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Energy Work
Fascinating work here. Definitely needs to be more research work done.
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mike Hinkle on
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Well, with all the discussion aside then, I'm just glad Apricot feels better!!!
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Permalink Reply by Noel Norwick on
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Christopher: I suggest you look at: http://medicalmassagedvds.tripod.com/id55.html if you wish to continue to challenge Boris and his opinions.
Regarding data: Tchaikovsky's study design failed to support his conclusion re the generally claimed effects of massage. Instead, his data showed something properly trained/experienced massage practitioners already know; One shouldn't perform common massage techniques immediately after causing tissues to become significantly fatigued/irritated/inflamed! "Bad" study design results in "garbage" data.
Like Boris, I believe that Tschakovsky is either "intellectually dishonest" (with an undisclosed bias against massage), or assuming his professional competence and therefore, less likely, is willfully ignorant of proven post exercise/sports massage protocols (timing of when and for how long specific techniques should be applied). -
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Permalink Reply by Christopher A. Moyer on
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Christopher: I suggest you look at: http://medicalmassagedvds.tripod.com/id55.html if you wish to continue to challenge Boris and his opinions.
Noel -
I don't care if the person I'm challenging has ten Nobel prizes, if they don't have data.
Scientific debates are not settled on authority. -
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Permalink Reply by Boris Prilutsky on
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you wrote:As for answering your questions, I do believe I've answered the relevant ones. Ad hominems and arguments from authority do not interest me."
You didn't answer on my question. How many years you have practicing massage therapy?how many cases of difficult neorological cases you have treated?
I asked you why you think that Tchaikovsky was intellectually honest scientist based on his New York Times interview statements?
you stated in discussion some think like:" results in anatomical and degenerative conditions"
I asked you what does it mean anatomical conditions?
I do not know your skills in massage therapy, but political skills you do have not to answer questions, and to try to make impression that you did answer. Please answer the questions, otherwise do not communicate with no one on massage.
you not only not superior to no one in knowledge of science of massage, you are below minimum standards. Otherwise you would know that degenerative changes is not reversible conditions.again please answer my questions.my questions had nothing to do as you stated:"Ad hominems and arguments from authority do not interest me." -
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Boris, I fail to see why you would want to waste your time discussing massage research with someone who is so obviously below minimum standards on the science of massage.
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Permalink Reply by Darcy Neibaur on
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Here we go again. It happens every time there is a discussion on Energy. It makes me so mad. They just missed the whole comment and topic for discussion.
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My goodness Marilyn.
How could I miss your post?really regret that did so.in my opinion your post is a beautiful summary of all this arguments with Christopher.If I wouldn't missed it probably would save some time because when clinical outcome is obvious who cares how academic world see it .I also represent academic world and all protocols that I am implementing are developed through research and most important, clinically proven as effective and safe protocols.
science of biology as well as massage cannot explain all but in no case rejecting energy work.
Best wishes.
Boris -
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Permalink Reply by Kris Stecker on
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As a technologist and engineer, the question of energy work being obvious is interesting. Coming into the field after working on micro technology for decades and being steeped in physics made me very skeptical. However, life experiences have a way of introducing new data that give the opportunity to learn more.
Many things only become obvious after they exist or have been adequately proven. (The earth was the center of the universe and the earth was flat springs to mind. The understanding of electricity, DNA and so many other things are also the result of people experiencing new learning. The history of healing is full of models and beliefs that we are amazed at today. They were all based on the science of the time. What would doctors 1000 years ago have said about having the ability to look into the body with an MRI or of the existence of DNA?)
Your thinking is the product of a system that believes that something is only real if it can be measured. It does not take into consideration that there are forces and phenomenon that are too subtle to be measured so therefore in your reality, they don't exist.
Understanding the human energy system is the first step to understanding why we are picking up information that cannot be measured. The energy doesn't come from the body, the body comes from the energy. It steps down into the physical form. Molecules are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles that are made of...energy. Matter comes from energy and retuns to energy. Study string theory and quantum physics and you begin to understand that nothing is as it appears.
Once you start to understand that we, along with everything else in our world, is energy having a material moment, or a string of moments that create the illusion of existence, you begin to understand that it's possible to perceive your world as an energetic being having a physical experience. But it's only when you reach a certain level of sensitivity that you begin to experience yourself as an energetic being. Once you do, you also start to discover that it's through your energy system that you can perceive things of a more subtle nature than can be experienced or measured by the current technology.
Once you have experienced yourself as an energy being, your perception of many things can change. At that point "energy" becomes obvious. Of course, there are many people who can't understand what is happening or have belief systems that are threatened by this knowledge and they can choose to block out the awareness and forget what they experienced. But for others, it becomes a very real and permanent part of their lives.
But back to the subject of whether this is real. Again, we still don't have the technology to measure it, so does that make it false, or just not able to be measured by the low technological ability of the "scientific" belief system (religion)? After all, isn't a core belief of the "scientific religion" that if it can't be measured it can't be real? Isn't that a pretty silly notion when you think about it?
In time this may change. When you look at the evolution of computing and the effects it has on research and development, and how that comes back to increase the advances even more, it gives an idea of how far we still have to go in our understanding. Recent breakthroughs are moving us closer to computing with light instead of electricity. What will this accomplish? Who knows?
So why is it that people don't have a consistent experience of energy that allows us to create a well articulated model?
The challenge is that since we are all different (no two people have identical perception because there are far too many variables that affect how we perceive), we all experience energy differently. There are similarities but at this point in time, there is no technology that is sufficiently refined to detect and use the information. (Technology can't even harness the information from nerve endings to interface with prosthetics, how is it ever going to measure and interpret information from the energy system.)
I can see that you have dedicated your attention to challenging the existence of energy. That is your choice and on some level it's part of the dynamic that is always healthy in the development in a new body of information. I guess on one level I feel sorry for you because I remember my pre-awareness days and know how much richer my life is now as a result of being more aware. But on another level I understand this is just where you need to be at this point and you serve an important role in the development of the field.
The one thing I'm pretty sure of is this. The great discoveries are never accomplished by the skeptics. They come from the dreamers and imagineers.
I wish you good health and prosperity with your life.
Respectfully,
Kris
Christopher A. Moyer said:Boris -
Thanks for your response. I agree that it's a terrific video, and I appreciate that you recognize there are definitely limitations to what we can conclude from the video ("we cannot come to conclusions...").
I couldn't disagree more strongly with the assertion that "energy work is obvious." It is not at all obvious, for myriad scientific reasons.
Regardless of the fact that we disagree on this, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance. -
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I thought this thread was dead.
Your reply is a thoughtful one, Kris, which I appreciate. And, you are entitled to your opinion, where matters of opinion are discussed. But there are also some facts about which you are mistaken; I hope you won't mind too much if I point them out.
As a technologist and engineer, the question of energy work being obvious is interesting. Coming into the field after working on micro technology for decades and being steeped in physics made me very skeptical. However, life experiences have a way of introducing new data that give the opportunity to learn more.
Life experiences aren't "data" in the way scientists use that term. They can't be used to support the existence of biofield energy. It would be possible to use people as tools for detection in a controlled experiment (see comment below about technology), but few believers are willing to be tested.
Many things only become obvious after they exist or have been adequately proven. (The earth was the center of the universe and the earth was flat springs to mind. The understanding of electricity, DNA and so many other things are also the result of people experiencing new learning. The history of healing is full of models and beliefs that we are amazed at today. They were all based on the science of the time.
You're right. But it also true that dozens or even hundreds more models have been discarded because the highest quality data fails to support them or actually refutes them. Just one example - it wasn't all that long ago that the best scientists were certain that phlogiston had to exist, but today most people have never even heard of this.
What would doctors 1000 years ago have said about having the ability to look into the body with an MRI or of the existence of DNA?)
They would be amazed and dumbfounded, no doubt. But it's also true that doctors of 100 or 200 years ago, who would also be amazed at the technology, would not be so amazed at the possibility that had been realized, just as we can make some reasonable predictions about what might be possible with technology in 100 or 200 more years.
Your thinking is the product of a system that believes that something is only real if it can be measured.
Not exactly. My thinking is that anything that is real is potentially capable of being measured. If something is posited to exist, the way we confirm if it exists is to make an observation, and a measurement is just a specific kind of observation. Note that an observation does not have to be a first-person account made with the naked eye. The particles that modern-day physics is concerned with can only be measured by their effects, which is sufficient. Psychological concepts can be validated, or refuted, based on their having their effects consistently measured (e.g., no one has ever held "anxiety" in their hand, but it makes sense to speak of anxiety as something that exists because it can be meaningfully defined and shown to have certain consistent effects across a range of people and situations - it's not tangible, but it is real).
It does not take into consideration that there are forces and phenomenon that are too subtle to be measured so therefore in your reality, they don't exist.
This doesn't make sense. You are simultaneously saying that this biofield energy has a detectable effect - that if you apply it or direct it therapeutically, it does something - and that it is so subtle it is undetectable. It can't be both ways. There either is an effect, even a subtle effect, that can be detected, or there isn't.
Understanding the human energy system is the first step to understanding why we are picking up information that cannot be measured. The energy doesn't come from the body, the body comes from the energy. It steps down into the physical form. Molecules are made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles that are made of...energy.
This is just mumbo-jumbo.
Matter comes from energy and retuns to energy. Study string theory and quantum physics and you begin to understand that nothing is as it appears.
As is this. String theory (which isn't even widely agreed upon by physicists) and quantum physics have nothing at all to do with any of this. Invoking these is just hand waving and obfuscation.
Once you start to understand that we, along with everything else in our world, is energy having a material moment, or a string of moments that create the illusion of existence, you begin to understand that it's possible to perceive your world as an energetic being having a physical experience. But it's only when you reach a certain level of sensitivity that you begin to experience yourself as an energetic being.
How do you know you're not wrong?
How can you be sure that your prior viewpoint wasn't the correct one?
Once you do, you also start to discover that it's through your energy system that you can perceive things of a more subtle nature than can be experienced or measured by the current technology.
No technology is needed to conduct an experiment capable of putting this nonsense to rest. All that is necessary is to create conditions in which alternate explanations for the perception of an energy effect are controlled. Here is one example:
If you are an energy worker, I would assume that you believe you can detect a human energy field, correct? In any case, some people claim that they can do this, and that what they are detecting cannot be measured by any available technologies. If all that is true, we should be able to have the person reliably detect whether a living human body is in close proximity to them. To ensure that they are not doing what any of us could do - seeing the person, hearing the person, perhaps even feeling the radiant heat of their body - we would need to take some experimental precautions. We could blindfold them, have them wear earplugs, maybe arrange for some mannequins that can also give off the same radiant heat as a real human body - and see if the person can reliably tell the difference between guiding their hands over real human bodies versus mannequins. Could they do it? Many other variations are possible.
Essentially, believers in energy medicine are claiming to be detectors of biofield energy. We don't need technology, we can test the reliability of the human detectors. Every such test I have ever seen has failed.
Once you have experienced yourself as an energy being, your perception of many things can change. At that point "energy" becomes obvious. Of course, there are many people who can't understand what is happening or have belief systems that are threatened by this knowledge and they can choose to block out the awareness and forget what they experienced. But for others, it becomes a very real and permanent part of their lives.
But people are mistaken about all kinds of things, everyday.
But back to the subject of whether this is real. Again, we still don't have the technology to measure it, so does that make it false, or just not able to be measured by the low technological ability of the "scientific" belief system (religion)?
It's naive to think that science is a belief system. Belief systems tend to be reliant on authority, revelation, and tradition for determining what they hold to be true. That's not how science works. In science, evidence trumps all. Every single idea or theory is on the chopping block, waiting to be destroyed, if counter evidence is unearthed. Some theories get replaced (e.g., phlogiston) because they are wrong. Others are so well supported by evidence that they survive for ages, only needing slight adjustment of their details to continue to be congruent with the evidence (e.g., gravity, evolution).
We don't believe in evolution because Darwin said it's right. We continue to believe in it because it is consistent with 99.99% of the evidence that anyone has ever uncovered (and 99.99% might be an underestimate).
After all, isn't a core belief of the "scientific religion" that if it can't be measured it can't be real? Isn't that a pretty silly notion when you think about it?
I agree. That's a very silly notion. That's why sensible people, including scientists, don't believe it. However, plenty of sensible people, and almost all scientists, do believe that all things which exist are potentially able to be measured, at least in principle.
In time this may change. When you look at the evolution of computing and the effects it has on research and development, and how that comes back to increase the advances even more, it gives an idea of how far we still have to go in our understanding. Recent breakthroughs are moving us closer to computing with light instead of electricity. What will this accomplish? Who knows?
And what does it have to do with biofield energy? Nothing.
So why is it that people don't have a consistent experience of energy that allows us to create a well articulated model?
Because biofield energy doesn't exist. That's my bet.
The challenge is that since we are all different (no two people have identical perception because there are far too many variables that affect how we perceive)
This is a difficulty that has been successfully dealt with many, many times in several fields. No two people react exactly the same way to any medical procedure, and yet we have medicine and medical science. No two people have exactly the same understanding of the definition of words, and yet we have language. No two people perceive pain in exactly the same way, and yet we have decades of progressive science on the phenomenon of pain. I could go on all day. It's not necessary for there to be identical experiences to meaningfully substantiate and study a perceptual phenomenon.
, we all experience energy differently. There are similarities but at this point in time, there is no technology that is sufficiently refined to detect and use the information. (Technology can't even harness the information from nerve endings to interface with prosthetics, how is it ever going to measure and interpret information from the energy system.)
I can see that you have dedicated your attention to challenging the existence of energy.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's something that pops up now and then. I would say I am dedicated to increasing our scientific understanding of massage therapy and some related practices.
That is your choice and on some level it's part of the dynamic that is always healthy in the development in a new body of information. I guess on one level I feel sorry for you because I remember my pre-awareness days and know how much richer my life is now as a result of being more aware. But on another level I understand this is just where you need to be at this point and you serve an important role in the development of the field.
The one thing I'm pretty sure of is this. The great discoveries are never accomplished by the skeptics.
Why are you pretty sure of that? Isn't it true, in fact, that most of the scientific discoveries that have ever been made have come from skeptical thinkers? I don't know of a single scientist, and I'm probably acquainted with several hundred, who do not rely on skepticism as a mode of thinking and reasoning. At the same time, many of those people are as creative as anyone you will ever meet. Making discoveries about the world requires a combination of things. One has to have knowledge about what is already known. One must also have a sense of what isn't known, and what aspects of current theories might be incorrect. These viewpoints are not incompatible, but they are totally different from the childish notion that "anything is possible." There are plenty of things that aren't possible, but even with this being the case, there are still so many interesting possibilities that studying nature never, ever gets boring. -
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Permalink Reply by Marilyn St.John on
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Well, so much for allowing intuition factor into what we do as massage therapists and energy workers! There are so many professionals in music, health care, and even alternative energy solutions, who are going to be really disappointed to learn that the way they go about their work is thought of as childish ~ but results do come, so I'm sure many won't mind.
I realize the scientific community is partly committed to finding flaws, which is a good thing. Where I come from, however, it's best to look at what could be possible rather than to first assume something is not and then see if it can be made so. As a child, my father used to say, if someone is snooping around to find something bad, they'll always find it...and the same applies for looking for something good. It's not a terribly scientific approach but I have found its truth to be repeatable.
Assumptions have a pesky way of screwing people up, across the board. So why would anybody enter into any endeavor with that intention? There are people who are studying the power of intention from a scientific perspective. I'm interested in anybody's thoughts on their work since it can weigh so heavily into what we do as bodyworkers. A few such as Schwartz, McTaggert, Hunt, Hawkins-- all scientists, some of whom were once skeptical--come to mind. -
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Marlilyn: You might look at my exchange with Christopher on August 15th re the Tchaikovsky article in the NY Times. I noted that Christopher purposefully failed to comment re my pointing out the the poor study design (possibly motivated by a desire to deny efficacy of massage). Additionally, you should read Boris's article in response to the Tchaikovsky article at: http://www.scienceofmassage.com/dnn/som/journal/1009/sports.aspx.
Marilyn St.John said:Well, so much for allowing intuition factor into what we do as massage therapists and energy workers! There are so many professionals in music, health care, and even alternative energy solutions, who are going to be really disappointed to learn that the way they go about their work is thought of as childish ~ but results do come, so I'm sure many won't mind.
I realize the scientific community is partly committed to finding flaws, which is a good thing. Where I come from, however, it's best to look at what could be possible rather than to first assume something is not and then see if it can be made so. As a child, my father used to say, if someone is snooping around to find something bad, they'll always find it...and the same applies for looking for something good. It's not a terribly scientific approach but I have found its truth to be repeatable.
Assumptions have a pesky way of screwing people up, across the board. So why would anybody enter into any endeavor with that intention? There are people who are studying the power of intention from a scientific perspective. I'm interested in anybody's thoughts on their work since it can weigh so heavily into what we do as bodyworkers. A few such as Schwartz, McTaggert, Hunt, Hawkins-- all scientists, some of whom were once skeptical--come to mind. -
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Hi Marilyn.
It is customary in science to doubt the existence of anything that isn't yet proven. That's been a very useful way to work on many problems, and so we continue to use it.
But you raise an interesting possibility - that doesn't have to be the only way to do things, and it could possibly cause one to 'miss' things that actually exist. Generally, scientists have seen that type of error - a miss - as less egregious than the other type of error, a 'false hit.'
But you're right that it's not impossible to approach something with the assumption that it does exist. Note, however, that this will lead to an increased probability of 'false hit' type of errors.
The problem with assuming that energy work exists is that there are too many other well-understood mechanisms to explain the observed effects.
As for intuition, it is in some cases an interesting phenomenon and worthy of study. Science isn't antithetical to intuition.
-CM
Marilyn St.John said:Well, so much for allowing intuition factor into what we do as massage therapists and energy workers! There are so many professionals in music, health care, and even alternative energy solutions, who are going to be really disappointed to learn that the way they go about their work is thought of as childish ~ but results do come, so I'm sure many won't mind.
I realize the scientific community is partly committed to finding flaws, which is a good thing. Where I come from, however, it's best to look at what could be possible rather than to first assume something is not and then see if it can be made so. As a child, my father used to say, if someone is snooping around to find something bad, they'll always find it...and the same applies for looking for something good. It's not a terribly scientific approach but I have found its truth to be repeatable.
Assumptions have a pesky way of screwing people up, across the board. So why would anybody enter into any endeavor with that intention? There are people who are studying the power of intention from a scientific perspective. I'm interested in anybody's thoughts on their work since it can weigh so heavily into what we do as bodyworkers. A few such as Schwartz, McTaggert, Hunt, Hawkins-- all scientists, some of whom were once skeptical--come to mind. -
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