Energy medicine goes mainstream: techniques to balance your energy are among the most widely used disciplines in alternative medicine. Before taking your pick, here's what you need to know

Natural Health, Oct, 2003 by Katy Koontz

When Elena Gillespie's dog Yiannis was dying of lung cancer, she let a friend talk her into visiting an energy healer for advice. The healer told Gillespie, an emergency medical technician, to touch her dog the same way she touched her patients. Gillespie hadn't mentioned that, along with the medical procedures she administered, she would sometimes put her hands on a patient and project love and calming thoughts while they rode in the ambulance. But figuring that it couldn't hurt to follow the healer's advice, that afternoon she tried the same technique on the Tibetan mastiff's chest for about 15 minutes. Then she left for work.

"When I came home, the dog who couldn't even get off the floor earlier in the day was standing at the door, waiting for me!" she says. "I took him out and he ran around. I was stunned." When the vet took an X-ray of the dog's chest two days later, the tumor was gone. While it could have disappeared on its own, Gillespie believes Yiannis recovered as a result of her healing touch.

Gillespie's hands-on application and treatment is an example of energy medicine, which is one of the most widespread of alternative-medicine disciplines, according to Wayne B. Jonas, M.D., former director of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine, now the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Therapeutic touch and acupuncture are the most popular therapies, but others, such as homeopathy and Reiki therapy, are making inroads into the mainstream via complementary or integrative therapy centers at medical schools, hospitals and clinics throughout the country.

Once relegated to the realm of shamans and mystics, energy medicine has been deemed a form of "frontier medicine" by the NCCAM, which defines this specialty as "complementary and alternative medicine practices for which there is no plausible biomedical explanation." In the fall of 2002, the agency awarded the University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington $1.8 million each to establish frontier-medicine research centers.

Today, thanks in part to a relatively recent increase in research funding, scientists are studying how energy medicine might work on a wide range of medical problems, not only on the chronic conditions, such as back pain or headaches, that prompt most people to consider it. For instance, a report this year in the Annals of Internal Medicine noted that homeopathic remedies appear to be effective in treating influenza, an acute ailment. And researchers are investigating how therapeutic touch might boost bone metabolism, and whether a Japanese energy healing technique known as Johrei can speed recovery after surgery.

an old/new paradigm

Many techniques used to manipulate energy in the body have their foundation in ancient healing arts and stem from the Eastern belief that all humans have a life-force energy. This energy is called qi or chi by the Chinese, ki by the Japanese, and prana by Hindus. In these traditions, disease occurs when energy is out of balance, and healing is enhanced when that imbalance is corrected.

The idea of using energy to diagnose and heal isn't completely foreign to Western medicine. After all, electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms have long been used to record the electrical energy of the heart and brain, respectively. Electrical stimulation is known to suppress certain types of pain. Pulsed electromagnetic fields appear to help fractured bones heal. And sound waves have been used to pulverize kidney stones and overgrowths of bone that cause heel spurs. While these diagnostic tools and treatments make use of energy, they do so in a way that still approaches the body according to the Western paradigm--that is, as a mechanical system. Frontier medicine, however, views the body as a unified system of energy, addressing body, mind and spirit holistically.

"We are energetic beings," states C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. "Everything in the body works both electrically and chemically. We're like a living battery. And since electricity produces magnetism, the force that attracts and repels molecules, we are electromagnetic as well as electrochemical."

Proof of a human energy field may be at hand, literally, thanks to a machine invented in 1999 by Russian physicist Konstantin Korotkov. The gas-discharge visualization device passes a low-level electrical current through the fingers and photographs the electromagnetic radiation coming from them. A computer then analyzes the picture and extrapolates information about the entire body. Initial testing found that the machine could distinguish real acupressure points from sham ones. "If the GDV is found to be accurate" says Shealy, "it will be a tremendous boon to the field of energy medicine."

looking for proof

Attempts to evaluate energy medicine in the past have been mediocre, says Jonas, now the director of the Samueli Institute, a nonprofit research organization specializing in the biology of healing. One big problem: The methods traditionally used to evaluate the effectiveness of a drug or operation have not been used by energy-medicine researchers. A goal of the Samueli Institute is to define accurate and universally acceptable standards, methods and protocols for objectively evaluating this form of medicine.