Energy Medicine: The Science and Mystery of Healing

182 Pages·2016·1.58 MB·English

by  Jill Blakeway

Dedication
ALEX TIBERI WAS A HEALER AND A SCHOLAR.
He was my first teacher and this book is dedicated to his memory.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. At My Fingertips
2. The Science of Connection
3. What’s God Got to Do With It?
4. Into the Lab
5. Moving the Needle
6. Hands-On Activities
7. Mystics Among Us
8. What’s in a Placebo?
9. You the Healer
10. Let There Be Light
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
In the 1840s, puerperal fever, or “childbed fever,” a postpartum bacterial uterine
infection, swept through one of two maternity clinics at the Vienna General
Hospital in Austria. At the first clinic, the mortality rate among women giving
birth was 10 percent; in the other, it was less than 4 percent. The two clinics
admitted patients on alternate days. When women learned they’d gone into labor
on a day reserved for the clinic rife with childbed fever, they would often drop to
their knees, begging not to be admitted. Some women went so far as to stall long
enough to give birth outside. These women—who’d given “street births” as this
practice came to be known—remained eligible for child-care benefits, even
without having to be admitted to the clinic. And, as it was later discovered, they
also rarely contracted the childbed fever that was raging inside.
Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who’d recently begun working at the
first clinic, wondered what protected these women from such a highly
contagious infection. After all, both clinics used almost all of the same
techniques. The only difference: medical students worked in the first clinic
whereas midwives worked in the second. After a meticulous process of
elimination, Semmelweis concluded that he and the medical students carried
“cadaverous particles” on their hands, whereas the midwives, who did not
perform autopsies and had no contact with corpses, kept their hands free of such
contamination. (As for the women who’d had street births, they’d managed to
avoid infection by not having medical oversight during childbirth at all.)
Semmelweis subsequently ordered that doctors at the first clinic wash their
hands with chlorinated lime water after performing autopsies and before
examining patients. After the practice was instituted, the mortality rate at the
first clinic dropped by an astounding 90 percent. Semmelweis then ordered the
midwives at the second clinic to do the same—in addition to scrubbing their
instruments in a chlorine solution. Again, this dramatically reduced the
hospital’s death rate.
Yet, despite clear evidence that Semmelweis’s theory and practice saved
lives, his colleagues, clinging to their well-established beliefs, refused to
concede that these results were anything more than coincidence. After all, they
couldn’t see the cause of death: the microscopic bacteria. And, more important,
Semmelweis’s data didn’t correspond with how they believed the body operated.
The germ theory of disease had not yet been accepted in Vienna; diseases were
attributed, at that time, to a variety of different and unrelated causes.
Semmelweis’s colleagues ridiculed him and eventually stopped following his
guidelines. Soon after, Semmelweis lost his job. He spent the rest of his life
fighting the medical community on this issue of sterilization and cleanliness, and
at age forty-seven, this innovative thinker was committed to a mental asylum,
where he died from sepsis.
The foundations of energy medicine are as ancient as history. In Egypt, a
description of the laying on of hands, as a prompt to the body to relieve pain,
was found in the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest preserved medical documents,
dated 1550 BC. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and physician, considered
healing his greatest calling and considered the pneuma, literally meaning
“breath,” to be the spirit. In Ayurveda, a health system developed thousands of
years ago in India, the life-giving force is referred to as “prana”; in Judeo-
Christian belief systems, it is called the “breath of life.” And in traditional
Chinese medicine (TCM), which is what I have practiced for twenty years, the
animating force that plays an essential role in maintaining and restoring health is
called “qi.” In this way, spirituality, philosophy, and science were once
intertwined, making up an essential part of our history, but we have since strayed
considerably from this notion. I often wonder if one day we’ll look back on
energy healing and shake our heads in disbelief, as we do with the story of
Semmelweis, wondering why any of us resisted an approach that offers such
benefits simply because it didn’t fit into our prevailing medical model.
And yet I admit: I, myself, took my time in coming around to this view. My
career began with an instinct to help others; it was as broad and naive as that.
But as my work took form—after studying East Asian medicine in graduate
school, I practiced acupuncture in hospice before starting my own practice in
New York City—I came to recognize the profoundly interwoven nature of
healing.
From the start, in my work as an acupuncturist, I was both humbled and
intrigued by the way patients thrived under my care. It bolstered my faith that
this ancient practice—administering thin needles to affect the flow of energy
within the body—offered such effective results. It also, however, raised a
number of startling questions. Most essentially: Why was it that this
manipulation of energy was so beneficial? Was I simply acting as a placebo? Or
was I some kind of conduit, as I sometimes curiously felt, with energy coming
through me when I worked?
Chinese philosophy posits that a vital energy, what is called qi, surrounds
and courses through our bodies to support life. It holds the body’s innate
intelligence, the intangible yet measurable way we maintain what’s known as
“homeostasis,” or the body’s ability to regulate its internal environment to create
good health. But qi is also understood to be part of a larger pattern, a grand
energy field, through which we are all interrelated.
As I became more adept at my work, I had the sense that something I
couldn’t see was influencing what was happening—not unlike, perhaps, the
intuition Dr. Semmelweis felt in his clinic. I suspected that the needles and herbs
(which I prescribe to supplement the acupuncture) were only part of what was
helping my patients. And, increasingly, I felt an undeniable sensation when I
practiced. Physically, it felt as if someone were pouring tonic water down my
spine; mentally, it came across as an acute instinct that I was drawing energy
from outside and channeling it for my patients.
I was captivated by this notion, but I was also afraid of it, impatient with it,
wary of its validity. I was conscious of, and self-conscious about, the energy
healing field being rife with—to put a fine point on it—quackery. While TCM
practitioners like me are licensed and held to a specific standard both medically
and ethically, there are no minimum standards for most other types of energy
work, which makes this a precarious landscape to enter, with fellow practitioners
who can hang a shingle and ask clients to simply have faith in what they do. The
last thing I wanted to give people—including myself—was false hope. I never
want to overpromise or underdeliver. (My policy, I should also say, has always
been to recommend, and in some instances require, that my patients confer with
the appropriate medical doctors in conjunction with my treatments.) But I also
had the strong impulse to further explore this ancient medical system that sought
to unify the physical and the energetic and to understand it within the worlds of
science and spirituality and philosophy today.
As someone who methodically charts her own progress, I wasn’t able to just
accept that an enigmatic mix of needles and invisible energy fields served my
patients so well. I wanted to know why. I also fervently wanted to explain me to
me. So I pursued a variety of knowledgeable and dynamic specialists—healers,
academics, doctors, scientists, and researchers on the cutting edge of energy
medicine—and I found that they were all working from remarkably, and
reassuringly, similar and interconnecting theories.
Moving from the scientific to the mystical and back again, this book has
been both a deeply personal project and a professional inquiry. It is as important
for me to take an unflinching look at what I may be experiencing as a healer as it
is to measure the changes that arise from energy interventions, and to validate
them with evidence-based research.
As such, over the last few years, I’ve studied the research of the former dean
of engineering at Princeton University Robert Jahn, cofounder of the Princeton
Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, which developed its own
experimental agenda for investigating collective consciousness and its effects on
us. I was counseled on spirituality and healing by Neale Donald Walsch, the
bestselling author of the series Conversations with God. In Japan I visited the
healer Hiroyuki Abe, who applies energy to acupuncture points—without using
needles. I asked a psychophysiologist to measure what happens in my body
when I’m working with a patient, published research on energy medicine in the
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and consulted a British
MD with an interesting take on how the acupuncture meridians work. I also
spent time with William Bengston, PhD, author of The Energy Cure: Unraveling
the Mystery of Hands-On Healing, who is both a healer and a scientist. Dr.
Bengston trained a team of skeptical colleagues to use hands-on healing with lab
mice who had been given injections that induced mammary cancer. The result?
Dr. Bengston and his teams cured the mice time and again, in every experiment.
This book is an account of what I’ve come to know about the most
dependable and impressive means of harnessing healing energy and how we can
all make this powerful force work for us. I hope that readers will not only come
away with an understanding of what healing energy is, but genuinely trust it and
feel encouraged to explore their own needs in a more informed way. And, as I
believe everyone has an innate ability to tap into healing energy within
themselves and in the world around them, I have included exercises throughout
the book to help readers draw on their own capacities.
While Chinese medicine will always be my foundation and focus, the work I
do now is very different from when I first began my career—it is the result of
various disciplines that span many cultures and belief systems. And, as I’d
hoped, my patients are better for it. More unexpectedly, however, this search has
allowed me an unwavering faith that what cannot be explained, the bit of
mystery that will always lie just out of reach, may be attuned to our needs.
1
At My Fingertips
The first acupuncture patient I ever worked with on my own was a woman who
had broken both of her legs. She had visited a fire station with her women’s
group and had been encouraged, ill-advisedly as it turned out, to slide down the
fire pole. When I met her, she was still walking with two canes—a full year after
her accident.
I was just beginning my third year of a four-year master’s degree in
acupuncture and Chinese medicine in San Diego, California, and a long way
from my native Britain. Before treating this woman, I’d only ever performed
acupuncture on a patient as an assistant to a more senior student; before that, I’d
practiced on sewn bags of rice. This was my first day working as an
acupuncturist and herbalist in the school’s clinic, and though I did have a
supervisor, he was also watching a number of other students, all of us practicing
acupuncture unaccompanied for the first time.
In the treatment room, the woman looked at me expectantly and handed over
a set of X-rays from her doctor. I held them up to the light and tried to at least
appear confident as I attempted to decipher what exactly I was viewing. At that
moment my supervisor popped his head around the door to check on me; he
strode across the room to turn the X-rays right side up in my hands. “Just do a
basic treatment,” he told me quietly.
I forged ahead. I asked the woman to put on a gown and lie down on the
small table. When she was ready, I dutifully began putting needles in a selection
of basic acupuncture points to address her pain. The woman was completely still
and silent throughout. Honestly, I had no sense as to whether anything I was
doing was having any effect at all. The session seemed rather unremarkable—
disappointingly so—until the end. What happened next will sound too good to
be true, but bear with me: the point of this story is that it is easy to attribute
recoveries we don’t understand to the miraculous when, in fact, they are really