Psychotic patients frequently receive distant healing from healers outside the hospital. Estebany and Krieger conducted studies that demonstrated tangible benefits associated with distance healing.
Sceptical interpretations for these results could include placebo responses. The present study tests this theory by comparing the effects of distant healing vs knowing one is receiving it.
Belief
Numerous healers claim they can transmit energy directly into patients to treat various ailments; however, scientific studies have rarely substantiated this claim. Even so, anecdotal reports and increasing interest in alternative medicine has grown steadily; researchers are actively trying to develop ways of testing whether distant healing has any physical impacts.
Studies comparing distant healing to conventional medical treatments have been conducted, yet most trials suffer from significant methodological flaws. While Astin et al. reported significant treatment effects, other trials showed no advantage over control interventions; one even demonstrated negative results!
As most healers work with multiple patients at once, some interviewees indicated that in order for distant healing to have any true effect it must be received repeatedly over a longer timeframe – making it hard to distinguish the effects of healing intent from those related to patient expectations or beliefs about what might happen during treatment.
Concerns have also been expressed over whether the observed healing effects are simply the result of placebo response; several researchers have attempted to investigate this by creating “masked conditions”, where the healer remains unknown to participants.
Sicher’s research team conducted an exhaustive investigation of distant healing and AIDS. Their team consulted with numerous AIDS specialists and healers before designing an experiment that ensured all participants in either group remained unaware if they belonged to either group; furthermore, healers were requested to work closely with participants over an extended period and regularly.
As part of their studies, researchers hoped the results of their investigation would demonstrate that, unlike traditional medicine, distant healing could serve as an adjunct therapy to improve patients’ overall quality of life. Unfortunately, however, results did not support this hypothesis and instead provided no clear support for an improvement on psychological outcomes such as GHQ and McGill Pain questionnaire scores; instead their improvements can only partially be explained by changes in expectancies.
Expectancy
Studies on healing suggest that hope or expectation are key elements in medical progress. A controlled experiment of distant healing with arthritis patients found those who had received prayer had greater improvement than those who hadn’t, which researchers attributed to differences in expectations among them; it proved difficult to assess expectations accurately so future research must devise methods of measuring expectations explicitly.
Healer Fred Sicher conducted interviews with numerous healers and found that their sessions typically extended over an extended period, sometimes weeks. Most healers believed their work to be most beneficial when patients faced life-threatening illness; Sicher proposed conducting a study involving people living with incurable conditions like AIDS who would receive healing sessions over an extended period.
After reviewing existing literature, the CPMC team began developing what they hoped would be a sound collaborative research project. After consulting with numerous scientists and AIDS specialists as well as volunteer healers who agreed to participate, the researchers designed what they hoped would be an airtight research design.
This collaboration produced a five-year, randomized trial which was published in the Western Journal of Medicine in 1998 and marked five years of intense investigation of distant healing. It confirmed previous findings that those receiving distant healing experienced significantly fewer AIDS-related illnesses and less severe infections compared to control group patients, along with less doctor visits, hospitalizations, days spent hospitalized, doctor visits to treat those illnessed by physicians or psychological outcomes measured using Profile of Mood States questionnaire showed having more positive outlook and lower levels of depression.
Extensive statistical analyses were performed to establish whether any baseline factors might have contributed to differences between groups. Unfortunately, these analyses failed to reveal any significant variance. Furthermore, the synchrony of healing sessions was examined by blinding both healers and healees to their schedule of sessions and collecting subjective experiences of both parties – healees reported sensations of relaxation, drowsiness, heaviness, decreased anxiety levels, feelings of peacefulness as reported by healees while healers who had also been blinded also rated their own subjective experiences in terms of synchronous or nonsynchrony ratings themselves.
Intention
At a time when there is growing public interest in alternative medicine and claims of distant healing are prevalent, it is imperative that research be undertaken into this phenomenon. This research project attempts to understand what role intentions play in distant healing. Though this study had several limitations – low statistical power, use of self-report measures instead of clinical outcomes and sample only composed of arthritis patients – its findings demonstrate how distant healing may be influenced by intention and expectation. Further research identifying methods of measuring intentions and investigating complex sets of intentions is essential for successful intervention studies, with more stringent outcome measurements as well as qualitative approaches such as semi-structured interviews providing better ways of gathering feedback on treatment success and helping develop more specific goals that can be set and pursued with energy and passion.
Results
Numerous randomized studies have found distant healing to be successful; however, not all trials have. Overall, most studies have demonstrated positive treatment effects in those suffering chronic conditions like fibromyalgia and CFS; however, results of some may have been affected by various factors, such as expectation that may be difficult to control; further research using more rigorous methodologies could shed more light on whether distant healing really does have medical ramifications.
One of the latest studies of distant healing involved participants being randomly assigned to either receiving distance healing or not knowing whether they were part of a control condition. They completed both a 12-item GHQ questionnaire and Short Form McGill Pain Questionnaire as part of this masked condition study. Participants were also required to fill out a four-item questionnaire assessing belief in distant healing. The findings from this research project revealed that specific knowledge about healing was correlated with self-reported well-being while general belief wasn’t, thus not supporting Hypothesis 2. Medium to large effect sizes were found for both GHQ and McGill Pain scores suggesting expectancy plays an integral part in these apparent distant healing effects.
Researchers do not intend to imply that anyone can remotely manipulate another’s body this way; rather, they’re investigating whether prayers for healing cause changes in patient physiology in an extremely precise manner. One approach used is comparing skin conductivity during brief ‘influence’ periods (when someone focused on healing is focused on an individual patient) to measures taken during non-influence intervals (when no healing was taking place).
Biofeedback research can produce some remarkable results, yet this method does not involve actual physical contact between practitioner and patient, meaning it cannot be used to treat serious illnesses such as cancer or HIV infection. Therefore, in these instances an experienced professional must be used; however, more recent work has shown that even less-experienced ‘healers’ can produce similar results.
