An analysis of pranic (energy) healing

I hope that if I connect the dots and show my work about analyzing energy healing, that this will be more constructive than just bickering about "does so!" "does not!" "does so!" "does not!"

 

In my experience, explanations of how energy healing is supposed to work tend to fall into 3 main traps--dodging the questions of exactly how they work, moving the goalposts, and attacking the questioner. I will give Dr. Jones credit in the following videos for not attacking the questioner, but there are plenty of other logical and methodological traps he falls into.

 

If you can show me the work of an energy practitioner that avoids these traps, I promise to take a serious look at it. I am not going to waste my time going through the same errors over and over, but if there is solid work out there that avoids these errors I explain below, I promise to examine the evidence with an open mind.

 

I was asked by someone to evaluate these videos; this is the work I delivered in response to that request. I hope going through the process is more constructive than most discussions about science and energy tend to be around here.

 

 

 

RT: So first, I did a little research on him, just to locate him in the web of science. This might look superficially like either an argument from authority or an argument ad hominem, but I'm not arguing that we should accept or reject his arguments just on his credentials or lack of them. I want to see what kind of work he has done, so that I can evaluate whether he's basing his present arguments on solid work, or whether he might have missed something crucial. He's got a PhD in physics from Brown, and he was at UC-Irvine, but no longer is--he's consulting now. According to NIHReporter, he had one NIH grant as PI in 1990, for work on an acoustical microscope. He had no NIH grants to work on pranic healing, although someone else has, so they will consider that in a proposal. There's one PubMed publication that's definitely him, on the acoustical microscope. It's such a common name that it's hard to tell if any other JP Jones articles in PubMed are him, but there are no pubs on prana or pranic by Jones. There are 5 PubMed articles on pranic by other authors.

RT: It's a very sparse record for a research professor in a medical school, but like I said, I'll evaluate this presentation on the strength of his arguments. I expect his science to be sound, and I will point out where I think it isn't. Presentation: Pranic Healing and Cells, Joie P. Jones

RT: He starts out saying in the Introduction that he's going to talk about "Our experiments over the last decade"--why then, no results in PubMed? This is a decent-sized study; why doesn't he share the results of over a decade of work with his colleagues? Did he not try, or did he try and his papers got rejected? If so, on what basis?

00:12 Pranic Healing slide: explanation of what PH is--it is a "biofield therapy" established in China thousands of years ago

RT: What does "biofield therapy" mean? What is the establishment and validation of the concept of a biofield?

RT: if this therapy was established in China thousands of years ago, why does it have a Sanskrit name? If we are talking about things that developed in two different cultures, are we sure that we are talking about the same thing, or are we glossing over important cultural differences to lump them together?

RT: if, as he later says, anyone can do this with less than an hour's training, why did it have to get lost and found ("reformulated") multiple times over centuries?

RT: The claim that it's thousands of years old is consistent with the development of Chinese writing during the Shang dynasty ~1700 BC; I would, however, like to see the evidence that it was actually recorded in those terms, rather than some vague reference that he's reading his own meaning into. He says: "It's actually a type of what I'll call 'Subtle Energy', and here, I'm using the term "Subtle Energy" more in a metaphorical way for basically, something that we really don't fully understand."

RT: However, he is presenting the results and mechanisms as reality, not as metaphors. The job of research is to establish those mechanisms so that we understand them, not to say "we don't understand it, so therefore, it's reality". His interpretation is getting way ahead of his results here, even if they actually are what he says they are.

00:46 Basis for PH slide: "This is the basis for PH as described by a pranic healer, certainly not a scientist, and in fact there are many terms here that many of us in the scientific community would have a few problems with. But in any case, let me describe how a pranic healer would describe the basis for pranic healing. It turns out that some sensitive people..."

* Some sensitive people perceive "energy fields" as "auras" of color surrounding the body (Clairvoyance)

* Colors in the "aura" and the "energy centers" or "chakras" shift constantly reflecting the state of the body (health and illness)

* Projecting "energy" of appropriate "colors" can change the colors of the "aura" and therefore the state of health

RT: He says: "Now, how does a pranic healer actually go about their work?"

RT: Yes, he is correct that many in the scientific community would have a few problems with many of those terms. So then he proceeds not to address those problems and to show his work on how he solves them. This is not a convincing argument. If he had laid out those problems and addressed how he thought they had solved them, we could at least debate his interpretation. But he didn't even do that; he just said these terms are a problem, so let's take the point of view of a pranic healer and ignore those problems entirely. This is where he needed to connect the dots to create a foundation for his later interpretations.

01:49 PH process slide

* Give blessings and recognition to masters and teachers that have provided guidance

* ("they actually") Scan the energy or the aura of the subject to diagnose any abnormalities

* Clean and energize the body, the chakras, and the aura of the subject with prana of appropriate colors to promote healing and balance

RT: He asks: "Well, how can we actually evaluate this process to really see if in fact it is working as prescribed?"

RT: I agree that this is the important question, especially as he has not done the work of connecting the dots to show that auras and chakras exist. He has not dealt with the problems he referred to previously; he just changed points of view and speaking from the point of view of the pranic healer, he is assuming what he claims, as a scientist, to prove. He uses the words "they actually scan the energy or the aura of the subject to diagnose any abnormalities". Yet he doesn't explain how, if they are doing this over the telephone from 6000 miles away, then they get around the well-established principle of the inverse-square law (energy gets more spread-out and "diluted" over distance at a rate of the inverse square of how far away it is. So light at 2 feet away is 1/4 (1/2-squared) as intense to the viewer as it is at 1 foot away (1/1-squared), and at 3 feet away, it is 1/9 (1/3-squared) as intense as the same light was at 1 foot away. At 6000 miles away, at 5280 feet/mile, then the energy is (1/1003622400000000) as intense as it is at 1 foot away. He doesn't explain how energy that weak can be detected at that distance.

RT: If his claim is to hold up under scrutiny, then one of the two following things has to be true; they are the only choices. Either they are working with energy so tiny as to be undetectable, so how can they detect it? Or it is detectable, and they are violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. If they can transcend the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, however, then they need to solve our energy crisis immediately, because the need is so great.

RT: The only other alternative is that the claims just don't hold up under the physical laws of the natural world.

RT: If he is just going to breeze past major issues like this, then he is not connecting the dots for the audience to understand how he solves this and similar problems.

02:30 Objectives slide

* Critically evaluate Pranic Healing in a laboratory setting

RT: Not on the slide, but in his speech, he added, "where we had much better controls of the variables involved". I agree with him 100% on this point. If he is testing this in a controlled laboratory setting, the environment is much more controlled, and there are fewer other factors to confuse (confound) the issue. If he is going to make the argument for applying this to living human beings in all their complexity, he first has to show he can reliably repeat this in a simplified setting--otherwise, it has no chance of succeeding in the harder, more complicated situation.

RT: So the point that he did the study in a laboratory setting to better control the variables is an important point that we will continue to refer to.

* Specifically: investigate possible mediation effects of Pranic Healing on HeLa cells ("human cell line") in culture subjected to gamma radiation

RT: Some definitions, so that we're all on the same page in evaluating this study:

1. mediation effects: not a direct cause and effect relationship, but rather an indirect influence on the effect. In this case, it seems that the treatment is gamma radiation, the effect is cell death, and the mediation effect is cell survival. In this study, he seems to be working under the assumption that any cell survival in a treated group is a mediated effect of pranic healing; he does not explain how he ruled out any other possible reason a cell could survive.

2. HeLa cells: a line of immortal cervical cancer cells taken from an African-American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died of this cancer in 1951. These cells are remarkably durable and prolific, even compared to other cancer cells. They grow so aggressively that they have contaminated other cell lines in many other experiments. Jones did not address what steps, if any, he took to make sure that his experimental groups were not contaminated by other HeLa cells, nor how they established the rates of cell death. Were there any ambiguous cases? Is the normal criterion sufficient for cells as aggressive (technically, under the right circumstances, immortal) as HeLa cells, or could they have missed some?

RT: If he wanted to make sure that scientists would not have a problem with the methods in his study, he should have addressed these issues. 3. While gamma rays are technically different from X-ray radiation, thinking of them as very similar to X-rays will be sufficient for the purposes of this discussion. 02:53 Experimental model used to evaluate PH slide

* HeLa cells in culture subjected to gamma radiation

* Measure radiation survival rates with and without Pranic Healing

* Laboratory model is well established and well characterized

03:27 A single experiment slide

* 10 near ("basically") identical petri dishes with HeLa cells in culture

* A1, A2: controls

* B1, B2: radiation only

* C1, C2: PH after radiation

* D1, D2: PH before radiation

* E1, E2: PH before and after radiation

RT: I would be curious to know what he means by "near identical" and "basically identical. It probably doesn't matter, but since he qualifies it in that way twice, then I am curious.

04:13 First study (1997) slide

* 25 single experiments using 3 different Pranic Healers

* Only 2 out of 25 experiments were successful (8%)

RT: He states that he thinks the results are "rather interesting"--why didn't they publish them? Or did they try to and get rejected?

* Apparent problem: experiments conducted in "unconditioned" or "dirty" space "I was ready to turn it in and say well, this doesn't work; let's move on to something else. But I was still kind of curious as to why two of them did work. Talking with the pranic healers, they all came back with the response that, 'Well, you know, you're working in--we're working in a dirty lab.' And I said 'Dirty lab? Two guys clean it every week. I mean, what is the problem here?' And they said, 'No, no, no, you don't understand. Your lab is etherically dirty. We find that the lab is very dirty when we go in and work there, and we would really prefer to work in a clean lab.'. And so my response is, 'well, if you want a clean lab, let's make a clean lab.' So the pranic healers then applied the PH techniques that they would apply to the cells in culture to the lab itself, to clean the lab and make it more suitable for doing experiments. So the apparent problem was experiments were conducted in a(n) unconditioned or dirty laboratory space, and we'll come to refer to this a bit later as an unconditioned lab space that now we want to condition."

RT: The "ether" is a new construct, introduced just now. So why didn't they raise this objection beforehand?

RT: Is this the same ether theory that was displaced by Einstein's Special Relativity? Whether it is or it isn't, it is not sufficiently explained. If it is the disproven ether, why have they brought it back against the evidence? If it is a different ether, then what evidence do they have for it?

RT: If, as he states later, distance and shielding don't matter, then why did they have to do this as a separate process? Why wasn't it a side effect of the previous process? "The pranic healers worked on this lab daily for a period of about 4 months and after this 4-month time period, the healers felt that the lab was clean enough that they felt they could do a series of experiments. So we tried the experiments again. Instead of 25 experiments, we decided to do 50 single experiments."

RT: If it takes 4 months to cleanse a very controlled space, how does this translate in a practical way into preparing a much more complex real-life patient for healing?

RT: Also, I think there is a bias in how he talks about "success" and "failure". He uses "successful treatment" and "successful experiment" interchangeably. It sounds like he's too attached to the treatment being validated by the experiment, rather than going where the evidence leads. If the treatment fails, the experiment can still be successful, beacuse it has increased our knowledge of how the biology works or doesn't work. If he equates a successful experiment with a positive outcome, then I am concerned that he is too in love with his hypothesis to be objective.

06:08 Second study (1997)

* Experiments conducted in "conditioned" or "clean" space

* 50 single experiments using 3 different Pranic Healers

* 44 out of 50 experiments were successful (88%) "So we went from a success rate of 8% in a dirty lab or ill-conditioned lab to 88%. This led us then--once again, this study was done in 1997--and that led us then to a more extensive study which we have undertaken over the last decade between 1998 and today."

RT: Were the healers all doing the same thing as each other, and were they all doing what had failed before? Did they even check that? If not, how can you compare what they did?

RT: Is he continuing to use the same HeLa cells after n more number of divisions or is he starting fresh with new cells for each study? I assume the latter, but he doesn't say; if not, however, then there could be a difference from the cells after they've been through the previous studies.

6:42 Present study (1998-2008)

* 854 single experiments using 10 different Pranic Healers

* 4 experiments using 4 groups of Pranic Healers (24, 32, 42, 38)

* 350 experiments to test conditioning of laboratory space (what were metrics? certainly not cell survival)

* 80 experiments using 3 Qigong Masters

* 150 experiments using 8 individual "energy healers"

RT: How do these different modalities work together? He seems to be mixing apples and oranges here.

RT: how many times had they had to condition the lab since then? How can they tell? How do they separate that process from the treatment process? "Sort of to go the chase, the PHs in fact were able to effect a change in the survival rate of the cells, and the results were actually surprising close, if not identical, to the results we obtained with QiGong masters as well as these number of individual energy healers. So even though the energy or the therapeutic processes may be quite different in these cases, the end results seem to be almost identical." How does he account for that?

RT: Why does he present no numbers at all? No p? No confidence intervals? No study limitations?

RT: NIH RePORTER shows no relevant grants with Joie Jones as PI, nor with Pranic as keyword--who is funding this study?

RT: What steps are they taking to avoid (unconscious) bias? What is the level of institutional scrutiny from their funders to ensure that unconscious bias is at a minimum?

08:16 Experimental design slide

* Healers extensively interviewed at beginning of study

* Each experiment went forward only if ("each") healer felt confident ("on being able to work that day") High risk of selection bias under these criteria. And how is this applicable to complex patient care, if the healers need such precise conditions in order to be able to work?

* Healers interviewed at end of study to record their impressions

* Several healers found lab "dirty"; lab "etherically cleaned" *during* study.

RT: Why is this not a confound with their work?

RT: He states that "that process has been going on now for over the last decade". Again, how can a process that requires a controlled environment to undergo such cleansing be applied to complex ill human beings?

RT: How did he ensure that negative results weren't just attributed to the lab "needing cleaning again"? I am not accusing him of conscious cherry-picking, but if one is in love with a hypothesis, and boundaries are ill-defined, there is a real risk of unconscious bias in interpreting things the way you want them to be. If this "cleaning" process is not to become a filter through which he sees results, then it needs to be conscientiously separated from the actual experiment.

09:05 Typical result (survival rate, 1 day post radiation) "kind of summarizes 854 experiments"

A (control): ~100%

B (radiation only): ~50%

C (PH after rad): ~70+%

D (PH before rad): ~80+%

E (PH before and after rad): ~90+%

RT: what does "~" mean? Does it mean the same thing in every case it's used? What does "~..+" mean? % of how many cells? Why are the numbers not reported precisely, with confidence intervals and p values?

RT: Why are the numbers so suspiciously linear? Knowing what we know about the payoff of investing in preventive health measures, I would expect the before effect to magnify cell survival in groups D & E.

RT: How were cells evaluated? All counted, or sampling? If sampling, how do we know sampling was representative? Plus the previous questions about the special properties of HeLa cells, and were they properly taken into account when determining the criteria for survival?

RT: Was survival the only measure? These are immortal cancer cells. Does pranic healing just give stronger cancer cells, or did PH actually treat their underlying disorder as well? If it can prevent death, why did PH not cure their cancerous nature, along with their underlying incorrect chromosome number?

09:54 Summary of results

* Distance between cells and healer unimportant

RT: Then this is not energy: violates inverse-square law and 2nd law of thermodynamics, as well as e=mc^2

* Shielding of cells from EMF and gamma radiation had no effect

RT: Another confound in the environment? He didn't mention this previously.

* Experience of healer slightly important (but even beginning student could produce a result)

* Effect enhanced by group healing (how does that work?) "went up to something like 98%?" what is "something like" 98%?

* Healers failed to produce an effect in about 12% of the experiments (this sounds like a very interesting result; did you follow up why?)

* Conditioning of lab space seems essential for success

RT: Again, what does this mean for treating much more complex organisms such as patients that you can't control so carefully?

* Findings are difficult to explain in terms of the standard scientific paradigm

RT: Actually, no, they're not, sadly. A PI in love with his hypothesis and sloppy about methodology is totally explainable. If you want to break the paradigm, you have to be fastidiously careful not to make any mistakes, and to give others enough detail to replicate your conclusions over and over until the truth can no longer be denied. [timing reset on video]

RT: He says healers able to visualize cells, worked over telephone, worked from 6000 miles away, "same result as if they were in the lab"

RT: Did they do any kind of inter-rater reliability on the descriptions of the visualizations? What would it mean if the descriptions conflicted? Did they do any testing of the environment to test whether temperature around the cells changed when they changed color? Because the quantum physics of colored light is very well-understood, and reliable predictions can be made about how much energy changing colors will absorb or release. Were those predictions reflected in the lab environment?

RT: What was the purpose of putting about 100 of the experiments in a lead-shielded room/Faraday cages to shield them from EMF and gamma radiation? it introduces another confound, but earlier he said it was the same design all the way through. What other changes, besides this and "cleaning", were introduced midway through the study that have not been mentioned? "So whatever this healing process involves, it involves some form of energy, i.e., subtle energy, that is something we certainly do not understand and is different from any kind of energy form that we know about."

RT: Not every other possibility has been ruled out, by a long shot, and the contradictions with what we know about the world that this explanation would provoke have been brushed aside without explanation. "Even in a very clean lab, 12% of the experiments failed."

RT: Why is that; did he do any followup? Once again, what does it mean the experiment failed? A negative result is a failure? This is a bias that could cause error in the interpretation of the results. "It's curious, my physics friends really don't have too many problems with this; my colleagues in medicine and biology go berserk when they see these results."

RT: Not berserk, exactly, just sad at the time, money, and passion that was wasted in this pursuit that turned out to be so flawed.

01:57 Importance of conditioned work space

* conditioned lab space (n = 854): no effect in 12% of experiments (102/854)

RT: He called this "failed" experiment again

* non-conditioned lab space (n = 250): no effect in 90% of experiments (225/250)

* "very dirty" lab space (n = 100): no effect in 100% of experiments

RT: Wait a minute, above he said I thought 8% worked, and now 100 failed? He is *extremely* sloppy with numbers.

RT: He has not explained the difference between dirty and non-conditioned. 02:29 Investigations of the 12% failure rate

(1) * Previous experiments: healer + cell manager

* New experiments (n = 100): healer + cell manager + observer

* Observer: made a donation to charity during treatment & willed any resulting good karma to be directed to the cells

RT: how do you measure karma? mere continued survival as a cancerous cell? what is the difference between a surviving control cell and a surviving cancer cell with good karma? how can you tell the difference? He says: "kind of a strange experiment"

RT: Indeed.

03:12 Investigations of the 12% failure rate

(2) * Results

* No improvement in cell survival rates

* BUT failure rate dropped from 12% to 4%

* No correlations between success rate and amount donated or charity used

* Represents first experimental observation and measurement of karmic intervention

RT: on what basis did you rule out every other possible explanation? (laughter in audience)

RT: How is this investigating the previous failure? This is introducing an entirely new confound.

RT: If outcome measurement is: "willed any good karma that came from the gift of this money to the charity to go to these cells and the change in survival rates" (confound! and apparently not blinded at all), then how can the failure rate be slashed by 2/3 with no improvement in cell survival rates? what, exactly, *is* the definition of "failure"?

03:38 Summary (1) * PH can reverse the effects of radiation on cells in culture

RT: this conclusion is flawed, for many reasons already alluded to

* Results are independent of shielding & of distance between healer and subject

RT: I am 100% serious when I say this: if they have managed to transcend the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics like this, then we need a perpetually renewable energy source *yesterday*. Why don't they give it to us?

* Results are dependent on conditioning of lab space

RT: What does this mean for patients?

* Success improved by karmic intervention

RT: In the speech he says "perhaps"; but he presents it on the slide as definite.

03:55 Summary

(2) * Results inconsistent with a Newtonian physics world view

RT: No, he didn't address the Newtonian concerns; he just mentioned them, and then blew right past them.

* Note that Newtonian physics is the basis for contemporary biology and Western medicine

RT: It works well enough to keep planes reliably in the sky and pacemakers shocking defibrillating hearts back into rhythm. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and we get functioning GPS of the kind we use every day in cell phones and satellite navigation. He has not overturned our understanding of the natural world.

* Thus results are difficult to explain in terms of the "standard scientific paradigm."

RT: Sadly, they're not. If his methodology were immaculate, his numbers unimpeachable, and his methodology detailed enough that researchers around the world were replicating his inexplicable results so that they were confronted with the fact that their previous understanding was failing, *then* he could say this. But he's not there yet, by a long shot.

* However, results are ("probably") consistent with a quantum mechanical world view.

RT: Again, presented as definite on the slide, but qualified as "probably" in speech. Not that this claim is particularly controversial, since at our level of perception, we don't see quantum mechanical effects.

04:22 Some final remarks

(1) In our culture today, space travel is sometimes described as the final frontier*. Let me suggest to you that the data presented here clearly** shows that there is yet another frontier--a frontier beyond our common notions of space and time that involves the power of the mind*** to intervene in and to change**** the physical world.

RT: * Nice reference to the original Star Trek, I'll give him credit for that

RT: ** it's not "clearly" at all, since he didn't rule out perfectly natural explanations for his results

RT: *** spoken as "mind through focus and intentionality"

RT: **** if you're going to claim this, you have to show your work was immaculate, and no other explanation remains. His methodology is vague enough that he did not do that job.

04:49 Some final remarks

(2) To approach this new frontier will require a new world view and a new paradigm for science. Perhaps even a formalism* in which science and spirituality are finally united. This coming paradigm shift may** be as important as those that occurred with Galileo or with Darwin. It will*** change forever the way in which we heal one another and the way in which we view ourselves in the universe, opening infinite possibilities for those of us that dare to dream.****

RT: * Oh, dear. No, this is not in the cards. Formalisms are my specialty, and the one he is proposing is a logical contradiction, in the same way that dividing by zero is a logical contradiction in mathematics. Any such formalism would have to contain every statement AND its contradiction at the same time, and that doesn't work. If this were possible, I would have done it already, and be raking in the megabucks for having done so, laughing at materialist science all the way to the bank while I did. Given the desire for such a thing out there, you know it would be that kind of success. But that's never going to happen. This is one of the things that is literally impossible. He's either using the word "formalism" because he doesn't understand the implications--or worse, he does understand, and is trying to persuade with something he knows is impossible. For what it's worth, I think it's the former.

RT: ** "may" is conditional. You don't get to claim something that "may" happen as science; you have to actually do it first. Look how many people have tried to do this and failed. If it can happen, why hasn't it by now, with so many people trying?

RT: *** now "may" has given way to "will". Same thing for future tense, though; you don't get to claim it as science until you have actually done it.

RT: **** Nice little implied dig at those of us materialists who don't "dare to dream". Sometimes, I wonder why I even bother with people who think and talk that way about me and my peeps.

Q&A session:

05:46 Q: "You define success as the difference in survival rate between experimental and control groups. Do you have any sense about whether the control groups in the clean lab had a different survival rate than the control groups in the dirty lab?"

A: "No, no, they did not."

06:08 Q: "What criteria did you use to choose the healers?"

A: "Um, the criteria for choosing the healers were, were people that, were, um, well, basically people that um, uh, that felt they could, uh, could, make, uh, changes in the cells in culture, and were willing to do the experiments, basically. There were a number of healers that when, uh, that eagerly volunteered for these, uh these studies, but then when the studies were explained to them, backed off, uh, because I think they felt they were going to get tested, and, um so it was virtually, I mean we were open basically to anyone that felt they could make changes in the cells, and um..." (inaudible)

07:08 Q: "My name is Robin Claire, and I would like to ask you if any of the healers made a distinction between not even recognizing the difference between the energy in the lab and the energy in the cell, perhaps focusing on the fact that energy is energy and they could just go in and as they cleaned the lab they could, so to speak, clean the cells at the same time."

A: "Well, there were certainly some healers that were less sensitive to the laboratory environment, but were still equally successful in treating the cells in culture. It seemed that several of the healers were particularly sensitive to the environment they were working in and that in fact is what led us to do the cleaning of the lab."

07:54 Q: "Bill Beatty. What was the source of ionizing radiation?"

A: "It's a gamma-ray, a gamma source."

Q: "Yeah, I mean, if someone wanted to replicate it, what would they have to find for equipment?"

A: "Well, actually it's a fixed gamma-ray source, and we used several different ones during the course of the study, and I can give you some further details later. It's a fairly, a standard gamma-ray source, several different ones."

[RT note: this is the first mention of different radiation sources. Yet another possible confound.]

08:20 Q: "I'm Garrett Modell. So Bill Bankston asked the question about the clean lab versus the dirty lab and the control. As you probably know, in his results, he had a lot of trouble controlling the control. And just comparing what you did with what he did, do you have any reason to, or any explanations as to why you got different results than he did in terms of the controls?"

A: "Well, ok, let me, I think that I probably responded to his question incorrectly. If I remember correctly, what he was asking was did we see differences in the control group. And umm, uh, there were some slight, you know, if you take the control group into the, into the really dirty lab, then you do see some, you do see some differences, yeah. And you know, I think the major implications of the study, or one of the implications, is that many people have tried to conduct subtle energy experiments, and if they conduct these experiments in a laboratory environment that's not conditioned, they're going to get very poor results. And this also clearly has implications for practitioners of any medical modality, that if you treat patients in an environment that's dirty, you're not going to get very good results."

[RT note: wait, I thought the survival rate was 100%, as reported on the slide. How can that be different in a clean lab? You can't have greater than 100% survival rates. And if Bankston had trouble "controlling the controls", how did Jones avoid those troubles--or did he? I looked for a paper in PubMed on the subject by Bankston, but didn't find any.]

09:47

Q: [inaudible]

A: "Correct. Correct. [nodding]"

[video segment ends]

 

part 3 restarts timing

Q: "[missed name here]. I was wondering exactly what did the healers do? I mean, did they chant, or pray, or was it just intentionality, or what exactly did they do to perform this treatment? Ok, The second part of that is was it based on special abilities of these people, or was it behaviors a person could learn, and therefore, you know, be able to treat others as well?"

A: "Well, I'll tell you that I have since, over this decade, trained myself as well, so now even I can do it, kay? I have a number of undergraduate students at University of California-Irvine that I took a crash course in pranic healing, about an hour, and they treated the cells in culture. They did not do as good a job as an experienced healer, but they still had a result. And what they actually did with pranic healing at least, was that they imagined and pulled energy from the universe through their bodies and visualized, first, green light emitting from their hands, cleaned the cells with green light, whitish-green light, then cleaned the cells with whitish-orange light, stimulated the cells with bright white light, through their hands, then placed blue light through the cells, and that was it."

01:30:

Q: [inaudible]

A: [shakes head] "It's what they visualized. If you look at it clairvoyantly, you see colors. But what this actually entails, it's far more, obviously, than electromagnetic or, uh, energy, because you can do this in an area that's shielded from electromagnetic fields. And the other healers that we work with, there are many healers that we work with, do not have a clue what they do, but they seem to be able to bring about a healing process."

RT: If what he is describing the same thing as synesthesia? How would you tell the difference?

[closing]

RT: What can a patient do to benefit from this, or a practitioner take away from this to know what to do for a patient? I don't think there's anything at all here that can be translated into a meaningful patient recommendation, nor do I see any advancement in the science.