The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal

by Gary E. Schwartz Ph.D., William L. Simon (Editor), Richard Carmona (Foreword by)

Overview

A healer removes the pain of a broken wrist in fifteen minutes. Another removes an ovarian tumor in a couple of weeks. Still another, from thousands of miles away, regenerates the nerves of an injured spine for a patient on whom the doctors had given up. These sound like tabloid stories but could they be true? They are just three out of millions of instances in which healers have claimed to manipulate energy fields to cure the body.

Books on vibrational medicine, prayer, and spiritual healing present readers with an array of historical and current discoveries and techniques. But so far nobody has addressed the reality of healing through comprehensive scientific research. The Energy Healing Experiments fills that void. Harvard- educated Dr. Gary E. Schwartz provides scientific experiments and evidence to reveal the truth about the existence of energy fields and unlocks their potential for enhancing your health.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743292399
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	08/19/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,116,728
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona and director of its Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University, he served as professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University, director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, and co-director of the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic, before moving to Arizona in 1988. He has published more than four hundred scientific papers and coedited eleven academic books. He is the author of The Afterlife Experiments and The Truth About Medium and coauthor of The Living Energy Universe.

William L. Simon is a screen and television writer and bestselling author.

Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS, is the President of the Canyon Ranch Institute, Vice Chairman of Canyon Ranch, and the Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the University of Arizona. He also served as the seventeenth Surgeon General of the US from 2002 to 2006.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

My Eyes Are Opened

Would you believe that a healer removed the pain of a broken wrist and bone in fifteen minutes?

Would you believe that another healer removed an ovarian tumor in a matter of weeks?

Would you believe that a third healer regenerated the nerves of a broken spine in a few months, remotely, on a person thousands of miles away?

As thoroughly unlikely as these examples may sound, I have personally witnessed such healings at first hand. They seem like miracles — yet they really did happen. The question is, how? The answer to this question involves a new understanding of energy and consciousness.

I'm a Harvard PhD, a former Yale professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center. I'm currently a professor of psychology, surgery, medicine, neurology, and psychiatry at the University of Arizona. I was awarded one of two NIH grants to establish a Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science. Though I was originally taught that such healing miracles do not and can not happen, the fact is that they do. Science can now help us to understand and celebrate them.

Pain That Disappears

The first energy healing I ever experienced was completely unexpected. In the summer of 1994, I was visiting a colleague on the East Coast, a psychotherapist I will call Suzanne.

Her father had been a distinguished physician and scientist who, though conventionally trained, was open to alternative therapies. After his death, Suzanne developed an interest in energy healing and was taking advanced courses in what's called healing touch.

While I was visiting with her, Suzanne received an emergency phone call from one of her counseling patients. In tears, the patient explained that her husband had been repairing the roof and had fallen off. He was rushed to the hospital in extreme pain. The lady pleaded with Suzanne to meet her at the emergency room and help her cope with this stress. Suzanne agreed to go, and I went as well.

We found her husband, Robert, apparently in excruciating pain, with his right wrist bent at an unlikely angle. I stepped out of the room so Suzanne could attempt healing. Curious about the process, I snuck a quick peek over her shoulder before I left. I saw Robert lying with his eyes closed while Suzanne waved her hands a few inches above his arm and wrist. I realized she was being circumspect: the hospital staff would not have been pleased about these goings-on, which they probably would have thought closely akin to voodoo.

After about fifteen minutes, Suzanne asked us to return. We found Robert with his eyes wide open and smiling like a surprised Cheshire cat. He said he had no idea what had just transpired, but to his amazement the severe pain in his wrist and arm was virtually gone. And no, he had not been given any pain medications.

He still couldn't move his limb, and X-rays would confirm he had a fractured wrist. Nonetheless, he was unexpectedly pain free and greatly relieved. So was his wife.

As for me, I was frankly in shock. If this was a placebo response — if Robert had believed Suzanne could relieve his pain, and his belief had tricked his body into making the pain disappear — then it was certainly a dramatic example. Could the elimination of Robert's pain be explained solely as the power of his mind over his body?

Or had something more occurred, something to do with healing that Suzanne had induced? Had I witnessed my first energy healing?

A Tumor Vanishes

Several years ago, a New Yorker I'll call Jane was diagnosed using ultrasound as having a large tumor on her right ovary. Refusing an immediate biopsy, she announced that she wanted to take a month to try alternative healing techniques.

She focused on two modalities — herbs, prescribed by a psychiatrist, and energy healing, to be performed by her husband, Mark, who happened to be a psychologist as well as a budding healer. He used the technique called Reiki, a form of energy healing that originated in Japan and has become popular in the United States and worldwide. Mark took a week off before the second ultrasound and spent four hours a day sending his wife loving energy. At times she would work at her computer and he would sit in a chair in the corner sending Reiki energy across the room. They focused on success, but what happened was not at all what they could have expected.

When the doctor repeated the ultrasound, he was astonished to find that the tumor had vanished. It had quite literally disappeared. I was shown the initial and follow-up ultrasound pictures, so was able to confirm the report for myself: a large tumor in the initial pictures, a complete absence of any tumor in the follow-up. The radiologist who took the pictures said he was completely baffled — he had never witnessed such a thing before.

In rare cases, tumors have been known to disappear by spontaneous remission. Perhaps that's what happened here. Or did it happen primarily through the combination of herbs and Mark's loving attention? Did his intentions and energies play a significant if not synergistic role as well?

The aftermath was less happy. After Jane and Mark divorced a few years later, she again developed tumors. This time she chose to have them surgically removed.

Help for a Permanently Disabled Man

A friend of mine in California, whom I will call Michael, asked me if I knew someone who could do a long-distance medical intuition diagnosis for his friend James. Medical intuition is a controversial process in which psychics — also known as intuitives — claim to receive information about a person's medical problems that includes energetic, emotional, and spiritual components. These diagnoses are often made longdistance, without the diagnostician ever meeting the patient.

James had been injured in an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His neurologists came to the conclusion that his condition was incurable. Patients with this kind of injury frequently die within three years. Michael said that James was not receiving physical therapy. Since his case was hopeless, there seemed to be no point in any treatment.

I told Michael about an Arizona medical intuitive and energy healer, Lynn, who had made some surprisingly accurate long-distance diagnoses in my presence, and I gave him her phone number. Since conventional medicine had failed to help, there was nothing to lose in giving alternative medicine a try.

Lynn not only provided an accurate medical diagnosis but accepted James as a patient, holding more than sixty therapy sessions with him over the ensuing eight months. All of the sessions were conducted longdistance, most over the telephone, along with a few via meditation.

Despite the predictions of conventional medicine, James began to regain much of his functioning. He regained use of his abdominal muscles and regained bladder control. He developed sensation in his legs, and then was able to move his legs and toes to the point where it was possible for him to start physical therapy. He even regained the ability to have sex. His doctors in San Diego were baffled because his MRIs indicated that his nerves were clearly regenerating, something they had never seen before.

Just a miracle? Or was there something more going on here? Was Lynn's long-distance spiritual energy healing actually responsible?

Any reputable scientist will tell you that a story of an individual, isolated experience — referred to as "anecdotal evidence" — is invalid, essentially meaningless. However, a collection of independently observed experiences begins to suggest that something real is going on and deserves scientific examination.

Exploring Energy Healing

What you are about to read will probably stretch your mind as it tugs at your heart. You will accompany me in the laboratory and clinic as I gather evidence, slowly but surely, that energy healing is real and can play a vital role in human existence, offering the tantalizing potential of improving the quality of life for every one of us. You will experience the challenges I faced as a scientist as I struggled to make sense of findings I was not prepared to discover. The evidence typically took me beyond my personal comfort level.

Medicine and science are in the throes of a dramatic evolution — which some might call a revolution. We live in a time of a profound change in thinking that is absolutely fundamental. The messages of contemporary physics tell us that our everyday sensory experience of the world is extremely limited, and that reality is far more interesting and mysterious than most of us are yet aware of.

The first sections of this book present a wide-ranging set of human energy experiments, mostly with nonhealers — from young undergraduate students at the University of Arizona in their late teens and early twenties to mature former students at Harvard University in their mid-sixties. The experiments address fundamental and far-reaching issues such as:

- Whether our bodies register invisible fields of energy, including TV and radio signals

- Whether we sense the energies of people, animals, and even plants

- Whether the energies generated by our bodies can be measured by electronic devices

- Whether our energies affect the physiology and behavior of diverse living systems — bacteria, animals, plants, and even other people — and can be used by us to foster healing and health

As you witness my personal scientific journey and ponder the discoveries my colleagues and I have made, consider the following: if all this, and more, is real, then as Dr. James Levin puts it, not only are we all "energy beings," we all have the inherent ability to be energy healers — to others, but most important, to ourselves.

Since research has solidly established that we can use our minds to help heal ourselves, and the physical body is actually a dynamic organization of energy and fields, it therefore follows that we are all potential energy healers as well. Further, because energy radiates beyond the body, in principle (and in fact, as I discuss in this book) energy healing can extend from your mind to others' bodies.

If you find the evidence of this book compelling, be ready to claim your natural power to heal. Copyright © 2007 by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS

Preface

PART I - EVERYTHING HAS ENERGY AND CONSCIOUS INTENTION

1. My Eyes Are Opened

2. Examining Energy Healing

3. Unlocking the Mystery of Invisible Energy Fields

4. Experiencing Human Energy Fields

5. Perceiving a Person's Intention

6. Learning to Detect Energy and Consciousness

7. Sensing the Energy of Minerals and Crystals

PART II - OUR ENERGY FIELDS CONNECT US WITH EVERYTHING

8. Interplay — The Heart and the Brain

9. How Your Heart's Energy Can Affect Another Person's Brain

10. Your Body Can Affect TV Satellite Dishes

11. How Healers' Hands Affect Magnetic-Field Meters

12. How Healers Affect the Invisible Light from Plants

13. Plant Communication and Botanical Cell Phones

14. Testing Energy Healing in the Laboratory

15. Testing Medical Intuition in the Laboratory

PART III - ALL HEALING INVOLVES ENERGY AND CONSCIOUS INTENTION

16. Energy Healing and the Placebo Effect — A New Vision

17. How Energy Healing Works — The Living Cell Phone

18. How Spirit and G.O.D. Play a Role in Energy Healing

19. Envisioning the Future of Energy Healing — Awakening to Energy Living

20. We Are All Energy Healers

Frequently Asked Questions

Recommended Readings

Appendix: Understanding Universal Energy

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Over the past three decades, an impressive body of scientific evidence has quietly emerged that points to stunning new insights into consciousness and its capacity to mediate healing. Dr. Gary Schwartz's The Energy Healing Experiments is a stellar introduction to this dazzling evidence, which will transform the very meaning of 'healing.' "
­Larry Dossey, MD, author of The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things

"For more than 30 years, I have known and learned from the truly creative genius of Dr. Gary Schwartz. In The Energy Healing Experiments his courageous odyssey continues with scientific rigor, penetrating insights, his characteristic twinkling humor, and true wisdom."
­Kenneth R. Pelletier, PhD, MD(hc), author of New Medicine and international bestseller Mind As Healer, Mind As Slayer

"In The Energy Healing Experiments, scientist Gary Schwartz reveals his thrilling journey to the threshold of 21st-century medicine. There we encounter the promise of new classes of therapies based on the modulation of energy and intention. While we don't know yet exactly how these new therapies work, the fact that they work is being firmly established by Schwartz and others, as reported in this riveting first-person account."
­Dean Radin, PhD, author of Entangled Minds and The Conscious Universe

"This is a lovely book. I congratulate Gary Schwartz, with William Simon, on a very readable and lucid book on the important and complex topic of energy/ information healing as distinguished from chemical/nutritional healing. It is highly recommended for all readers because it will significantly transform the public mind-set in very beneficial ways."
­William A. Tiller, PhD, author of Science and Human Transformation

"Through the able hand of a master scientist, this book is a reliable guide to the complex and sometimes perplexing engagement of mind, body, and spirit."
­Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, PhD, Vice President for Research and Education, Institute of Noetic Sciences

From the Publisher

Are energy fields real? And if so, can they be used for healing and health? Yes, according to Schwartz (The G.O.D. Experiments), a professor of psychology, surgery, medicine, neurology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona. He tells marvelous stories of such healings and uses experiments to confirm that the human body is a bundle of energy that can be healed by another such bundle of energy. One story is of a four-year-old boy, Philip, whose heart rate dropped precipitously following surgery; a Hindu avatar, by merely touching Philip, increased his heart rate to 80 beats a minute. Through experiments with EEGs and EKGs, Schwartz says, he and others have found that our bodies are masses of biochemical energy, that such energy connects us to plants and other animals, that this energy can be harnessed for healing and that some people are in touch with their energy and use it to heal others. Schwartz's research has not appeared in peer-reviewed journals (due to their bias against such work, he says), so skeptics will want to wait for his experiments to be replicated. But those disposed to believe in the healing touch will find support for that belief. (Aug.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

The notion of healing someone with the laying on of hands has to it both a religious feel and a Star Trekone. Schwartz (psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, & surgery, Univ. of Arizona) wants to move it into the arena of hard science. After a foreword by former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona (who, like Schwartz, is affiliated with Tucson's Canyon Ranch Spa), Schwartz discusses various types of energy healing, e.g., Reiki and shamanism, and explains his experiments in determining how people detect and correct others' energy fields. He writes in an easygoing, enthusiastic style that makes it clear he believes in energy healing and would like to convince readers it is an emerging area of complementary medicine. Although skeptics in the medical field are likely to find his arguments unpersuasive, Schwartz's earlier books-The Truth About Mediumand The G.O.D. Experiments, also coauthored by Simon-did get some press, so expect demand from the crystal crowd. Recommended for public libraries with patrons interested in alternative therapies and psychic healing as well as for academic/medical libraries with very open-minded clientele.
—Elizabeth Williams

Library Journal