Energy medicine

Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, Apr 06, 2001 by Linda Chrisman

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Energy medicine is based upon the belief that changes in the "life force" of the body, including the electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields, affect human health and can promote healing.

The notion of a life force or energy is shared by people around the world. Since ancient times, traditional cultures have believed that a special energy vitalizes all life. This energy is known as chi, prana, pneuma, orgone, mana, ether, odyle, élan vital, bio-cosmic energy and many other names.

Early Ayurvedic references to a life force, or prana, go back to the eighth century B.C. In the West, as early as the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras conceived of a life energy, or pneuma, visible in a luminous body. A century later, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, recognized the body's natural capacity for healing, or Vis medicatrix naturae. He instructed physicians to find the blocking influences both within a patient and between them and the cosmos, in order to restore the healing life force. Nature, not the doctor, is the source of healing.

In the sixteenth century, the Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus reported "a healing energy that radiates within and around man like a luminous sphere." He believed this energy could cause and cure disease and could work from a distance. He also thought that magnets, planets, and stars could influence this energy. There are echoes of these beliefs in some of theories and practices of contemporary energy medicine. However, the ideas of Francis Bacon and the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes have had a much greater impact on Western medicine as a whole.

Bacon applied logical mathematical concepts to analyze humans and the world. He believed that the laws of science should be used to "master rather than become harmonious with nature." Descartes proposed that the body, which was measurable, and the mind, which was immeasurable, were firmly separate. The body could influence the mind but the mind could not influence the body. These notions promoted the search for physical causes of human illness. They also led to a denial of the mind's ability to affect physical health. As a result, mainstream science came to devalue or reject any phenomenon that cannot be measured or objectively proved.

From the seventeenth century onward, Western medicine has focused primarily upon the physical aspects of disease. Scientists who studied forces within the body that were difficult to measure were often ignored or ridiculed. The Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who had been a student and colleague of Sigmund Freud, was jailed and his books publicly burned because of his theories about "orgone" energy. His views, however, have influenced the development of many body-mind approaches, particularly bioenergetics.

The 1990s brought a new emerging scientific paradigm in relation to medicine and health care. According to biophysicist Beverly Rubik, this emerging paradigm "... celebrates the creative, subtle, empowering, wise, and enduring features of life that were never acknowledged during the age of machines and mechanistic thought. Living systems are self-organizing systems that expend energy in order to maintain their coherence and integrity...Healing is ultimately self-healing, a natural response to internal dynamic shifts or external challenges." This new paradigm also conveys that "...very small or subtle stimuli applied to the body-mind can have profound effects and set a person on the road to recovery."

In a 1990 review of more than 131 controlled scientific studies of healers from around the world, Dr. Daniel Benor found evidence of healing for a wide range of human conditions. These include changes in immune system functioning as well as improvement of skin wound healing, blood pressure, nearsightedness, leukemia, anxiety, asthma, bronchitis, epilepsy, tension headache, neck and back pain, post-operative pain, self-esteem, heart disease , and relationships.

Patients have also reported spontaneous healing of a variety of conditions including cancer and paralysis. Spiritual awakenings or new attitudes and a fresh sense of meaning in life can also result from energy healing.

Energy medicine is a broad term that includes touch therapies, movement therapies, spiritual healing, meditation, magnetic field therapy, homeopathy, acupuncture, light therapy , and other innovative methods of healing. What these various approaches have in common is an energetic understanding of health and healing. These therapies may affect the patient's internal energy, external energy (aura, or other energy fields surrounding the body) or both. Many of these therapies fall into several different categories at once and their benefits may not be exclusively due to changes in life force. Energetic touch therapies include, but are not limited to, reiki, therapeutic touch (although the physical body is not touched), watsu, polarity therapy , Ayurvedic massage, zero balancing, reflexology, Jin Shin Jyutsu, lomilomi, breema bodywork, Thai massage , shiatsu, amma, Chi Nei Tsang, Jin Shin Do, Shen, and Chinese massage , and acupressure. Energetic movement therapies include qigong, t'ai chi chuan, aikido, karate, and yoga (there are many different forms of yoga). Spiritual healing includes distance healing, laying on of hands, meditation, ceremony, ritual and other shamanic practices.