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Opening health care to more understandings

by Richard Harman, BE, CHTP

I recently heard the excellent, RSNZ sponsored panel discussion chaired by Kim Hill on National Radio, “But is it Science?”, about the place of complementary/alternative (CA) health treatments in relation to Western scientific medicine.  The panel did not support them, but does that matter?

Unfortunately, the lack of a CA practitioner on the panel meant that some beliefs that seemed misconceived were left open for answering.  My purpose in writing this essay is to address those misconceptions and the obstacles, for doctors and healers, that stand in the way of integrating New Zealand’s health care system, and thereby to open the way for a far more effective capability.  Much of my argument is written around the example of a homeopathic cure (scientists’ favourite bete-noire) for trigeminal neuralgia, but the understandings of two other CA cures are also presented.

The discussion panel consisted of Kathy Sykes - Professor of Public Engagement in Science and Engineering at Bristol University, Dr Peter Gluckman - Director of the Liggins Institute for Medical Research, and Peter Callaghan - the Alan McDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University.  Clearly, none are CA practitioners, but Prof. Sykes has presented a BBC series of programmes on different CA disciplines.  She was amazed to see wheelchairs thrown off the stage during the programme on Spiritual Healing, and was said to be working to bridge the polarized gap between CA and Medicine.

My qualifications for answering their misconceptions start with a career in mechanical engineering design, the creative side of which develops access to the right side of the brain and the intuition.  That career was partly overlapped by 21 years of part-time CA experience and exploration, starting with training in body-mind massage.  My book1 records that exploration until 1998, and reports anecdotally and discusses over a hundred healing and other experiences.  From 1999-2001, I trained and gained certification as a Healing Touch practitioner, and more recently undertook initial training in the BodyTalk system.  Those two disciplines have understandings that are very different from those of Western medicine and consequently offer a wide range of very different healing capabilities, as described in the Box with respect to depression and chronic fatigue.

The different capabilities arise partly because science is mainly logical, left brained work in the beta state frequency range above 14 Hz (brain waves per second), whereas CA work often involves the sensing, intuitive, alpha state (7-14 Hz), right side of the brain.  Those differences alone put CA treatments outside the beliefs and precepts of scientific medicine, which grew in the mechanistic Newtonian paradigm, using reductionist analysis of parts of the body.  In contrast, CA energy treatments act holistically and include consciousness effects, thus fitting with quantum mechanics.

CA practitioners are often concerned by doctors’ dismissal of their successes as anecdotal, unproven and not tested.  Even worse for doctors would be an anecdote about homeopathy, which the panel frequently dismissed along with magnetic healing, colour therapy and others.  Yet homeopathy found an immediate cure for my trigeminal neuralgia.  The following simple record of an unexpected experience was taken from page 63 of my book. 

A severe pain started to spread [from a twinging upper right tooth] in August 1993, through the trigeminal nerve progressively to the lower jaw, up into the cheek and eventually outside my face in front of the right eye – yes, literally beyond my skin by up to two or three cm.  I do not remember telling my dentist or doctor about this pain, but someone said I might have to visit a neuralgia specialist. It was an example of pain being felt in the etheric body.

I was interested in the work of a homeopath I had just met, so I consulted him first. He tried several remedies during two visits, all to no effect. Then he tried Kalmia Latifolia 30C, whereupon the pain disappeared within [about three] seconds. On arriving home I used a Bach flower remedy, which had been given to me for some other reason, and the nerve pain returned immediately. I waited a few minutes, then took another Kalmia Latifolia tablet. The pain disappeared and never returned.

The basis of homeopathy was that, for many years, Professor Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) had his students at Leipzig University record absolutely all their responses to ingesting small doses of a wide range of substances, as a start to verifying and systematizing the folk medicine of that era.  Responses could be as abstruse as an itch behind the right eye and a momentary sense of panic.  He also prepared infinitesimal dilutions of those substances, having the same (homeo) pathology, to influence energetically the water based remedies for treating ailments having those same symptoms.  The full sets of symptoms, called provings, were logged in Homeopathic Materia Medica.  Was this the earliest systematic and therefore scientific approach to medicine? 

This anecdote raises several challenges for scientists, apart from the homeopathic aspect.  The first is the reference to the etheric body, the smallest of the series of interpenetrating subtle energy ‘bodies’ of increasing size and subtleness, that comprise our bio-energy field.  Perhaps that field was what Prof. Callaghan alluded to when he said that an obstacle for scientists was that the workings of CA too often rely upon the introduction of new laws of nature for their explanation.

The magnetic nature of some parts of the field, mainly generated by the heart and less than a millionth of the strength of the Earth’s field, is discussed by James Oschman2 in terms of the measurement of the energies involved and their biological effects.  Just as well discussed is the vibrational nature of the structure of the entire physical body.  He refers to the strong bio-magnetic energy projected from healers’ hands, with its main energy at 7-8 Hz, after the healer enters the meditative alpha state (p78).  It works by influencing the body’s systemic defence and repair mechanisms (p62).  However, he does not mention the ancient Indian and Chinese knowledge of the chakras and the subtle energy bodies, that are used particularly in spiritual healing.

Oschman’s magnetic comments may apply mainly to the etheric body, which healers see as the template providing the shape to which the physical body conforms as it grows, and as where pain is sometimes felt as the consciousness of the physical body.  Healers also work with the energy bodies above the etheric, which they see as alternate levels of emotional and mental consciousness, rising from narrow self-focus towards the spiritual. 

Could it be seen that to study medicine without knowledge of the aura is like studying the rise and fall of sea water without knowledge of the invisible influences of the gravitational pull of the moon, variations of atmospheric pressure and tsunamis?

The second challenge is not that homeopathy has not been proven by double-blind testing, but  that it could not be.  In the panel discussion, Dr Gluckman praised randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled testing as the “best medical discovery ever”.  It clearly suits the Newtonian paradigm but there is an obstacle regarding its use with CA treatments.  The placebo control is used to cancel the average effect of consciousness of all the test subjects, whereas homeopathy considers the individual client’s consciousness to find the right remedy.  Double-blind testing is therefore unsuitable for assessing the effectiveness of homeopathy, and other CA treatments that take individual consciousness into account.  Instead, the record of effectiveness of individual CA practitioners could be a better basis for assessment, as it could for doctors.

A related challenge is the panel’s hypothesis that, because its remedies are so overwhelmingly diluted, homeopathic cures can only result from the placebo effect or faith healing.  The simple answer is that, if the cure for my trigeminal nerve pain had worked only as a placebo effect, why did the earlier remedies tried not cure it by the placebo effect?  And why should I have faith in another remedy, after five or six had failed?  This cure falsifies their hypothesis, which was falsely based by assuming that homeopathy works on the physical body.

The reason is that homeopathy does not work on the physical body, but upon the subtle body whose frequency is attuned to the remedy’s level of dilution.  The greater the dilution, the higher the subtle body frequency and the more powerful its effect.  Correction at one level affects all others (see Box), including the physical, and is very fast acting because it works at the level of the client’s consciousness.  However, the remedy used has to match all the patient’s symptoms, including thoughts and  fears.  KL 30C would therefore not help most cases of right side trigeminal pain, because few people will have the same thoughts and feelings as mine, and nor does it affect left side pain. 

A fourth challenge is the rapidity of the cure when the right remedy is found, a common experience with CA treatments.  Rapid cures work both ways - a medical success after many CA failures is just as likely as a CA success after many medical failures.  They occur because only the last treatment regime was well-matched to the ailment, and that last treatment could be from any discipline. 

This opens the way to considering the degree of matching between treatments and ailments.  It seems fairly obvious that every ailment is well-matched by only a few treatments.  Thus, if you break a leg, you go to a surgeon rather than a homeopath - almost no other treatment can repair the leg.  A database of the best matched treatments for all ailments, regardless of the treatment source, could therefore become essential for maximizing the effectiveness of the health care system.  Then practitioners could spend more of their time on ailments that their treatments are able to cure. 

Conveniently, ailments with which medical treatments fail are recognized by being labelled as chronic.  One could ask, therefore, why do medical treatments never cure chronic ailments by the placebo effect? 

There is still the obstacle that CA successes fail requests for scientific proof, so it may be time to consider the scientific mind set.  Prof. Callaghan mentioned the existence of scientific fundamentalism, which will not accept that there are other valid understandings of health care that work.  And, in my experience, scientists will refuse all offers of Healing Touch to relieve a minor pain.  One such scientist suffered the pain from a damaged anterior rotator cuff in her right shoulder, which hampered her dancing for two years before it became tolerable.  Having impeccable credentials in the life sciences, she was convinced that no explanation involving vague energy fields could help.

Cell-biologist Bruce Lipton would disagree, saying that a cornerstone of biology has been that DNA determines the character of the cells’ proteins and hence their behaviour3.  However, he and other researchers have found that the environment surrounding the cells, including the subtle energies, affects the proteins that sheathe the DNA molecule, and thus affects the DNA.  The DNA coding still provides our ‘nature’, but the cells’ environment including the energy of love, for example, can now be seen to provide the ‘nurture’ aspect, even at conception.  And energy healing activities can influence the creation of new cells, thus also gaining credibility.

So it really doesn’t matter that CA treatments lie outside medical science as currently understood, because CA understandings involve a different paradigm.  Ideally, science would explore the new things CA offers instead of dismissing them.  But why explore them?  Why not just accept that there are other valid understandings of life, and cooperate with them?  For instance, could doctors send patients with trigeminal neuralgia to a homeopath?  Or, could healing be accelerated and the drugs bill reduced, as at the US Navy Hospitals at Norfolk, VA and San Diego, where Healing Touch is extensively used?

If I had been on the panel, I would have concluded by saying that life is multi-dimensional and far too complex to be described by the understanding of any single discipline.  In health care, New Zealand’s stressed medical system desperately needs help from every available understanding.  The CA understandings introduced in this essay are linked to successes with conditions that scientific medicine finds difficult to treat.  The formal acceptance and use of these and several other CA understandings, perhaps following an informal investigatory period, could usefully help many patients.

To this end, I would suggest that the Ministry of Health set up an authority, independent of control by either doctors or healers, to integrate appropriate CA treatments and practitioners into the health care system.  That would make the system substantially more effective, and increase the number of successful treatments for the money spent.  Full integration would also make ACC and medical insurance support available for approved CA practitioners.

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Further informationA CD of the panel discussion is available from Replay Radio by phoning 0800 737 529. The websites www.healingtouchnz.com and www.bodytalksystem.com list their certified practitioners' names and how to contact them.  Raewyn's Neurolink practitioner was Ora Lefebvre in Christchurch.

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Box: Two medically unconventional, CA understandings

1. Energy healing for depression.

The general understanding of energy healing is that the body’s energy field and the physical body together comprise the complete human being.  Neither part can exist by itself.  The energetic and physical aspects affect each other, so that damage to the physical causes distortions in the field.  In the other direction, dis-ease at the energetic level, in the form of negative thoughts and feelings, or stress, will eventually lead to physical disease if left unresolved.  In both cases, work with the hands to clear, balance and energize the client’s energy field can help to restore the whole being.  This work is done in the alpha state, where most healers can feel or see the energy field.

Many disciplines under the heading energy healing work in different ways on the body’s energy field.  The case below involved correction by Healing Touch of extreme distortion of the field.  Healing Touch is recognized by the US medical profession and is used in many American hospitals, and here in Oncology at Wellington Hospital.

Rosalie Van Aken, an Australian who teaches the higher levels of Healing Touch, was awarded a PhD in 2004 for her research programme on treatment for depression4.  Fourteen self-referred volunteers with moderate depression (one of 30 years duration), but not under psychiatric care or medication, all completed her research programme cleared of depression.  That programme involved five, weekly Healing Touch sessions, with Beck inventory tests before and after each session, and concurrent counselling to find the root cause of their problem. 

The specific understanding involved was that, whereas in full health the bio-energy field is egg shaped and a bit larger than the body, the volunteers’ fields were all like a balloon attached only to the top of the head, hardly protruding at all from the rest of the body.  Van Aken said that shape was consistent with those people’s wish not to remain on earth.  Only techniques from the first two levels of Healing Touch were required to restore the field to its correct position and ground them in life.  During recovery, however, they had to be kept safe when their returning energy could have been used to commit the suicide they had been wanting while depressed. 

2. Restoring internal communications to overcome chronic fatigue.

Kinesiology uses neuro-muscular response to elicit answers from the subconscious mind about the body’s state.  The practitioner applies a slight load to a selected muscle of the client while asking a question, even silently in her mind, and detects a different response according to whether the answer is yes or no.  A sequence of questions thus diagnoses the body’s needs.

Neurolink and BodyTalk share the core understanding that the brain can correct any problem in the body provided that the brain knows of the problem.  The reason why it may not know is explained by likening us to a complex machine with a few blown fuses.  These disciplines use kinesiology to determine where communication links between all parts and systems of the body and its environment have broken down, and use various techniques to restore them and to inform the brain.

After already having changed her circumstances in life, many treatments to restore the links using these disciplines, plus a few other CA treatments, helped Raewyn to overcome chronic fatigue in about two years5.  Her initial condition included damage by past falls from horses, parasites in her liver that a self-administered dose of sheep drench had been unable to clear, a virus in her spleen, pancreas and adrenals, constantly swollen glands, clinical depression, extreme tiredness that was not refreshed by any amount of sleep, violent gastric upsets coinciding with mild stress or anxiety, vertigo, a tremor in the hands and an inability to concentrate.

The virus and parasites disappeared early, while Neurolink was being used.  Perhaps they became part of the body’s overall consciousness, so that bringing them to the attention of the body’s innate wisdom enabled their part of the consciousness to be terminated, and they died.  Many of the other symptoms had gone within six months, but the recovery of stamina is a longer process.

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References

1  Harman, Richard, From Massage to Miracles: and Other Experiences from the Alpha State, Orca Publishing, Christchurch, 1998. ($30.00 from r.harman@ext.canterbury.ac.nz)

2  Oschman, James L, Energy Medicine: the Scientific Basis, Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, 2000.

3  Lipton, Bruce H, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Mountain of Love Productions, Santa Rosa, CA, 2005.

4  Van Aken, R I, The experiential process of Healing Touch for people with moderate depression: a  grounded theory and case study approach.  Unpublished PhD thesis, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia, 2004.

5  Harman, Richard, ‘Encouraging news: chronic fatigue syndrome’, Healthy Options,  Tauranga, November 2005, pp50-1.