The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  She began trawling through the evidence on healing. The studies seemed to fall into three broad categories: attempts to affect isolated cells or enzymes; healing of animals, plants or microscopic living systems; and studies of human beings. Included was all of Braud and Schlitz’s work, which showed that people could have an influence on all types of living processes. There was also some interesting evidence showing the effects humans could have on plants and animals. There’d even been some work showing that positive or negative thoughts and feelings could somehow be transmitted to other living things.

  In the 1960s, biologist Dr Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal, one of the earliest pioneers in the field, was interested in determining whether psychic healers actually transmit energy to patients. Rather than using live human patients, Grad had used plants which he’d planned to make ‘ill’ by soaking their seeds in salty water, which retards growth. Before he soaked the seeds, however, he had a healer lay hands on one container of salt water, which was to be used for one batch of seeds. The other container of salt water, which had not been exposed to the healer, would hold the remainder of seeds. After the seeds were soaked in the two containers of salt water, the batch exposed to the water treated by the healer grew taller than the other batch.

  Grad then hypothesized that the reverse might also happen – negative feelings might have a negative effect on the growth of plants. In a follow-up study, Grad had several psychiatric patients hold containers of ordinary water which were to be used again to sprout seeds. One patient, a man being treated for psychotic depression, was noticeably more depressed than the others. Later, when Grad tried to sprout seeds using water of the patients, the water that had been held by the depressed man suppressed growth3. This may be one good explanation why some people have green fingers and others can get nothing living to grow.4

  In later experiments, Grad chemically analyzed the water by infrared spectroscopy and discovered that the water treated by the healer had minor shifts in its molecular structure and decreased hydrogen bonding between the molecules, similar to what happens when water is exposed to magnets. A number of other scientists confirmed Grad’s findings.5

  Grad moved on to mice, who’d been given skin wounds in the laboratory. After controlling for a number of factors, even the effect of warm hands, he found that the skin of his test mice healed far more quickly when healers had treated them.6 Grad also showed that healers could reduce the growth of cancerous tumors in laboratory animals. Animals with tumors which were not healed died more quickly.7 Other animal studies have shown that amyloidosis, tumors and laboratory-induced goiter could be healed in laboratory animals.8

  Other conducted scientific studies had shown that people could influence yeast, fungi and even isolated cancer cells.9 In one of them, a biologist named Carroll Nash at St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia found that people could influence the growth rate of bacteria just by willing it so.10

  An ingenious trial by Gerald Solfvin showed that our ability to ‘hope for the best’ might actually affect the healing of other beings. Solfvin created a series of complex and elaborate conditions for his test. He injected a group of mice with a type of malaria, which is usually fatal in rodents.

  Solfvin got hold of three lab assistants and told them that only half the mice had been injected with malaria. A psychic healer would be attempting to heal one-half of the mice – not necessarily all those with malaria – although the assistants would not know which mice were to be the target of the healing. Neither statement was true.

  All the assistants could do was to hope that the mice in their care would recover, and that the psychic healer’s intervention would work. However, one assistant was considerably more optimistic than his colleagues, and it showed. At the end of the study the mice under his care were less ill than those cared for by the other two assistants.11

  Like that of Grad’s healers, the Solfvin study was too small to be definitive. But there had been earlier research by Rex Stanford in 1974. Stanford had showed that people could influence events just by ‘hoping’ everything would go well, even when they did not fully understand exactly what they were supposed to be hoping for.12

  Elisabeth was surprised to find that scores of studies – at least 150 human trials – had been done on healing. These were instances in which an intermediary would use one of a variety of methods to attempt to send healing messages, through touch, prayer or some sort of secular intention. With therapeutic touch, the patient is supposed to relax and attempt to direct his or her attention inward while the healer lays hands on the patient and intends the patient to heal.

  A typical study involved ninety-six patients with high blood pressure and a number of healers. Neither doctor nor patients were told who was being given the mental healing treatments. A statistical analysis performed afterwards showed that the systolic blood pressure (that is, the pressure of blood flow as it is being pumped from the heart) of the group being treated by a healer was significantly improved, compared with that of the controls. The healers had employed a well-defined regime, which involved relaxation, getting in touch with a Higher Power or Infinite Being, using visualization or affirmation of the patients in a state of perfect health, and giving thanks to the source, whether it was God or some other spiritual power. As a group, the healers demonstrated overall success and, in certain individual instances, extraordinary results. Four of the healers enjoyed a 92.3 per cent improvement among their total group of patients.13

  Perhaps the most impressive human study had been carried out by physician Randolph Byrd in 1988. It had attempted to determine in a randomized, double-blind trial whether remote prayer would have any effect on patients in a coronary care unit. Over 10 months, nearly 400 patients were divided into two groups, and only half (unbeknownst to them) were prayed for by a Christian prayer group outside the hospital. All patients had been evaluated, and there was no statistical difference in their condition before treatment. However, after treatment, those who’d been prayed for had significantly less severe symptoms and fewer instances of pneumonia and also required less assistance on a ventilator and fewer antibiotics than patients who hadn’t been prayed for.14

  Although a large number of studies had been carried out, the problem with many of them, as far as Elisabeth was concerned, was the potential for sloppy protocol. The researchers hadn’t constructed trials tightly enough to demonstrate that it was truly healing that had produced the positive result. Any number of influences, rather than any actual healing mechanism, might have been responsible.

  In the blood-pressure-healing study, for instance, the authors didn’t record or control whether the patients were taking blood-pressure medication. Good as the results were, you couldn’t really tell whether they were due to the healing or the drugs.

  Although Byrd’s prayer study was well designed, one obvious omission was any data concerning the psychological state of the patients when they’d started the study. As it is known that psychological issues can affect recovery after a number of illnesses, notably cardiac surgery, it may have been that a disproportionate number of patients with a positive mental outlook had landed in the healing group.

  To demonstrate that healing was what had actually made patients better, it was vital to separate out any effects that might have been due to other causes. Even human expectation could skew the results. You needed to control for the effects of hope or such factors as relaxation on the outcome of trials. Cuddling animals, or even handling the contents of Petri dishes, could potentially bias the results, as could the act of traveling to a healer or even a warm pair of hands.

  In any scientific trial, when you are trying to test the effectiveness of some form of intervention, you need to make sure that the only difference between your treatment group and control group is that one gets the treatment and the other doesn’t. This means matching the two groups as closely as you can in terms of health, age, socioeconomic status and any other relative factors. If the patients are ill, you
need to make sure that one group isn’t more ill than the other. However, in the studies Elisabeth read about, few attempts had been made to make sure the populations were similar.

  You also have to make sure that participation in a study and all the attention associated with it doesn’t itself cause improvement, so that you have the same results among those who have been treated and those who haven’t.

  In one such study, a six-week distant healing study of patients suffering from clinical depression, the test was unsuccessful – all the patients improved, even the control group who hadn’t been subject to healing. But all patients, those receiving healing and those with no healing, may have had a psychological boost from the session, which might have overwhelmed any actual effect of healing.15

  All these considerations represented a tremendous challenge to Elisabeth in putting together a trial. The study would have to be so tightly constructed that none of these variables affected the results. Even the presence of a healer at certain times and not others might tend to influence the outcome. Though a laying on of hands might aid in the healing process, to control properly in a scientific sense meant that patients should not know whether they were being touched or healed.

  Targ and Sicher spent months designing their trial. Of course, it had to be double-blind, so that neither patients nor doctors could know who was being healed. The patient population had to be homogeneous, so they selected advanced AIDS patients of Elisabeth’s with the same degree of illness – the same T-cell counts, the same number of AIDS-defining illnesses. It was important to eliminate any element of the healing mechanism that might confound the results, such as meeting the healer or being touched. This meant, they decided, that all healing should be done remotely. Because they were testing healing itself, and not the power of a particular form of it, such as Christian prayer, their healers should be from diverse backgrounds and between them cover the whole array of approaches. They would screen out anyone who appeared overly egotistical, only in it for the money or fraudulent. They’d also have to be dedicated, as they’d receive no pay and no individual glory. Each patient was to be treated by at least ten different healers.

  After four months of searching, Fred and Elisabeth had their healers – an eclectic assortment of forty religious and spiritual healers all across America, many highly respected in their fields. Only a small minority described themselves as conventionally religious and carried out their work by praying to God or using a rosary: several Christian healers, a handful of evangelicals, one Jewish kabbalist healer and a few Buddhists. A number of others were trained in non-religious healing schools, such as the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, or worked with complex energy fields, attempting to change colors or vibrations in a patient’s aura. Some used contemplative healing or visualizations; others worked with tones and planned to sing or ring bells on behalf of the patient, the purpose of which, they claimed, was to reattune their chakras, or energy centers. A few worked with crystals. One healer, who’d been trained as a Lakota Sioux shaman, intended to use the Native American pipe ceremony. Drumming and chanting would enable him to go into a trance during which he would contact spirits on the patient’s behalf. They also enlisted a Qigong master from China, who said that he would be sending harmonizing qi energy to the patients. The only criterion, Targ and Sicher maintained, was that the healers believed that what they were using was going to work.

  They had one other common element: success in treating hopeless cases. Collectively, the healers had an average of 17 years of experience in healing and reported an average of 117 distant healings apiece.

  Targ and Sicher then divided their group of twenty patients in half. The plan was that both groups would receive the usual orthodox treatment, but only one of the two groups would also receive distant healing. Neither doctors nor patients were going to know who was being healed and who wasn’t.

  All information about each patient was to be kept in sealed envelopes and handled individually through each step of the study. One of the researchers would gather up each patient’s name, photograph and health details into a numbered folder. This would then be given to another researcher, who would then renumber the folders at random. A third researcher would then randomly divide the folders into two groups, after which they were placed in locked filing cabinets. Copies in five sealed packets would be sent to each healer, with information about the five patients and a start date specifying the days to begin treatment on each person. The only participants in the study who were going to know who was being healed were the healers themselves. The healers would have no contact with their patients – indeed, would never even meet. All they’d been given to work with was a photo, a name and a T-cell count.

  Each of the healers was asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient for an hour a day, six days each week, for ten weeks, with alternate weeks off for rest. It was an unprecedented treatment protocol, where every patient in the treatment group would be treated by every healer in turn. To remove any individual biases, healers had a weekly rotation, so that they were assigned a new patient each week. This would enable all of the healers to be distributed throughout the patient population, so that healing itself, not any particular variety of it, would be studied. The healers were to keep a log of their healing sessions with information about their healing methods and their impressions of their patients’ health. By the end of the study, each of the treated patients would have had ten healers, and each of the healers, five patients.

  Elisabeth was open-minded about it, but the conservative in her kept surfacing. Try as she might, her training and her own predilections kept surfacing. She remained fairly convinced that Native American pipe smoking and chakra chanting had nothing to do with curing a group of men with an illness so serious and so advanced that they were virtually certain to die.

  And then she saw her patients with end-stage AIDS getting better. During the six months of the trial period, 40 per cent of the control population died. But all ten of the patients in the healing group were not only still alive but had become healthier, on the basis of their own reports and medical evaluations.

  At the end of the study, the patients had been examined by a team of scientists, and their condition had yielded one inescapable conclusion: the treatment was working.

  Targ almost didn’t believe her own results. She and Sicher had to make certain that it was healing that had been responsible. They checked and rechecked their protocol. Was there anything about the treatment group that had been different? Had the medication been different, the doctor different, their diets different? Their T-cell counts had been the same, they had not been HIV positive for longer. After re-examining the data, Elisabeth discovered one difference they’d overlooked: the control patients had been slightly older, a median age of 45, compared with 35 in the treatment group. It didn’t represent a vast difference – just a ten-year age gap – but that could have been factor in why more of them had died. Elisabeth followed up the patients after the study, and found that those who’d been healed were surviving better, regardless of age. Nevertheless, she knew they were dealing with a controversial field and an effect that is, on its face, extremely unlikely, so science dictates that you have to assume the effect isn’t real unless you are really sure. Occum’s razor. Select the simplest hypothesis when confronted with several possibilities.

  Elisabeth and Sicher decided to repeat the experiment, but this time to make it larger and to control for age and any other factors they’d overlooked. The forty patients chosen to participate were now perfectly matched for age, degree of illness and many other variables, even down to their personal habits. The amount they smoked, or exercise they took, their religious beliefs, even their use of recreational drugs were now equivalent. In scientific terms, this was a batch of men who were as close as you could get to a perfect match.

  By this time protease inhibitors, the great white hope drug of AIDS treatment, had been discovered. All of the patients were told
to take standard triple therapy for AIDS (protease inhibitors plus two antiretroviral drugs such as AZT) but to continue their medical treatment in every other regard.

  Because the triple therapy appeared to be making a profound difference on mortality rates in AIDS patients, Elisabeth assumed that, this time, no one in either group would actually die. This meant she needed to change the result she was aiming for. In the new study, she was looking for whether distant healing could slow down the progression of AIDS. Could it result in fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, less medical intervention, improved psychological well-being?

  Elisabeth’s caution finally paid off. After six months, the treated group were healthier on every parameter – significantly fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer days in hospital, fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses and significantly lower severity of disease. Only two of those in the treatment group had developed any new AIDS-defining illnesses, while twelve of the control group had, and only three of the treated group had been hospitalized, compared with twelve of those in the control group. The treated group also registered significant improved mood on psychological tests. On six of the eleven medical outcome measures, the group treated with healing had significantly better outcomes.

  Even the power of positive thinking among the patients had been controlled for. Midway through the study, all the participants were asked if they thought they were being treated. In both the treatment and the control groups, half thought they were, half thought not. This random division of positive and negative views about healing meant that any involvement of positive mental attitude would not have affected the results. When analyzed, the beliefs of the participants about whether they were getting healing treatment did not correlate with anything. Only at the end of the study period did the subjects tend to guess correctly that they’d been in the healing group.