchers design their studies and evaluate their outcomes to accord with their beliefs. I mean subconsciously, not fraudulently. Still, the research designs and methods are clearly listed in medical papers. It's just that two people using them can come up with different results. Why this happens is an area worthy of study. It affects the drugs and therapies we use every day.
Also worthy of study, I heliei'e, are the mechanisms behind the experiences of the people described in this book. If' we don't understand things, that doesn't mean they didn't happen. Ignoring or concealing facts is not a scientific accomplishment. Given how common paranormal-type experiences are, and the fact that the people who have them are usually psychiatrically normal (near-death experiencers and children who remember past lives, for example, have been studied and found to be quite mentally intact), we needn't stigmatize the people who've had them.
Nor should we stigmatize the people who try to study them. A university researcher who studies the paranormal is, unfortunately, generally sluicing his or her way right out the door. Federal grant money is basically not available for such research (although a small amount is available for alternative medicine studies).
Perhaps there are things that humankind cannot know. What happens to us after we die might qualify. Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century British physicist who elucidated many of the relationships between magnetism and electricity (and namesake of the insulated cage mentioned in the previous chapter), felt that some of his work was "upon the threshold of what man is permitted to know in this world." Many would argue that the nuclear physics leading to bomb technology teeters on that same threshold.
But we are curious souls, and changes in the laws of physics reflect an evolution in our concept of reality. As pointed out by Columbia physics professor Brian Greene in a recent Aeu' Kork Time., editorial, Einstein's E = rnc2 is easily derived mathematically. I remember being shown the derivation in a college physics class. The genius of that famous equation lies in its restructuring of reality: Einstein's insight that mass and energy were related, with each capable of becoming the other.
The post-twentieth-century universe contains a number of' items that are plainly counterintuitive. From relativity comes the concept that the speed of light is a universal absolute: No matter how fast you are going when you observe it, light always travels at the same speed. Time, on the other hand, is relative. "One person's past could theoretically be another's future" was how it was put at the Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Space, meanwhile, is curved. Some of Einstein's predictions waited decades for the technology that would be able to confirm them. Some wait still. When first published, they were merely "theories."
From quantum mechanics, we know that light and subatomic matter exist both as particles and as waves. From what has come to be called chaos theory, we find that the universe, like the weather, is fundamentally unpredictable.
In Isaac Newton's physics, gravity was a universal force that held the solar system together, and a revolutionary idea at the time. Einstein conceived of gravity as something builtin to the fabric of a universe predictably distorted by objects with mass (like planets, stars, and moons). In 1998, anti-gravity became plausible, as observations showed the universe to be moving apart at an increasingly rapid rate. The March 3, 1998, Neu, York Time.+ article about this, "Wary Astronomers Ponder an Accelerating Universe," spoke of the "first strong evidence that the universe is permeated by a repulsive force, the opposite of gravity." A later Time., piece, "The Mystery of Time" (June 28, 2005), referred to antigravity as a mysterious "dark energy."
It seems that some of nature's energies exist in opposing pairs, as if needed for cosmic balance. Electricity was originally known as static electricity. It was also known that if you rubbed a glass rod with silk, you got a different kind of static electricity from when you rubbed a hard rubber rod with fur. The rubber and glass rods attracted each other; two rubber or two glass rods repelled each other. Benjamin Franklin, seeing the bipolar essence of electricity, named the charge on the glass rod "positive" and that on the rubber one "negative." The connotations of good and evil are coincidental.
I don't know if good and evil in human behavior are really forces, but they're often thought of as such, as if selflessness and selfishness are two opposing poles of the human spirit. I don't know if living things are connected by some natural binding principle. I don't know the answers to the many questions posed in this book. But I would like to know the answers. And apparently, so would a lot of other people.
References
Chapter 2
Cannon, W. B. "'Voodoo' Death." Anuruan AnthrvpoLyait. 1942; 44:169-181 (reprinted in Anuruan Journal ?l' Public Health 2002; v. 92(10):1593-6).
Caporael, L. R. "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?" Science. April 2, 1976; 192(4234): 21-6.
Kandel, E. R., J. H. Schwartz, and T. M. Jessell. The Hypothalamus Controls the Endocrine System," in HasentiaL' of Neural Science and &havwr. Norwalk: Appleton & Lange, 1995. p. 602.
Kirkpatrick, R. A. "Witchcraft and Lupus Erythematosis." Journal o f the Ainerican {fe~lieal A,saciatioa. 1981; 245:1937.
Littlewood, R. L., and C. Douyon. "Clinical Findings in Three Cases of Zombification." Lancet. 1997; 350:1094-96
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Steinberg, E. M. "Walter B. Cannon and 'Voodoo Death': A Perspective from 60 Years On." American Journal of Public Health 2002; v.92(10):1564-6.
(no author listed). "Puffers, Gourmands, and Zombification." Lancet. 1984; 1:1220-1 (editorial).
Chapter 3
Blakemore, C. Mechanisms of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. pp. 49-50.
Duane, T. D., and T. Behrendt. "Extrasensory Electoencephalographic Induction Between Identical Twins." Science. 1965; 150:367.
Koren, S. A., and M. A. Persinger. "Possible Disruption of Remote Viewing by Complex Weak Magnetic Fields Around the Stimulus Site and the Possibility of Accessing Real Phase Space: A Pilot Study." Percept Mot SkilLr. 2002; 95:989-98.
Long Island Newsday, Oct. 12, 2004, "Dehydration May Have Saved Teen Trapped in Car for Eight Days," accessed at http://www.newsday.com on Oct. 13, 2004.
Moss, T., H. H. Eveloff, and A. F. Chang. "A Laboratory Investigation of Telepathy: The Study of a Psychic." Behav Neuropeychuatry. 1974-1975; 6(1-12):71-80.
Persinger, M. A. "Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXXI. Differential Contribution of Geomagnetic Activity to Paranormal Experiences Concerning Death and Crisis: An Alternative to the ESP Hypothesis." Percept Mot Skills. 1993; 76(2):555-62.
Persinger, M. A., S. A. Koren, and E. W. Tsang. "Enhanced Power Within a Specific Band of Theta Activity in One Person While Another Receives Circumcerebral Pulsed Magnetic Fields: A Mechanism for Cognitive Influence at a Distance?" Percept Mot Skill+. 2003; 97:877-94.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 21