Send Them Peace

Medicine, it's time to open your heart, as well as the bag with your stethoscope.

I'm not implying that practitioners have no compassion. Usually compassion remains a poignant reason to go into the profession. And it somehow remains in evidence somewhere. The demands on practitioners of Allopathic (usual) Medicine have become so insane, that why more aren't (insane) remains a mystery to me. Finding oneself in a patient's pain and misery is still a useful, practiced, and powerful driver towards doing things for "potential patient benefit." Notwithstanding what the payor says. 

Here are some articles that I will place here so you can download them, read them and think about them a bit. They arive here, accompanied in each case by a clear link to The Scientific Method. They are written in Medicaleese, so I will help with a brief translation where indicated.

What are we looking for?

I'll give away the surprise ending.

This is Scientific Method, and Medicine it's baby, which The Method protects in its current format of practice, looking at something pretty "woo-woo" by it's own standards. "Woo-woo" signals: "in what follows, tolerate it, say little, but don't start getting serious about this hokey stuff." That's "woo-woo."

In this case, the Scientific Method is looking at Distant Prayer.

Distant prayer is when someone, or a group of someones, participate(s) in intercessionary prayer, like a prayer intention requested by a family member. The recipient of this prayer, may not know, or doesn't have to know that another human is praying for his/ her health and its problems. The "prayors" are in one spot, and the "recipient" in another. And distance of separation has little or no importance. This is different from Healing Touch, where proximity and contact take place as the name implies.

Is it effective?

Well, yes. And that's a Scientific Method "yes."

But as or if you read these articles, you may be struck, as I was, by Medicine's difficulty in swallowing this bolus.

In more than one article, towards the Conclusion section, one senses disbelief. The usual rigorous statistical methods applied in these studies, suggest effectiveness of this "woo-woo" discipline. So maybe it's time to stop labelling it "woo-woo"? 

The disbelief leads to a researcher's pretty standard conclusion: "Better controlled studies are needed to confirm this study's initial impression." What? Their study was a crummy, shabby, half-baked study, whose financing was a waste of money, ... and someone ought to do a better one?

I think that the difficulty arises in an inability to explain the reason for the effectiveness. The "prayors" might suggest that its because the researchers didn't have a test tube big enough to fit an "Our Father" into it. Or that if it fell into one of their test tubes, that they had no method to weigh, read its spectral emissions, or otherwise analyze it.

Yet, there they are, saying scientifically: "You know, there's something to this. Our results suggest that this practice adds to the patient's Treatment Plan, and sometimes considerably."

Yes, other studies than those I placed here are also supportive. And quite a few report, sometimes it seems to me with a cold pleasure, conclusions such as : "No effect identified when compared with controls in this carefully randomized cross-over study."

A Radiologist will rarely end the dictation of his report of an X-Ray or other study without concluding: "Additional studies seem indicated to confirm these initial findings."

So one could conclude the same thing at this point. Is Distant Prayer effective? Some say "yes," and some say "no," so it seems like more studies, with better controls and methodology are indicated.

That is not the point here. Perhaps for our purposes, we already have enough data. The goal is to review such positive results, and see if they can help us define, model, mold, ... a useful tool. A tool that helps the members of our growing Team, implement The Challenge to Send Them Peace.

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So here are these articles, and eventually, as promised, each will have a little summary, looking with eyes and hears wide open, for that unbelieveably, and amazingly effective tool. With luck and patience, our toolbox will eventually contain more than one.

To speed your passage through this material, here is a brief Quick Review of Distant Healing for SendThemPeace purposes, of several such articles. I place it here to give you a sense of the landscape of this terrain. In this day and Internet age, PubMed serves as it did since the 1970's when I would use it as "MedLine" as a valuable resource. Useful especially, if one has been trained to understand what in th world some researchers are talking about. Even with that training, what is written in some disciplines, take Molecular Biology as an example, is advancing so rapidly that it requires inventing new words to describe what is seen or postulated. There, I'm as lost as you may be. Press on.

The efficacy of distant healing - JA Astin et al. (Annals of Internal Medicine). What struck me about this article in a very mainstream journal, is its sense of wonder at its own findings. It conveys that kind of emotion arising in findings that make guys in white lab coats run down the hall shouting: "Hey, look at this. You're not going to believe this!"

Effectiveness of Spiritual Healing for Rheumatoid Arthritis - there is improvement, with no clear physiological or psychological explanation why.

Fostering A Healing Presence - "The goal is to foster healing at bio-psycho-social-spiritual levels of the human being."

Mind Out of Body - by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis. I introduced Dr. Nicolelis in another article. But the point of placing this citation here is two-fold: First, one will be hard-pressed to find a researcher who sticks more closely to Scientific Method than Dr. Nicolelis and "his" Department of NeuroEngineering, as they develop Brain-Machine interfaces for paraplegics. Secondly, in reading his Conclusions, one is quickly immersed in a message that says that our brain in its actions, is not stopped at skin level. It's electrons, appropriately directed, have a near infinite work range. Nicolelis and his team of co-researchers are diligently working to perfect that INTERFACE, that escape route for our brain's electrons, to guide them in organized fashion towards moving machines and receiving feedback from such movement, thereby guiding the next step. 

But what if we already have, without being too aware of it, that INTERFACE within us? What if it's already there Now, awaiting a gentle awakening from sleep, and active, effective application outside of ourselves in the world that surrounds us? What then?

Before there were Interventional Radiologists, or Laser Eye Surgeons in Ophthalmology, there were shamans, local healers, and similar health helpers. They still exist and practice of course. Do they just manage to do "the best they can" before "Real Medicine" arrives by helicopter? No I think there's more to it. So I include here :

A review of their methods and results from the cold regions of Scandinavia (Healing in the Sa´mi North [Norway] ).

In leaving this subject, I hope you have not been inspired to search out many more citations and articles (they are available), to either approve or disprove the effectiveness of distant healing. Such duality, source of heated argument between those who need more ego assurance, is not the path we should turn to follow.

Instead, from one of the above articles, I select an excerpt. The method described herein, according to the scientifically controlled study, seemed effective. This, no matter how distant it may seem, from a method that you would use yourself, to help another living, sentient being :

"The proposed way of action from the healer's perspective is ...

that he begins the procedure by being aware of his own "spiritual level of consciousness." From this level, he focuses on "being the connection between inner spiritual entities and the soul of the patient." Subsequently, the healer attempts to function as "a transmitter of the healing forces into the personality level of consciousness of the patient." This gives the soul level of the patient a possibility to "enforce the influence on the blockages between soul and personality." "Individual blockages" are then addressed, and, if possible, resolved. This description is in concordance with the general definition of "spiritual" or "energy" healing as a systematic, purposeful intervention by one or more persons aiming to help another living being (person, animal, plant, cell, or other living system) by means of focused intention to improve their condition."

That last section, placed in Bold, is a concise summary of our goal here at STP.

If it works,... if it can be taught, ... if perhaps our children can teach it to their elders, ... such a method addresses the essential balance between Duality and Unity. Between Us-ness and Them-ness. Perhaps a door to receiving help ourselves, as we choose to help others.

Philosophers in the East and West and everything in between, have been seeking to reconcile this split for thousands of years. Are we emerging from the deep, dark wood into light? Can we? Dare we? Up to each of us to decide.

These are all simply clues for our toolbox.

♦ Does yours still have a little bit of room in it, or is it complete, or overfilled with tools you never use ? ♦