The Healing Touch

Here is another interesting topic that I have been looking at for a while. My mentor at the University of Nevada, Reno, has done some work on the healing touch cure (or method of reduction) for cancer. What the method basically involves is examining the energy field of sick patients. By altering that energy field, the cancer has been shown to be reduced in humans. Special trained individuals, called feelers, feel the field and mold it to a healthy shape.

This may sound like an impossible method, but there has been some studies that have shown that the cancer is reduced in humans through work with the energy fields. There is, though, always some problem with studies that humans are used for. Scientists have absolutely no idea weather the cancer remissions are due to the actual treatment or the placebo effect.

For this reason, the people involved in Healing Touch have decided to do some work with mice. Mice do not have the placebo effect that is shown in humans. If the same treatment works in mice, then there is some truth behind the alterations of energy fields.

The studies don in mice had two parts. One of the parts was to see if the feelers could actually identify the fields of sick mice to be different than the fields of healthy mice. It was shown that the feelers correctly identify the sick mice 50% of the time more than a trained eye of a professional mouse handler. This part really has potential. The other part of the study, to see whether the Healing Touch method actually worked to reduce the cancer in the mice, was not able to be done completely, and the Healing Touch person working with my mentor on this study was convinced that she had to get the results she thought she would get, and no other results would do.

This kind of science completely ruins an otherwise good study, and the Healing Touch researcher is still trying to find someone that will continue her research with her. Because she was so set on corrupting the study to get good results, there is still not a result. Perhaps this sort of method to reduce cancer really does work. But it is yet to be found out.

I really had two messages to convey in this post. One is to give you all an idea about the research that is being done on this subject. The other is to show you that nothing good comes out of bad science. So if any of you are doing research, or plan to in the future, no that any results give conclusions, even if they are not the conclusions that you wanted or expected.