I have only paid occasional attention to the other energetic healers because most of the supporting evidence, as presented in books and seminars, is anecdotal, while my own obsession is with the underlying fundamentals of healing.
Many of these healers trace their lineage to a single revered teacher. Reiki (“life force” in Japanese) was founded by Mikao Usui, who apparently received its healing powers in 1922 after three weeks of fasting and meditation on Mount Kurama in Japan. Reiki healers, possibly in the millions worldwide, channel universal energy, which is said to be infinite and intelligent. They channel this energy through their palms, which are placed on or near their clients to stimulate the client’s own self-healing. Some Reiki masters say that they can not only heal at a distance, but also backwards and forwards in time.
Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a Western-based healing system that has been taught to approximately seventy thousand professional caregivers and is offered to patients in some North American hospitals. It was developed from experiments that Dolores Krieger, a nursing professor at New York University, did with psychic Oskar Estebany, showing that practical healing significantly increased hemoglobin in the blood of sick people, suggesting an immune response . As with Reiki, TT practitioners hold or move their hands a few inches from their patients, with the intention of activating their immune system.
In the West, the most popular practical healing tradition is based on the miracles of Jesus Christ, as written in the New Testament in John 14:12. After restoring his sight and healing the lame man, Jesus told his followers: “He who believes in me, the works that I do, he will also do; and greater than these he will do.”
Among early Christian cults, healing was an ordinary part of preaching, often using oil and water. European kings such as Edward the Confessor of England, who claimed to rule by divine right, exercised the royal touch to heal their subjects. Napoleon was even said to have tried his skills, to no avail.
Today, faith healing remains a popular part of the evangelical Christian movement. It is also backed, with caution, by the Roman Catholic Church, which expects miracles from those who travel the road to holiness. I have sometimes thought about how convenient it would be for me to reclassify myself as a faith healer, especially when asked in a dubious voice, “If you can do what you say you can, why haven’t you won a Nobel Prize?”
The practice of practical healing as a medical rite rather than a religious or magical one dates back at least to the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates (around 460 BC) was known as the father of Western medicine due to his reliance on keen observation and the principle of cause and effect. He summarized his extensive healing experience this way: “Often, while I have been calming my patients, it has appeared as if there is some strange property in my hands to extract and extract pain and various impurities from the affected parts.”
In the 16th century, Dr. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, historically known as “Paracelsus”, spoke of a healing and magnetic solar force that spread in waves throughout the Universe. “Munia”, as he called it, radiated around the human body in a luminous shield and could be transmitted at a distance. Despite the many healings attributed to him, Paracelsus was not only ridiculed by his peers, but was also negatively immortalized in the epithet “bombastic”, based on his birth name Bombastus.
Inspired by Paracelsus, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was also credited with many amazing cures, such as ridding a Munich scientist from paralysis and a teacher from blindness, simply by running his hands over them. When his disciples discovered hypnotism by experimenting with its techniques, Mesmer’s cures were dismissed as the power of suggestion. In the spirit of the Scientific Enlightenment, Mesmer’s name came into derogatory use through the word “hypnotize” with its connotation of undue influence.
After European medicine moved into the laboratory, a universal energy, often with magnetic properties, was rediscovered many times.
In 1791, the Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani, one of the first experimenters in electricity, wrote about a life force similar to electricity and magnetism, which seemed to radiate from the sun. He had an affinity for metal, water, and wood. It permeated everything, pulsed through the human body through breath and flowed from the fingertips.
In the 19th century, German scientist and industrialist Karl von Reichenbach risked his reputation as the discoverer of creosote and various other chemicals when he declared evidence of a new universal energy, which he named “od” in honor of the Viking god of thunder Odin. . Od was in free circulation throughout the Universe and permeated everything. It radiated a luminous glow from the human body and was vital to health. It was concentrated in iron, sulfur, magnets, and crystals, and driven by metal, silk, and water. Although confirmed by researchers in Britain, France, and Calcutta, od was eventually dismissed by orthodox science as a flaw in von Reichenbach’s excellent reputation.
In 1903, the French physicist RenĂ© Blondlot claimed to have discovered a vital force, both biological and universal, which he called “N-rays.” This finding was also experimentally confirmed by other French researchers, who noted its many similarities to od. Like his predecessors, Blondlot was ridiculed by his peers.
In 1936, Otto Rahn, a bacteriologist at Cornell University, noticed biochemical radiation from living cells that played an important role in growth, cell division, and wound healing. As he said, “It may be surprising that radiation has not been conclusively recognized and tested before this. The reason can be sought in its very low intensity. The best detector is still the living organism.”
Around the same time, Yale biologist Harold Burr demonstrated that all living systems, from trees to mice to men, are shaped and controlled by invisible electrodynamic force fields that can be measured and mapped with standard voltmeters. He called them “fields of life” or “L fields” and believed that their voltage could be used to diagnose physical and mental conditions before symptoms developed. Burr validated his theory by comparing the L fields of mice injected with cancer with control groups of healthy mice.
Burr’s colleague, Dr. LJ Ravitz, expanded on these findings to show that emotion is energy in motion. He described this energy as electrical and found a connection between low-energy states and diseases like cancer, asthma, arthritis, and ulcers.
In the 1970s, Fritz-Albert Popp, a German physicist, discovered that all living organisms constantly emit small streams of light, which he called “biophoton emissions.” These were stable in their intensity unless the organism was sick. Cancer patients, for example, emitted fewer photons, as if their batteries were running low. He also discovered that organisms used these light emissions as a form of communication.
After Konstantin Korotkov, a Russian physicist, developed sophisticated equipment to measure Popp’s bioenergy fields, Russian doctors began using his tests to diagnose diseases such as cancer. When Korotkov measured the healers’ crowns as they transmitted energy, he discovered remarkable changes in the intensity of their emissions, consistent with what Ben Mayrick and I discovered while working with a crudely built Kirlian photography device.