The History of Energy Transference: Exploring the Foundations of Modern Healing

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Some black and white photos. Numerous spiritual traditions describe modes and pathways of energy within and surrounding the physical body Jain et al, , this issue. Moreover, Western biomedicine routinely examines electrical fields from the heart via electrocardiogram [ECG] and brain via electroencephalogram [EEG] as indices of clinical pathology. Furthermore, contemporary cell biology and biophysics provide evidence that endogenous electromagnetic and other types of fields play active roles in development, tissue repair, and an array of homeodynamic processes.

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The term biofield fills the need for a unifying concept to bridge traditional and contemporary explanatory models of energy medicine and provides a common language for aspects of both clinical practice and scientific research that focus on energy fields of the body. This paper summarizes the recent origins of the biofield concept and describes the levels of scale for which the term has been applied, from biophotons and cell membranes to whole organisms to Gaia and the Tao. Working definitions of biofield and related terms are offered with the proviso that such descriptions are and should be based in the cultural and scientific vantage points of the observers and may not always be completely comparable.

Most of the latter group of healing modalities were founded on a concept of a vital force, although each has its own explanatory model and terminology that reflect a particular cultural context. The committee sought to bring unity to the diversity of energetic practices by creating a term that would be amenable to the scientific and broader healthcare communities.

Such a term was also needed to describe a central organizing biological field that healers were detecting and interacting with in their practice. The term biofield was coined for these purposes with the hope that it would be generic and malleable enough to fit differing explanatory models of therapy. Further, the committee sought to consolidate the diverse modes of energetic healing under the single term biofield therapies , which was also accepted by the NIH.

An additional realization was that both diagnostics and therapeutics may be involved in these biofield modalities. Subsequently, a round of frontier medicine research grants in biofield science was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the successor to the OAM. Thus, energy healing that was performed locally by healers directly on patients, which had been termed biofield therapy, was separated from distant healing due to this initial categorization.

A rationale for this separation between local and distant healing was that they may operate by different modes of action. Whereas local or proximal energy healing might involve electromagnetic fields EMFs that diminish over distance by an inverse square law, the same fields are unlikely to be involved in healing across large distances. However, local and distant healing are commonly performed by the same practitioner, such as in Reiki, which poses a conundrum.

Since antiquity, there have been 2 opposing views on the nature of life. Democritus, who coined the word atom , maintained that everything, including organisms, is reducible to its constituents, while Aristotle held that life processes are autonomous and organisms are integral wholes. These 2 viewpoints remain today, with the biochemical view of life represented by molecular reductionism and a holistic view that embraces a field concept of life.

In vitalism, living matter was believed to involve a life force: This force was initially considered immeasurable and outside the scope of science. Yet discoveries of bioelectricity challenged the notion that this force was immeasurable. By , experimental electrophysiology had replaced the notion of vital force with electricity, effectively banishing vitalism from biological science. Nevertheless, many contemporary CAM practitioners continue to use terms from non-Western explanatory models and medical systems to evoke a vital force or vital energy.

For example, there is qi chi in Chinese medicine, ki in Japanese medicine, prana in Ayurveda, and similar terms in other traditions of indigenous medicine. These descriptions of life energy originated from metaphysical considerations of the nature of consciousness and its interaction with mental, emotional, and physical systems Jain et al, , this issue and were based on first-person observations by adept spiritual practitioners.

In the modern age, the notion of a universal life energy is nearly ubiquitously employed by energy healing practitioners, who often describe energy coming from their hands and other parts of the body. These same practitioners report utilizing energy awareness not only to sense imbalances in patients' energy fields but to regulate energy flow and release energy blockages perceived to be impeding the healing process.

Most traditional healing practices maintain that disease starts with an energetic imbalance such as a blockage or other irregularity in the energy flow through the body. Modern CAM systems such as chiropractic, 8 homeopathy, 9 and classical osteopathy 10 are also founded on principles of a vital force. Therapeutics in these practices involves restoring or rebalancing the vital force to promote healing. The scientific concept of force, however, is very much in the physical realm, whereas the vital force at the basis of many CAM therapies is considered by mainstream science to be a metaphysical concept.

Force, as well as field and energy, are fundamentals of physical theory. Force refers to any interaction that tends to change the motion of an object. The concept of a field from physics refers to a spatially distributed nonmaterial element that is able to impart a force upon an object within it. Therefore, a field cannot be detected directly but only through its action upon a suitable probe—for example, a charge in an electric field.

Contemporary physics holds that there are only 4 types of force operating throughout nature: A particular form of energy defined in physics as the ability to do work: The concept of the biofield as proposed herein is firmly grounded in science, although other putative fields, as yet unknown to science, may also be involved.

The concept of a biological field first arose in embryology as an underlying informational template to explain the developmental process. The Ukranian histologist Alexander Gurwitsch, PhD, coined the term morphogenetic field to describe the highly coherent and dynamic process that appeared to be guiding development of the unfolding embryo as well as biological regeneration. Gurwitsch also discovered mitogenetic radiation, ultraviolet light emission during cell division in onion roots.

One line of research on endogenous biofields followed from the early discovery by Gurwitsch, as mentioned above, of ultraviolet light emission during cell division. Recent studies have reported evidence for a variety of biophoton-mediated regulatory processes, including cell-cell communication, cell-cell orientation sensing, secretion of regulatory neurotransmitters, modulation of respiratory activity in white blood cells, and accelerated seed germination.

More generally, a wide variety of bioelectromagnetic activities has been identified, often associated with interaction energies substantially below that of thermal noise, which produce clinically significant effects, including enhancement of growth, wound repair, regeneration, and the reduction of pain and inflammation.

For example, regenerative healing of whole limbs in animals such as salamanders has been shown to involve EMFs, 19 and limb regeneration in higher animals has also been stimulated by means of externally applied EMFs. The biofield, or information associated with it stemming from multicellular electrical activity, is also the basis of a decades-old clinical tool most commonly in the form of the ECG the detector of electrical wave forms generated by synchronous activity of heart muscle cells and EEG the detector of wave forms reflecting summative spontaneous or evoked electrical activity of neuronal arrays.

While the ECG and EEG are readily detected from the body surface, the heart's magnetic field, generated by moving electric charges associated with electrical activity, can be recorded up to several feet from the body surface via a magnetocardiogram.

At the interpersonal level, the biofield concept encompasses a large body of research on the effects of biofield therapies, as practiced both locally with the practitioner in the same room as the patient Jain et al, , this issue , animals, or cell cultures Gronowicz et al, , this issue , and nonlocally, which includes distant mental interaction with living systems, as well as intercessory prayer and distant healing Radin et al, , this issue.

However, recent reviews examining nontouch biofield therapies also report significant changes in outcome measures, suggesting that effects of biofield therapies on outcomes may not be ascribed only to effects of physical touch, 27 , 28 and an explanation in terms of quantum entanglement or other nonlocal causes may be needed. Biofield interactions also extend from molecular to planetary levels. Such properties, however, do not explain how molecular partners attain proximity to each other; the necessary preludes to docking are unlikely to occur via simple diffusion and Brownian motion.

At the planetary level, there is increasing evidence that the biofield concept can include effects of geocosmic fields on human health and behavior: Some of these modalities involve novel ways of obtaining useful information from the body's energy field as well as applying energy fields therapeutically. In addition, the underlying principles of biological organization, including embryonic development and the coordinated maintenance of biological structure and function, are beginning to be better understood, with evidence suggesting that field-like phenomena underlie many of these processes as described earlier.

Field effects have also been invoked as explanations of a large body of research on human intention effects and nonlocality. Concepts of sentience, mind, and consciousness have also evolved from the mechanistic approach of biochemical neuroscience to a field-oriented approach. The application of quantum theory to these concepts has led to several proposals of the body-mind as a macroscopic quantum system. As a regulator and mediator of biological interactions, the biofield appears intimately connected with information delivery within the organism.

The biofield thus holds and conveys information that is vital for biocommunication and bioregulation. Here it must be said that the concept of information in biology is nothing new; it is already used successfully to explain numerous molecular mechanisms in molecular biology, such as information encoded in DNA, hormone-receptor interactions, enzyme-substrate interactions, and many other forms of molecular recognition, as well as in ECG and EEG data. Further, many of these well-understood mechanisms may also be thought of as biofield interactions because information itself is often an emergent property of dynamical interactions that cannot be meaningfully understood from a reductionist viewpoint.

At the cellular and subcellular levels, oscillatory behaviors emerge from negative feedback loops and coupled positive and negative feedback loops 61 and result from stochastic, nonlinear biological mechanisms interacting with the fluctuating environment. The concept of biofield regulation offers a shift from a mechanical, chemistry-based view of biology to an information-based view.

Unlike machines, living organisms have an immense network of internal and external interconnections across which information flows to modulate life functions. The continuous exchange of information in living systems to maintain their integrity is astounding. Furthermore, new relationships along with new information exchanges emerge at higher levels of organization in life, forming new wholes.

The biofield may be considered one such multilevel organizational concept in which information flows within and between the various levels of the organism. The biofield may be considered to be the language of life. Biofield information can manifest beyond mechanistic concepts; bioelectromagnetic medicine presents another example of the informational aspect of biofield interactions. In addition to the above-mentioned weak EMF effects, a large body of literature has demonstrated the existence of nonthermal EMF resonance interactions.

Furthermore, other elements of the biofield may carry information important for medical diagnostics, beyond the EEG and ECG, that provide useful medical information and suggest new modes of treatment via informational medicine. Indeed, information offers a unifying concept in the modus operandi of CAM and integrative medical modalities.

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Archived from the original on February 9, Berens; Christine Willmsen January 30, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Retrieved October 19, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine. Its Biophysical Basis and Role in Medicine". Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies.

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A Review and Commentary". Complementary Therapies in Medicine. The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Retrieved November 27, Die Bioresonanztherapie geht auf eine angebliche Entdeckung des im Jahr verstorbenen Frankfurter Arztes und hochrangigen Scientologen Dr. Bioresonance therapy dates from the alleged discovery made by the Frankfurt doctor and high-rank Scientologist Dr Franz Morell, who died in Retrieved August 10, J Investig Allergol Clin Immunol.

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Archived from the original PDF on May 12, Int Arch Allergy Immunol. There is no reliable scientific evidence that bioresonance is an accurate indicator of medical conditions or disease or an effective treatment for any condition. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Bourgeois pseudoscience Suppressed research in the Soviet Union Traditional medicine. List of topics characterized as pseudoscience.

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