Energy Medicine. C. Norman Shealy
a time when the weather bureau had reportedly forecast no rain for several days, Reich’s cloud buster was reported to have induced a 0.24 inches of rain, at least temporarily ending the drought.
Everything Is Energy
This short summary of some of the more important historical aspects reminds me of the popular aphorism, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Almost all of the techniques currently considered part of Energy Medicine have their roots in these and other foundations that date back thousands of years.
Everything is energy. Energy is all that there is. There are subtle energies that we cannot, at this time, measure, but we can sense and sometimes measure the effects of most Subtle Energy.
In summary, the major foundations of modern Energy Medicine are:
• Prana and Pranic Healing
• OD
• Ayurvedic Medicine
• Acupuncture
• Sleep Temples
• Qi Gong
• Dowsing
• Parapsychology
• Paracelsus
• The L-Field (Harold Saxton Burr)
• Orgonomy and Sexual Energy (Wilhelm Reich)
• Hypnosis
Additionally, and to be discussed next, are these important energy-related techniques and procedures:
• Homeopathy
• Radionics
• Magnetic Healing
• Spiritual Healing
• Sound Therapy
• Crystal Therapy
There are no known clinics where all of these are used in a totally integrative way. Most alternative, non-physician practitioners focus on one or two approaches. A rare holistic physician might incorporate several of these techniques. Ultimately you, the patient/client, are left to make the intuitive choice!
Following is some historical background on specifically medicinal techniques and treatments involving the energy aspects of health.
Homeopathy
Homeopathy is the “youngest” of the major fields of Energy Medicine. The topic is treated in Chapter 7 because I consider it one of the foundational energy techniques. However, we need to lay a brief foundation as it truly is, to some extent, the use of “pure energy.”
The founder of homeopathy was German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, who founded the science in 1790. His father and family had traditionally been painters and designers of porcelain for Meissen porcelain. His early studies were in languages, as he had become proficient as a writer and translator in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek and later in Aramaic Syriac, Chaldaic, and Hebrew. He studied medicine at Leipzig, Vienna, and the University of Erlangen, graduating with honors. He became a village physician, married, and fathered eleven children. Hahnemann rather vigorously attacked the conventional medicine of his day, stating that it did as much harm as good. In 1794, he returned to writing and translation, but became interested in William Cullen’s A Treatise on the Materia Medica and its treatment of the legendary South American medicinal bark called cinchona. Testing cinchona on himself, which had been used for treating malaria because of its quinine content, Hahnemann noted that the drug induced malarialike symptoms in him. He went on from there to test many substances giving test subjects adequate amounts of them to produce symptoms and then developing his famous technique of diluting them to treat the symptoms.
In 1811, Hahnemann actually moved back to Leipzig where he became a faculty member at the University of Leipzig. He continued investigating homeopathy, writing, and lecturing for the rest of his life. The basic principle of homeopathy is the Law of Similars. If a substance causes a symptom, then diluting that substance adequately can be used to treat that symptom. Techniques of the dilution, etc., will be discussed in Chapter 7. However, suffice it to say that Homeopathy certainly was safer than the medicine of its day, which consisted largely of leeching, bloodletting, and other seriously dangerous approaches. Homeopathy is widely used today, especially in Germany, and throughout much of Europe and Great Britain. In this country, it was thrown out with what I would call the infamous Flexner Report of 1910, which called on American medical schools to raise admission and graduation standards and to adhere strictly to mainstream science in their research and teaching.
Hypnosis
As with so many of the traditional approaches, hypnosis went through its own challenges in its early days. Most historians consider eighteenth-century physician Franz Anton Mesmer to be the individual who laid the foundation for modern hypnosis. (There are also discussions, without a huge amount of proof, that hypnotic states might have been used in ancient sleep temples.) Mesmer used no talking whatsoever to induce a trance-like state in his clients. Essentially, classic mesmerism was a state of significant trance in which the therapist essentially stared at the patient while making very slow movements in front of the patient or near the patient with the therapist’s hands moving slowly over the top of the head, down the shoulders and body to the hips and below. The induction process could take twenty or thirty minutes or longer. Mesmer introduced mesmerism in a most flamboyant way. Interestingly, although mesmerism was rejected by the Establishment, Benjamin Franklin felt that mesmerism was the result of “suggestion.”
Scottish-born physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnosis in 1841, some twenty-five years after Mesmer’s death, considered hypnosis to be “a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye on one object, not of an exciting nature.” I would disagree somewhat with that, as I believe that people can be hypnotized by extreme fear and extreme anxiety, as well as by various aspects of sexuality. My own definition of hypnosis is “the focus of attention on one object to the relative exclusion of all others.” In contrast to that, I consider relaxation to be the focus of one pleasurable thought to the relative exclusion of all others.
A variety of tools have been used for inducing hypnosis, including talking in a rather monotone voice, staring at some particular object, such as a lighted candle, and photostimulation with flashing lights at a relatively low frequency. Almost unlimited variations on both induction and the entire process of hypnotherapy exist. It was James Esdaile, another Scottish physician, who used the mesmeric form of induction to perform many hundreds of operations, some of them quite major, in India. Of course, Mesmer himself was ultimately discredited and ignored by his contemporaries, but Braid seems to have avoided such controversy.
Throughout the nineteenth century, many individuals experimented extensively with hypnosis, especially to do major surgical approaches. It should be noted that only about 25 percent of individuals appear to be capable of entering a hypnotic trance deep enough to allow major surgery, although essentially everyone can go into at least a light hypnotic trance. Hypnotherapy has been credited by many people as being capable of curing virtually every disease from allergies to cancer.
Radionics
In the early 1900s, Albert Abrams introduced the concept of radionics, the use of an intuitively, kinesiologically derived energy to diagnose and treat illness. Abrams created a large device with multiple dials, each having a number around the dial, and then placing something belonging to the individual on a flat, black glass plate. It could be a photograph, a bit of hair, blood, urine, etc. Abrams claimed to detect frequencies, which he considered to be out of the normal range, which could be corrected by treating with a different set of frequencies. Interestingly, the knobs behind the radionics device initially were not connected at all. There were no wires and Abrams was called a quack by no less than the