Quantum Issue Seventeen|May/June 2012|£3.95
HEALTH Issue Ten | March 2011 | £3.95
The Science of Psi Exploring Inner Space with Dean Radin, PhD
Are Wireless Signals Threatening Your Health? The Business of CAM
Tips for Increasing Your Prosperity
Blinded by Science
What Conventional Scientists Don’t Know and Why Energy and information for health and well-being
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Issue 17 May/June 2012
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Welcome to the May/June issue of
Quantum Health magazine!
W
elcome to the May/June Issue of Quantum Health!
Mind over matter. Precognition. Telepathy. Healing at a distance. Few people are better known for their pioneering and persuasive research in these fields than Dean Radin, PhD, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. When I interviewed him, our conversation ranged far and wide over these topics and more—such as the nature of time, the need to “subvert the dominant paradigm,” and the current online mind-matter interaction experiment that you can get involved in. Our conversation went on for so long that I have had to divide the interview into two parts, the first part of which is our cover interview in this issue and the second part which will appear inside our next issue. In this issue you will also benefit from a monthslong investigation by Australian physician Valerie Malka on the health effects of the signals from wireless technologies, predominantly cell phone towers and base stations. Is there one close to you? Did you know transmission and receiver equipment is often hidden in trees and chimneys, and could be close to your own backyard? Are you aware of the evidence for deleterious health effects from the signals from this equipment? You owe it to yourself and your family to read this article and educate yourself. Niki Gratrix returns with an article for CAM practitioners about being the best businesspersons they can be. Is your clinic successful? Are you charging enough? If not, this article will motivate you to consider why not and to do something about. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
Matthew Silverstone found himself the unlikely author of a groundbreaking book, Blinded by Science. When his son got sick and conventional medicine couldn’t help him, they turned to CAM. And Matthew began a year-long research intensive that changed his life and resulted in his book. Sarah Turner talks with Matthew and reviews some of this surprising science.
Joan Parisi Wilcox Managing Editor
In this issue you will also find a new feature, Research & Development in Energy Medicine, a new recurring section that covers cutting-edge energy and information technologies so you can stay on top of what’s happening at the forefront of CAM. Of course, we also include your old favorites, Book Reviews, Science in the News, and the Conference Calendar. I am saddened to report that Dr. Jeanne Achterberg, a founder of the field of complementary medicine and a pioneer in the study of imagery in healing, has passed on. I had been in communication with her about doing a cover interview for an upcoming issue of Quantum Health. Sadly, we did not get to it. Dr. Achterberg’s contributions were enormous, and she will live on through her research work, through the work and service of her students, and through her many bestselling books. As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions, please write to me at
[email protected]. Warm regards,
Joan Quantum Health 3
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This Month’s Contributors
Dean Radin, PhD Senior Scientist, IONS
Valerie Malka, MD Physician and Writer
Niki Gratrix Clinician and Educator
Matthew Silverstone Author
Regular Contributors Sarah Turner Head of Research at NES Health Quantum Health Magazine Editor in Chief:
Trina Hart TFT Dx
Managing Editor: Joan Parisi Wilcox
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Science Editor:
Sarah Turner
R&D Editor:
Dr. Thornton Streeter, DSc
Production:
Trevor Hart
Disclaimer All content in Quantum Health magazine is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. Quantum Health magazine, or any contributors to Quantum Health magazine, is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this magazine. Quantum Health magazine is not liable for the content of any external website listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the sites. The views expressed by authors of articles published in this magazine are solely those of the author and are not necessarily the views of or shared by the editor, publisher or directors, shareholders and employees of Quantum Health. Copyright. Quantum Health 2012 all rights reserved. No part of this magazine can be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. Unsolicited contributions must be accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope if they are to be returned. We cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs or for material lost or damaged in the post. Letters submitted to Quantum Health magazine or to its editors are assumed to be intended for publication in whole or part.
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Contents
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7-15
Exploring Inner Space: Part One An interview with Dean Radin, PhD
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In Memoriam: Jeanne Achterberg
17-25
Mobile Phone Towers: Are They Threatening Your Health? By Valerie Malka, MD
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Science in the News
30-31
Book Reviews
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Contents
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The Business of CAM By Niki Gratrix
37-41
R&D in Energy Medicine
43-45
Conference Calendar
46-50
Blinded by Science An Interview with Matthew Silverstone
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Exploring Inner Space: Part One An Interview with Dean Radin, PhD By Joan Parisi Wilcox
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ean Radin, PhD, is one of the world’s best known and most respected researchers into “psi,” a term that covers just about every aspect of the “paranormal” aspects of consciousness. As an undergraduate he studied electrical engineering and physics, and he went on to earn a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology. Over the past twenty years he has conducted psi research for private firms and think-tanks, and for the US government. He also has held appointments at many premier universities, including Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh. Currently, he is a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and an adjunct professor at Sonoma State University. He is the author of two best-selling books, The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds. He has also authored or co-authored more than 200 professional and popular articles, been interviewed for television and radio, appeared in documentary films, and lectured around the world. In this interview, he and Joan range far and wide as they explore many of the most strange and fascinating aspects of psi, consciousness, physical reality and the universe. There is even an online psi experiment that you can take part in. Part Two of this interview will appear in the July-August issue.
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Start by telling us what the Institute of Noetic Sciences is and what your role is there. DR: The Institute was started almost forty years ago by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon. Edgar was a Navy captain, test pilot and MIT-trained scientist and had an unusual experience on the way back from the moon in which he looked out of the space capsule and was astonished—as all of the astronauts are—to see that everything that we know is on this tiny blue ball in space. He had what he later described as an experience of unity, with everything on Earth—all life on Earth—and then it expanded out to include the universe. He didn’t know it at the time, but this is a classic Samadhi [unity consciousness] experience—Samadhi as the yogis would describe 8 Quantum Health
it. He became very intrigued that here he was completely reliant on Western science to get to the moon and come back, and he has an experience that science knew almost nothing about. When he started looking into it, he realized that just as he had taken steps to explore outer space there was also a need to explore inner space. So the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was started as a way of using the tools of science to explore inner space. Noetics is one of the aspects of what a mystical experience is about. It specifically focuses on the sense of getting information from somewhere else, without knowing how you get it, but also having a strong conviction that the information is real. And even more so, that the sense of reality of that information can be tested, and it turns out that it is real. So, it’s a major challenge to our scientific assumptions about how we get information in our heads and what consciousness and all the rest of it is. �I am the director of the laboratory at IONS. So when we do in-house laboratory research on noetic experiences, I design the experiments, run them, create a team to be involved in the experiment and all the rest.
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You have been involved in this kind of work for more than twenty years now. What has been the range of your experience in noetic research? DR: I started doing experiments when I was working in industrial research at Bell Laboratories, which was primarily work on mind-matter interaction. The way we describe that is micro PK, or micro-psychokinesis, or mind-matter interactions on a very small scale. Then I went to work for a classified project for the US government on remote viewing, otherwise known as clairvoyance, primarily for espionage purposes. So, I have done experiments and watched experiments in remote viewing. Then I went back to the academic world and studied precognition and later telepathy. So over the years I have studied mind-matter interactions, precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, distance healing, distance staring effects, and all of the different ways that www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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psychic phenomena [often called “psi” for short] can manifest. I have studied it in the laboratory at one place or another.
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Were you originally a sceptic? Has your worldview changed over these twenty years of research? DR: I would say that I have always been a sceptic in the sense that I am not willing to take anything on faith. Somebody tells me something or writes something perhaps, and I am not judgemental about it, but it doesn’t mean that I believe it. I mean there are all kinds of reasons to doubt what people say. They may be sincere and wellmeaning, but mistaken. So, in order to do any kind of science, you have to be sceptical . . . because you want to make sure that you are not fooling yourself as well. So I remain a sceptic. I think the idea of doing this kind of research seems unusual, as there are very few people in the world doing it, but that has more to do with what you are willing to risk rather than whether it’s interesting. I say this because I have given many talks at most of the Ivy League schools, and in industrial research and at lots and lots of places, and more or less every time someone will ask, “Well, why are you doing this? How did you get interested in this?” And I just turn www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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the question back to the audience and ask, “Well, how many people here are interested in this?” And, of course, everyone is interested. And it’s representative of everyone no matter where I happen to be, whether it’s an academic institution or industrial research—and usually it’s an overflow crowd. So, why is it standing-room only? Because everyone is interested in it. So the next question I ask them is, “If you had the ability and the funding to do this kind of research and it wasn’t a risk to your career, would you do it? How many people would do it?” And it is usually about two-thirds. So, the only thing I did that was different was to challenge the taboo that said this is going to ruin your career if you do it. And, realistically, it takes a variety of skills and the willingness to take the risk to actually do it. And even that sometimes is not enough, as there is almost no money to do this kind of work, so it takes maybe a certain amount of grit and grace.
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So your own personal belief, obviously, is that there is something more to the universe than Western science sanctions. DR: Yes, but I would say that my interest was not sparked by personal psychic experiences, but rather by intrigue about whether or not this [psi] could be true. I just found it intriguing that so Quantum Health 9
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many people have written about this, including many people who are recognized as hard-nosed scientists all the way to mystics. They more or less say the same thing: that the world is more complicated and interesting than we know. I was drawn by the curiosity about whether this [psi phenomena] was true, and if so, if science has overlooked a major aspect of what it means to be alive. So, I found that interest through books, and I started to do experiments as an avocation. It took about five years to actually convince me that there actually was something that not only was real but that could be studied. Because if it is real but only experienced in a spontaneous way, I wouldn’t be interested in pursuing it as a career. There is no career! But if you can show that scientific methods can be brought to bear on these things, then why not? What could be more interesting than that?
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You mentioned working on covert government programs on remote viewing, which basically is clairvoyance. I studied with Lyn Buchanan learning the basics of remote viewing. He was part of the classified US government study. Obviously the government funded a lot of study on this in terms of espionage, and now the program is over and it’s sort of gone by the wayside. Or has it? Is it still “deep black” [covert] within the government? What do you think is going on within the walls of the Pentagon or Defense Intelligence Agency or some other government agency in regards to this? I’m not trying to raise a conspiracy theory or anything like that. I’m talking about legitimate study and interest by the government. DR: Well, the problem, of course, is that the government is millions and millions of people. Within the US Defense Department the players change about every two years. And so there is no real continuity within the visible, or even the invisible, portions of government. So what do they believe? They believe every possible thing you can imagine they could believe! �The times were important in determining what was done. The fact that the remote-viewing 10 Quantum Health
program was from 1972 to 1995 matched a growing tolerance within the culture that this stuff wasn’t so spooky after all. Or it was spooky, but it was real. So it was simply easier from a sociological point of view to run those programs, even if they were deep black [covert]. But times change. From about the mid 1990s to now, it’s been much more conservative. Much like we see in Congress now, people don’t know how to do anything anymore! And so that filters down into the rest of government, including the Defense Department, and it makes it much more difficult for anybody, even in the deep black world, to run this kind of program. So my guess is that there are individual people, or maybe even agencies, that have hired consultants occasionally to do something, but I don’t think that there are any programs underway.
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Okay, switching tracks. Astronomer James Jeans once said that from the perspective of quantum physics the universe appears to be more like a great thought than a great machine. In your books you focus on consciousness, the web of relations between people, mindmatter interaction. So what’s your view, or definition, of consciousness, and do you think there really are such things as consciousness fields that structure reality? DR: I think the primary mystery in consciousness is self-reflective awareness. It’s awareness, but a particular form of awareness in which you are aware of awareness. That’s the mystery. Because lots of the other portions of consciousness, of its elements, the neurosciences are getting a pretty good handle on them—that is, all the unconscious aspects of being an organism. The mystery is, How are we aware of our own consciousness? And also what then constitutes our subjectivity? I can taste a lemon, and I know very well what it is, but there doesn’t seem to be any external, obvious way of determining how I feel about it. So that’s a mystery. How that mystery fits into the psychic realm is itself a mystery. Let’s say someone has a remote-viewing experience—the mystery is not so much what is happening in terms of the www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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mind processing the information, but how the information got in there [in their mind] in the first place. So that really says that the mystery within psychic phenomena and within consciousness is a matter of physics. It’s a matter of asking, How does the physical world work? What’s the boundary between objective and subjective reality? That’s basically all about physics. Physics, of course, has the concept of fields. A field is a convenient way of describing how things appear to work. All the studies involving mind-matter interaction suggest that when consciousness is focused on a physical system, the physical system responds as though it is becoming more organized. So the more organized or coherent the mental effort, the more coherent or organized the matter that is the object of that attention. So is that like a field? Well, kind of. It’s the best word that we have right now. And an analogy might be something like a magnetic field, which will surround and make things work a certain way. In that sense, yes, there may be something like a field that consciousness is or produces. I wish I had better answers, but the truth is that we don’t know yet.
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Health is a focus for us. And on the frontiers of health, coherence and resonance are hot topics. There are so many experiments showing some kind of coherence or resonance between brain signals and heart signals between two people physically separated. . . What’s going on at the frontier of psi research that may have relevance to healing, perhaps going beyond energy to information fields or transfer? Where is this research headed? DR: Up until about ten years ago, there were a fair number of university groups, mostly in medical schools, who were interested in things like distance healing, which is kind of the realm that we are talking about. Then there was a big study by Herb Benson and his group at Harvard which didn’t show anything interesting happening, and that put a major chill on this type of research. Now, since that study, five or six years ago, there have been zero additional new studies done. In fact, [in the US] the National Center for www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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Complementary and Alternative Medicine, of the National Institutes of Health, no longer funds this area of research. If they’re not funding it, other funding agencies aren’t interested in funding it, and so the answer right now in terms of what’s the leading edge is nothing—there is no leading edge!
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Well, there are studies going on about energy healing in labs, in private work. In particular, I’m thinking of William Bengston’s amazing work. DR: There’s Bill Bengston, and then there is Bill Bengston! [See review of his book The Energy Cure in this issue of QH.] His work is the most shocking that I have seen in a long time. It’s so past impossible, and yet done in a rigorous way. . . . It’s almost too good in the sense not that it isn’t real—I think it is real—but in that it presents such a major challenge [to understanding] that we don’t even know where to begin with something like this. I have taken Bill’s training course [in his energy healing method] and it’s sort of interesting. It sort of fits what I know about the way that you would do these sorts of things in the yogic tradition and so on. It probably calls for a bit of talent on the part of the individual healer. But it’s amazing. �Other than that, particularly focusing on mental or psychic type healing, you will find people doing research on things like Therapeutic Touch, there’s one called Quantum Bioenergetics I think in Australia, and there are a few other papers I’ve seen in our [IONS] journal and a few other journals. So there is still interest in this, but most of it is close-up healing, like non-contact Therapeutic Touch and occasionally you get ones that work at a distance as well. But these tend to be small-scale studies that have no funding or tiny bits of funding, and they are not going to appear in major journals.
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With what we know of the placebo effect now, it seems like there would be more study. The likelihood is that there is some kind of consciousness field affecting the physical body. IONS has a major monograph about spontaneous remissions from cancer, for instance, so there is plenty of research and anecdotal evidence amassed on this. In terms of this kind of research— the mind affecting the body or health—belief seems to play a major role. Where do you think medicine would be heading if it took the placebo effect as real and put as much money and research behind studying it as they do for the biochemical war on cancer and that model of health? Just speculating, what do you think medicine would come to look like? DR: Well, this is part of psychoneuroimmunology. In science if you can come up with a fancy sounding euphemism you are more likely to get funding! Did you see the [US TV show] “60 Minutes” episode last Sunday [February 19]? You should go to the CBS website and look at it, because one of the segments was on the use of antidepressant drugs as compared to placebo. This guy, one of the top researchers from Harvard, was on the show saying that there is no difference—zero difference—between antidepressant drugs, which have all kinds of horrible side-effects, and a placebo. And the effect from the placebo is very real. People get better! So, if there was a major effort to find out how the mind affects the body, one of the consequences might be that a huge number of the drugs that we are currently using would not be used. You know what kind of reaction that would produce! There is so much of an economic incentive to keep the system the way it is that it would be extremely difficult to put a huge effort into making the drug companies go away. . . . To battle head-on a huge economic interest like that is not going to work. There’s way too much money there.
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So what we could do, though, is say, “Here you have Lipitor or some other popular drug, and we can make it 30% more effective without you [the drug companies] doing anything, simply by letting us study the colour of the pill and anything having to do with the mental side of taking the pill. And eventually, we could tell the drug company, you would wean yourself off having to use any active ingredient at all, so it becomes a pure placebo, which is cheap to make! They can be happy. The people can be happy. The side-effects will go away. It becomes a win-win situation rather than trying to battle the drug companies. I mentioned this to the executives at [pharmaceutical company] Johnson & Johnson, and they thought this was a great idea! I’m not sure it’s going to go anywhere, but the drug company people are not bad people. They produce many drugs that are very nice things to have, but like any giant economic engine, it has a certain degree of inertia. It’s difficult to stop it.
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Well, medicine largely is driven by consumer demand. When consumers refuse to use pharmaceuticals so much, to depend on them at the expense of also using other methods, such as mind-body healing and nurturing a placebo response—which is really somehow activating the body’s own self-healing systems—then the drug companies will have to change to meet demand. Consumers drive the marketplace, right? DR: Yes, but remember that antidepressants do work. In some cases, it probably is the only thing that will help someone who is spiralling into depression. The thing is that once the effect starts, can they be weaned off the drug and [using a placebo] would they still get the effects of the drug? Would it still work? My suspicion is that it probably would.
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I’d like to go back to the sceptics for a moment. There is a scientific method, but there is also a mindset and belief system within science that influences what is worth studying, what is possible or probable. Conventional scientists for the most part don’t accept psi as real. I remember reading in your first book about the discovery of the omega-minus particle in physics. Physicists believed in its reality based on evidence from only two events in more than 200,000 thousand experiments. That’s a terrible replication rate and yet it was enough to convince physicists the particle was real. Yet, psi researchers produce evidence that is exponentially better than that and their results are dismissed or rejected. Any comment on the fact that there is compelling evidence for psi effects but it is roundly rejected by most of science, seemingly for reasons of belief rather than of science? DR: All that most people accept is what they believe. Well, in every case all we will accept is what we believe! So if you look at what students are taught, especially those on a science track, most of them will never hear anything about this topic [psi] from a scientific point of view. If they do, the vast majority of them will get it pounded into their heads that it’s superstition and entertainment and all the rest of it. Sometimes there will be assigned readings, and the vast majority of that will be the sceptics’ books. So it’s not surprising that the belief after twenty years of education is that psi is ridiculous and no serious scientist will take it seriously. Once you have that mindset, it’s almost impossible to look at evidence that runs counter to your belief and to see it the way it actually is. There are a lot of studies now by social psychologists that show that your prior beliefs will shape what you can see and how you react to it. So the sceptics are correct in writing books showing how beliefs are a very strong distortion force, but they almost never turn that back onto their own beliefs! And if they did, they would see that belief is a double-edged sword. It cuts www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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both ways. It cuts in the direction of seeing that psi doesn’t exist and in the direction that it does exist. So if you have someone who starts out being a very strong believer in psi, for whatever reason, that person may think psi is everywhere, all the time. That’s probably not true. If you come from the other direction, you’ll never see it and will think it doesn’t exist at all. And that’s not true either. Like a lot of complex things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But the difference here is that if you start from the sceptical view, then psi cannot exist at all. Even a tiny little bit. And that’s a very difficult position to hold. I mean you have to defend that position, because you can’t allow even a tiny little smidgen to exist, because it challenges your worldview. Whereas, if you start on the side that allows it might exist, you might say that in some cases [the evidence for psi] is mistakes and misinterpretation, but it’s a much easier position because it doesn’t require defence. So I actually have a certain sympathy for people who call themselves the hardcore sceptics, because they are put into a very difficult position. They are put into a position that the history of science tells us is almost always wrong. Of course, if you bet your career on that [hardcore sceptical view], it’s not a good place to be. Nevertheless, enormous numbers of students, who then go on to become professors themselves, repeat what amounts to a dogma. The dogma is that psi doesn’t exist, don’t look at it, it’s not interesting. And it doesn’t take very long for students to accept that. For students who don’t accept it, like I didn’t, it’s maybe just a natural proclivity to not trust authority. But even that is beaten out of students after a while! You know, the motto on my website is “Subvert the dominant paradigm!” The dominant paradigm is always trying to get you to believe something on faith, and that was one thing I was not willing to do.
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Which experiments do you think are some of the best in terms of producing significant evidence for the reality of psi, in whatever form it takes—precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, mind-matter influence? DR: I’m writing a book now, its tentative title is The Science of Siddhis, about the yogic siddhis [metanormal powers attained through yoga, meditation or similar practices]. The whole point of it is that there is yogic lore that matches every other mystical and religious tradition that says we will bump against these things if we train long enough. I talk about what the evidence is for some of the siddhis that have been looked at in a scientific way. It’s possible to talk about individual experiments, but I almost never want to do that. As you know from my previous books, the point of science is not just showing a strange thing but showing that it is repeatable. So, when I talk about something like precognition, the evidence for it, I talk about four classes of studies over 75 years and the degree of repeatability of the different classes. Within each class there may be one or two studies that act as exemplars, but the confidence we have in it is that it is independently repeatable, so this is something that is true in general and not just from one lab or one person. I am doing that for precognition, clairvoyance, mind-matter interaction, telepathy. Those are the four areas where we have the most evidence and in which we have the most confidence.
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Tell us about your current online experiment, with the double-slit physics experiment, about mind-matter interaction, in this case trying to influence photons. How can our readers participate? DR: If you go to our website, www.IONSresearch. com, we have an online version of an experiment [a double-slit experiment] that we have been doing in our laboratory for the last three years. It’s looking at mind-matter interaction within a realm of physics that already has an opening for the possibility that there should be mind-matter interaction. It’s the quantum observer effect, 14 Quantum Health
otherwise known as the quantum measurement problem. I did this experiment for two reasons. One is that because we already have a recognised problem in physics—the quantum measurement problem, which has to do with how quantum systems behave differently when you are looking at them than when you are not—it makes it much easier to do experiments and have them perceived by the mainstream, in this case the physics mainstream, as something that is relevant to their interests. Whereas, if I did a study on telepathy and I tried to publish it in a physics journal they would think, “Well, it’s interesting but it has nothing to do with what we do.” So here is a way of saying, “No, this is something you are interested in.” That’s why the journal Physics Essays has accepted our paper on this experiment [which shows a positive result: that mind can influence the quantum system]. So, part of it, then, is a strategic approach to problems that will be seen as important to the disciplines that we want to talk to. The other thing is that this offers an interesting kind of target, because at the quantum scale observing something and influencing something are the same. So, it provides the opportunity for clairvoyance or psychokinesis—or both of them, and maybe at that scale they are the same, there is no difference between the two—but it allows different mental approaches to produce the same kind of outcome. And so far what we’ve seen is that when people pay attention to this system it behaves differently than when no one is paying attention to it.
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Basically, you are asking people to log on to the site and there is a representation of the photon and you are asking them to affect it—to make it move upwards—with just the influence of their mind, their intention. The theory is explained on the site, so we won’t go into it here. DR: Right. What it’s reflecting is how much interference there is within an optical double-slit system. The prediction would be that if we could extract information—if we knew everything there was to know about the double-slit system—we www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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are extracting information that would reduce quantum interference [showing that mind can influence matter]. And that’s what we can measure. There is a score at the end, which is a measure of how the system is behaving when you are paying attention to it versus when you are not. You have 30-second periods where you pay attention and you get feedback, and then there are 30-second periods where the screen is blank and you don’t get any feedback. So we can make a comparison. The evidence in this experiment so far is that mind can affect matter.
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It’s a fun experiment and I urge our readers to sign on and try it. Let’s now go back to an earlier question. Once again, how has your view of the world, your conception of the universe, changed over the course of your research? DR: That’s a good question. I guess the only major change has been one from being intrigued as a teenager in these things and not having much personal experience with it to having much higher confidence as an adult that some aspects of yogic lore, which is one way of looking at it, are correct. That’s quite interesting because it means from a popular point of view it [psi] is probably not that strange, and most people believe all sorts of things that come down to the idea that there’s a lot more to the world than what you see in everyday reality. This is true even among scientists—that this [world] is a very complicated and interesting place. So I just have a much higher confidence that this is true than I did as a young person. To learn more about Dr. Radin’s work, visit his website at www.deanradin.com or the IONS website at www.ions.org. Part Two of this interview will appear in the next issue of Quantum Health. In it we cover topics including the nature of information transfer, the yogic tradition and psi, the odd nature of time and whether the past and future can be influenced, and other equally intriguing topics.
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YouTube Videos on Consciousness and Psi Featuring Dean Radin Reality and the Extended Mind: Part One By Adrian D. Nelson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrKVQVr 3p04&feature=channel Reality and the Extended Mind: Part Two By Adrian D. Nelson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS2Dbkd JrDk&feature=channel The Global Consciousness Project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnvJfkI5 NVc&feature=related A Quantum View of the World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssO3uhv F73o&feature=relmfu The Conscious Universe Excerpt With Jeffrey Mishlove http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x_ Z9KXQ3nE&feature=related Can Science Seek the Soul: Part One from Closer to Truth With Robert Lawrence Kuhn http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2J0EBBgg_6c&feature=relmfu Can Science Seek the Soul: Part Two: Closer to Truth With Robert Lawrence Kuhn http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwI6AsK OsaQ&feature=relmfu
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Dr. Achterberg—Jeannie to her friends, colleagues and students—died at age 69 on March 7, 2012
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In Memoriam:
Jeanne Achterberg, PhD
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t is with gratitude that I mark the life and contributions of—and with sadness the passing of—Jeanne Achterberg, PhD, one of the pioneers of mind-body medicine practice, research and education. I am especially saddened because I recently had been in contact with Dr. Achterberg about doing a cover interview for Quantum Health. She had graciously accepted and was scheduled to be the cover interview for our July/August issue, although we had not yet managed to coordinate our schedules to conduct the interview. Dr. Achteberg—Jeannie to her friends, colleagues and students—died at age 69 on March 7, 2012. Her 2001 book Lightning at the Gate chronicled her personal healing journey after a diagnosis of a rare and deadly ocular melanoma, which is highly metastatic eye cancer that is usually quickly fatal. She survived against the odds, largely using mind-body healing approaches, although ultimately she succumbed, some ten years later, from metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Achterberg was a much beloved educator who served as Professor of Psychology at the Saybrook Institute for more than 20 years, was senior editor at the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, and was an internationally renowned research scientist. Dr. Achterberg was a pioneer in the study and use of imagery in healing, initially exploring this area of mind-body medicine with fellow pioneer O. Carl Simonton. She championed the use of visualization techniques in healing, revealing how the features of personal imagery correlate to the course of the illness and healing. She also broke new ground in mind-body medicine and the shamanic approach to healing. In collaboration with others, she studied the brain in response to various healing modalities, especially in distance energy healing and hands-on healing. This worked revealed which areas of the receiver’s brain became active when a sender directed healing energy toward that person. Dr. Achterberg was also a pioneer in cross-cultural studies in complementary medicine, creating a bridge between cultures in terms of the psychology, science, and the beliefs and methodologies of healing. In addition to Lightning at the Gate, Dr. Achterberg’s books, all bestsellers, include Bridges of the Body-Mind, Imagery in Healing, Woman as Healer, and Imagery and Disease. 16 Quantum Health
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Mobile Phone Towers: Are They Threatening Your Health? By Valerie Malka, MD
Reader’s Note: This article is adapted from a substantive investigative report by Dr. Valerie Malka about possible wireless telecommunications health hazards, especially as relates to the situation in Australia. She has compiled an extensive bibliography of sources from her investigation and will provide them upon request.
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avid Citer landed a new job in Hornsby, Australia, but quit on his first day. From the window of his new office he could see sixteen wireless communications antennae sticking out of an enormous base station nearby. No one in the office had noticed it before, although many of them had been complaining of migraines, nausea, visual problems and skin ailments without ever finding a cause. Perhaps Citer had just found it? “I knew about the dangers and was not going to take the risk,” Citer said of his decision to quit the job. He previously had done an enormous amount of research about wireless equipment signals and had formed the Kurrajong Resident Action group to prevent a telecom company from placing a tower near his home. Like Citer, people around the world are educating themselves about the possible health hazards of such wireless equipment and taking action. In Australia and elsewhere, there are a growing number of community groups forming, most in response to the heavy-handed manner in which the telecom carriers have ignored their individual and neighbourhood concerns and installed towers against their wishes. “People have a right to know about and say no to these towers,” Citer argues. “They [the companies] go to great lengths to camouflage and hide them; it is incredibly deceptive.” As an example, Citer’s father, George, who lives in Seaforth, Australia, saw the telecom company Telstra remove the top of an old chimney on a nearby building. Wondering what was going on, he watched, only to discover that the company technicians were performing maintenance on mobile telecom equipment concealed within the chimney. “It is all a bit sinister, as the community has no idea and it is just next to the Dalwood Children’s Home,” he said. Worldwide there are hundreds of examples of action groups successfully rallying to force the telecommunications giants to remove wireless communication towers from their communities. Like George Citer, you may not realize just how close to a mobile phone tower or related equipment you really are. Base stations can 18 Quantum Health
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look like large antennas or huge towers, but they can also be small and concealed. They can be hidden in trees or chimneys or mounted on flagpoles or church steeples. They can sit atop fire stations, schools and hospitals. They can be sited in cemeteries or public parks. They can sit on top of office buildings and apartment blocks without residents even knowing they are there. For example, in London, Orange mobile phone company was forced to remove its cell phone tower, dubbed the “Tower of Doom,” from the top of a five-story apartment building after seven of its residents got cancer. The cancer rate among those living on the top floor, where residents from five of the eight flats were affected, was 20 percent, which is ten times the national average. Although conventional medical experts, industry researchers and government regulatory agencies the world over are denying any health risk from wireless equipment and base station emissions, the evidence is mounting that the health hazards are real. And people around the world are saying “Enough!” and taking action individually and as communities to assert their rights and protect themselves.
Race to a Wireless World You may complain about a dropped cell phone call now and then when you hit a wireless signal “dead zone,” but the truth is that there is hardly any place on Earth where you can’t make a call. Even on Mount Everest! The European mobile operator TeliaSonera won the race for 3G broadband and mobile coverage at Everest Base Camp, which at 5,000 metres is the highest mobile base station in the world. They also control the lowest mobile base station in the world, which is 1,400 metres below sea level in a European mine. The worldwide scale of mobile phone ownership is staggering. There are nearly five billion mobile phone users worldwide and that figure is predicted to reach six billion by 2013. Mobile telecommunications have quickly become a necessity in our everyday lives both professionally and personally. To meet this rapid expansion in use, phone towers and base stations are being erected at a precipitous rate. More than www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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1.4 million base stations exist worldwide, and the number is increasing significantly with the introduction of third-generation (3G) and fourthgeneration (4G) technology. But at what cost?
Contrary to WHO claims that this technology— from wireless signal towers to cell phones themselves—is safe, there is extensive scientific, epidemiological and medical evidence from around the world that suggests that long-term exposure to electromagnetic microwave radiation emitted from base stations and towers has significant and even severe adverse effects on our health. Children are particularly vulnerable. To date research about the possible deleterious health effects of mobile telecommunications has focused mainly on the risk of brain tumours, but the risk extends to many types of cancer and other illnesses. A growing number of medical and scientific experts foresee the rise of an overwhelming health crisis. A warning about the uncertain state of affairs comes from Lloyd Morgan, a member of the Washington, DC-based Bioelectromagnetics Society, an independent organization of biological and physical scientists, physicians and engineers interested in the interactions of non-ionizing radiation with biological systems. He said, “Exposure to cell phone radiation is the largest human health experiment ever undertaken, without informed Quantum Health 19
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consent, and has over four billion participants enrolled.” So who and what are we, the public, to believe? Is this technology safe or are the health concerns real? Furthermore, who regulates the industry? Why do local communities have so little control over the placement of phone towers? Why is the equipment related to the towers sometimes hidden? What are officials and the industry not telling us?
The Problem of Base Stations The potential health threat from wireless communications technology is electromagnetic radiation (EMR). EMR is non-ionizing radiation that is emitted by both wireless and non-wireless technologies: cordless phones, mobile phones, base stations (phone towers, antennas), radio broadcast antennas, WIFI networks, microwave ovens, televisions, computers and many other technologies. The problem with mobile telephony is that the signal is wireless—it is indiscriminately broadcast across vast distances 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no respect for what or who may be in its path. Mobile phones rely on the relay of radio frequency signals (RF), which originate from, are received by and then are resent from base stations that form an extensive network across a country and around the world. Base stations usually consist of an equipment cabinet or hut, and the antennas are mounted on a support structure. Base station antennas are usually located on the most suitable structure in the area, for example on an existing building, tower or structure. Sometimes a new tower or mast is required if there are no existing structures. Each base station is connected to the main telephone network via either a microwave link using a small dish antenna or an optical fibre cable. As base stations and wireless networks proliferate, so does our exposure to electromagnetic radiation microwaves. Although there is mounting evidence of a correlation between heavy mobile phone use and brain tumours, our exposure from the phones themselves is intermittent and voluntary. In 20 Quantum Health
contrast, our exposure to the wireless EMR signals from base stations is continuous and involuntary. The health impact from mobile telecommunications signals has yet to be definitively established, but many scientists are raising the alarm. The evidence is in dispute because it is contradictory and dependent on its source: industry-sponsored studies tell us this technology is safe whereas many independent researchers tell us it potentially is not. Because of the vast sums of money involved and the politics of public health versus industry and economics, it is difficult to know whose data to trust for its objectivity. Furthermore, past denials of potential health threats in relation to other products by industry, government officials and even medical professionals make it hard to trust them now on this issue. For example, governments and medical professionals used to tell us that cigarettes did not cause lung cancer, and that asbestos and thalidomide were safe. So it is difficult for many of use to make a blanket acceptance of claims now by our leaders and authority figures that there is no evidence that exposure to the EMR www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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The Evidence for Adverse Health Effects
and RF signals from mobile phones and base stations is correlated to any adverse health consequences. Because of the controversy, many telecom companies are relying of public relations firms to soothe public concern. For example, the Australian mobile telecom giants Telstra, Optus and Vodafone/Hutchison have hired BursonMarsteller, one of the largest public relations agencies in the world, to help them manage their public presence. But the public relations firms themselves increase the controversy because they call into question the notions of truth, trust and scientific independence. Corporate Watch UK describes Burson-Marsteller as bringing “to bear state of the art techniques in manipulating the mass media, legislators and public opinion.” They previously ran the National Smokers Alliance with money from the Philip Morris Company, targeting politicians who supported anti-smoking legislation with a strategy that built confusion and doubt about the scientific validity of health issues and tobacco use.
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A few years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement that cancer is unlikely to be caused by cellular phones or their base stations based on current medical and scientific consensus. “From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF signals produced by base stations. Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.” However, it is important to note that their studies are based on the thermal (heating) effects of radiation, which considers that rises in tissue or body temperature of about 1.0 Celsius or more are required before any adverse biological effects will occur. What they are missing is the significant and serious non-thermal effects from chronic long-term exposure. There is substantial evidence of serious health effects from long-term exposure at non-thermal levels, where the intensity of the electromagnetic microwave radiation was too low to cause tissue heating. The non-thermal effects are recognized by experts on EMR and health to be potential health hazards, and safe levels of EMR exposure for these low-intensity, nonthermal effects have not yet been established. There is increasing concern amongst experts regarding EMR and its possible links to a variety of disorders including cancer, autoimmune diseases, neurological degenerative disorders and infertility. Those concerns are greatly increased when it comes to children, where EMR exposure has been strongly linked to childhood leukaemia and neuro-behavioural problems. A study conducted by Dr. Bruce Hocking, of Australia, found that children living near three TV and FM broadcast towers (similar to cell towers) in Sydney had more than twice the rate of leukaemia than children living more than seven miles away. A number of European countries already have guidelines that limit the proximity of mobile phone towers to schools and places where children congregate for long periods given the even greater health concerns regarding children. Quantum Health 21
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The New South Wales Teachers Federation has accepted this view, and supports the principle that mobile phone towers should not be located within 300 metres of school grounds. However, the large telecommunications carriers have placed their towers not only near but sometimes within the perimeters of many schools across the country. Sylvia Hale, Greens MP in Parliament in 2004, voiced an opinion shared by many that non-political and non-business oversight is necessary: “Parents with children at these schools, at every school, have a right to be consulted about the location of towers. Under current loopholes in the Telecommunications Act, telecommunication companies need to notify principals of affected schools, but the State Government does not require the principal to take any action or to notify parents or staff.” More than fifteen years ago, Dr. Tan Barnett, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, completed a landmark document and literature review examining the health hazards of electromagnetic radiation. He said, “Whilst researching the scientific data it has become evident that subtle changes in cell structure and biochemistry have been frequently reported at exposure levels where gross thermal change could not be attributed as a cause.” Dr. Neil Cherry, who is now deceased but was a leading New Zealand biophysicist and electromagnetic radiation meta-analyst, reviewed more than 600 studies worldwide. His findings were in direct conflict with those of the telecommunications industry. He found conclusively that EMR caused serious non-thermal effects such as DNA breakages, chromosome abnormalities, altered brain activity and increased oncogene (cancer gene) activity. The biological changes greatly increased the cancer rates at levels that were lower than the Australian standard, which was based on thermal effects only. Following a 120-page review of nearly 200 scientific studies, Dr. Cherry said that “to claim there is no adverse effect from phone towers flies in the face of a large body of evidence.” He further warned that “public health surveys 22 Quantum Health
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of people living in the vicinity of cell site base stations should be being carried out now, and continue progressively over the next two decades. This is because effects such as miscarriage, cardiac disruption, sleep disturbance and chronic fatigue could well be early indicators of the adverse health effects. Symptoms of reduced immune system competence, cardiac problems, especially of the arrhythmic type, and cancers, especially brain tumour and leukaemia, are probable.” Dr. Vini Khurana, an Australian neurosurgeon, also reviewed the evidence for health risks associated with phone towers and their base stations. The studies consistently pointed to adverse health effects, including cancer, in populations living within 500 metres of a base station, even though none of the studies reported exposures above the accepted international guidelines. Thus, Dr. Khurana suggests that the current guidelines are inadequate for protecting the population, and he is greatly concerned about the effects of EMR exposure, seeing deep conflicts of interest between governments, industry and the scientists they hire to do their research. He said, referring to the increase in brain tumours and other malignancies medical professionals are seeing in those living close to base stations, “It will be another decade yet before we clearly see the full impact of all this. What I cannot understand is that no-body is asking why?” Australian Public Health expert Sarah Benson in an extensively researched discussion paper titled “Join the Dots−An Overview of Public Health Trends in 2007” showed conclusively the adverse non-thermal effects on health of electromagnetic radiation. She noted that in the previous fifteen years worldwide there had been a dramatic increase in illnesses such as cancers, heart disease, obesity, asthma, allergies and diabetes in Australia and that there was “only one significant new factor: the sudden explosion in wireless communications technology which began in Australia 15 years ago.” Scientists from elsewhere are sounding the same warning call. The American President’s Cancer Panel reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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been grossly underestimated” and the panel named cell phones, towers and other wireless technologies as potential causes of cancer. They urged that further research be carried out and that precautions be taken now. More than 100 scientists and physicians at Boston university’s and Harvard University’s Schools of Public Health have called cell phone towers a radiation hazard. An overwhelming majority of the European Parliament in April 2009 voted for policy changes based on “health concerns associated with electromagnetic fields.” Among the actions called for were a review of the scientific basis and adequacy of the EMF [exposure] limits, a consideration of the biological effects when assessing the potential health impacts of electromagnetic radiation and further research to address potential health problems. The WHO statement that “cancer is unlikely to be caused by cellular phones or their base stations based on current medical and scientific consensus” has become the mantra for governments and the mobile telecommunications industry worldwide. As an example, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) adopted the electromagnetic radiation safety standard recommended by WHO and the International Commission for Non Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). Those standards were adopted by all mobile network carriers. But there are legitimate concerns regarding WHO and ICNIRP and their apparent independence from the telecommunications industry. EMR standards and public health advisor Dr. Don Maisch, in an article entitled “Conflict of Interest and Bias in Health Advisory Committees,” noted that the industry had significant influence on the decision-making process involved in setting EMR standards and making the scientific claims that there are no health risks. Despite the fact that both WHO and ICNIRP claim that they “do not allow industry to participate in either standard setting or in health risk assessment,” there is compelling evidence to the contrary. He notes that it was “highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a WHO health document (the Electromagnetic Field document) to be reviewed by so many with such strong ties to the affected industry. . . .” In fact, the www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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Belgian magazine Imagine reported that WHO was “receiving even more industry money than previously disclosed.” EMR Australia is a company that conducts research and offers solutions to problems about electromagnetic radiation (EMR) for the workplace, local government, health professionals and the home. Lyn McLean, the director, has over 15 years’ experience investigating electromagnetic radiation and its effects on biological systems. She sees an “absolute collusion between government and the mobile carriers” where research funding is allocated and spent by the industry. She is distrustful of WHO and its claims, noting “when independent scientists find evidence of great concern with health effects of EMR exposure from phones and their towers, they are publicly maligned by WHO.” In addition, Dr. Gerard Hyland, a physicist who was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in medicine, says, “Existing safety guidelines for cell phone towers are completely inadequate. Quite justifiably, the public remains sceptical of attempts by governments and industry to reassure them that all is well, particularly given the unethical way in which they often operate symbiotically so as to promote their own vested interests.”
What Can You Do? Do you have cause to be concerned? Is there a base station near you? Chances are there is one or there soon will be. Here in Australia, currently there are 17,000 base stations around the country and plans are underway to add another 1,000 over the next year. There are more than 350 in Sydney’s central business district alone. In Australia you can locate nearby towers by entering your postcode into the Radio Frequency National Site Archive (RFNSA) website, www. rfnsa.com/au, which is run by the mobile carrier giants. In the UK, go to www.sitefinder.ofcom. org/UK and in the US go to www.antennasearch. com. However, you might be surprised to know that not all telecom base camps have to be reported or revealed to the public. There are many loopholes to reporting tower locations. Quantum Health 23
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For instance, in Australia the siting of mobile phone towers is governed by the Federal Telecommunications Act, which currently exempts mobile phone carriers from seeking State and/ or local planning approval, and which allows telecom companies to install antennas that they deem to be “low impact.” What does that mean? It refers to visual impact only and does not take into account other impacts, such as on health. Therefore, if equipment is installed unobtrusively on an existing structure, such as a building or light pole, the company does not have to obtain consent from any planning authority. In this way the carriers are able to circumvent all normal development consent processes. Carriers also seek out soft targets such as cash-strapped sporting clubs, local shops with absentee landlords, and publicly owned or publicly managed property and parks on which to site their equipment. Industry spokespersons defend such placements by intoning a message that has become almost an industry mantra. “People want to use their mobiles and have good and reliable reception,” says Matt Evans, from Australia’s Mobile Carriers Forum, and as it is becoming increasingly difficult to find “good sites” the companies must “balance the competing priorities between communities and the network needs.” Good sites are what the industry calls “low visual impact sites,” which are sites that blend into the environment, where there is minimal community scrutiny and where property values won’t be affected. “If that means hiding them so communities don’t get upset, then that’s what is done,” Evans explains.
The Precautionary Principle There is no question that more research is needed. Unfortunately, those who would be able to fund major studies are the very same organisations (mobile carrier giants) that would be disadvantaged if a definite link between cell phone towers and cancer were established. One notorious case that demonstrates this conflict of interest—and outright intimidation—is that of Dr. George Carlo, often called a mobile industry whistleblower. A public health scientist, epidemiologist, lawyer and the founder of the Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington, 24 Quantum Health
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DC, he headed the $28.5 million research program funded by the cell phone industry from 1993 to 1999. When he presented his findings to the US government regarding the dangers posed by mobile phones, which included his estimation of “500,000 US citizens a year by 2010 contracting cancer and 25% of the population by 2014 as a direct result of mobile phone abuse,” the industry sought to silence him. Dr. Carlo rejected their offers of financial reward in exchange for not publicising his data. Subsequently, Carlo and his family were threatened physically, his finances were threatened and one of his homes was burned down in suspected arson. One of the health parameters Carlo was supposed to ratify was specific absorption rates based on thermal effects as a method or guideline for cell phone handset safety. This, like the ICNIRP guidelines for mobile phone base station and tower safety, as Carlo discovered, was completely the wrong issue to look at. It is the non-thermal effects that need studying, for they appear to be correlated to the health risks from wireless signals. He has since spoken about the dangers of other wireless technology and warned the industry not to take the same route as the tobacco industry did in buying science and falsely advising that there were no adverse health effects. If phone towers are causing cancer, it will take several years of exposure to reveal any correlation, and then there would have to be an unexpectedly high occurrence of disease amongst the exposed population to convince sceptics that there is a cause-and-effect link. The damage from radiation exposure accumulates over many years, but the breakdown in health happens only after all body defences and repair mechanisms have been exhausted. Dr. Khurana says, “My concern is that the precautionary principle is ignored and we don’t yet know what the real dangers are long term.” The Precautionary Principle puts forward the “commonsense” notion that decision-makers should be cautious when assessing potential health or environmental harms in the presence of scientific evidence which is insufficient, inconclusive or uncertain or preliminary scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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A more strident warning comes from Dr. Don Maisch, who believes the public must take action by informing themselves and questioning the evidence and issues. “The mystique of expert infallibility cannot be maintained when a concerned and well informed public becomes involved in the process. When all is said and done, it is only by this process that the foundations for a true and trustworthy risk assessment for society can be laid.”
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To claim there is no adverse effect from phone towers flies in the face of a large body of evidence.
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grounds for concern that there may be potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal or plant health. “The debate must at least be had,” says Dr. Khurana. “No-one is saying get rid of the technology, we are saying examine ways of making it safer and ensuring the community is not at risk.”
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Dr. Valerie Malka is a trauma and general surgeon with particular interests in education and quality assurance, as well as being an Advanced Trauma Life Support Director and Definitive Surgical Trauma Care Course Instructor. She is also the founder and convener of Austrauma, a Trauma, Critical Care and Emergency Surgery Conference, the largest conference of its kind in Australia. Her greatest passion is in humanitarian work, having joined and worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Rescue Committee. She completed a Masters Degree in International Public Health with a major in Humanitarian Law. She has recently completed a Masters of Art degree in journalism and has begun fulfilling her life-long passion of writing. She can be reached at
[email protected].
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More Evidence of the Benefits of Meditation
Science in the News
Two studies have recently come out of the University of California−Los Angeles (UCLA) that are showing the significant physical and mental health benefits of meditation. One study revealed how long-term meditation restructures the brain to enhance cognition. The other shows how meditation not only reduces stress but also confers body-wide health benefits, especially as relates to cellular aging.
Your Brain on Meditation UCLA researchers recently uncovered new brainhealth benefits associated with meditation. We all know that meditation over the long term has health benefits, such as reducing stress, enhancing creativity and increasing selfawareness, and now it is known to also increase “gryification” of the brain. This is the folding or furrowing in the cortex of the brain. It is generally thought that the more folding in your brain, the faster information is processed, which enhances cognition. Previously researchers at UCLA had discovered other beneficial brain changes in experienced meditators, including more robust connections between brain cells and a beneficial thickening of the brain. This new finding about increased gryification and the associated enhancements in information processing, memory and cognitive skills adds to the evidence that meditation is good for your brain and good for you.
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Dr. Eileen Luders, who headed the study, which was originally published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, says that her research findings indicate that the longer a person meditates, the more his or her brain changes. This finding supports other research evidence that our brains are indeed more “plastic” than once thought. Neuroplasticity means that the brain changes—not just in function but in form as well—in response to environmental signals and stimulation. The study imaged the brains of 23 active meditators, all of whom had at least 20 years of meditation experience, although study subjects practiced a variety of types of meditation. A control group was comprised of 16 subjects who were not meditators but who were matched for other characteristics with the meditators. Using MRI imaging, researchers were able to detect marked differences in the brains of the active, long-term meditators from those of the control subjects. The meditators had significantly more furrowing across a wide swath of their cortex. The cerebral cortex is the outermost layer of the brain that is involved in memory, attention, thought and consciousness. What’s more, the findings suggest that the longer you meditate, the greater the beneficial changes in your brain. Specifically, those who had been regularly meditating the greatest number of years had the greatest amount of furrowing in an area of the brain called the anterior dorsal insula. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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study, the meditators showed significantly fewer symptoms of depression—which is a common problem for caregivers—than the control group members. The meditators also showed significant improvement in overall mental health and cognitive functioning.
Your Cells on Meditation In a separate study, other UCLA researchers explored how even brief periods of meditation might help relieve stress for the caregivers of people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They found that it did indeed work to reduce stress, but it also conferred other, more surprising benefits at the cellular level. In the pilot study, 49 family caregivers, ranging in age from 45 to 91, were randomized into two groups. One group was taught a yogic meditation called Kirtan Kriya that includes chanting, mudras (finger poses) and visualization. They meditated each day for twelve minutes over eight weeks. The other group served as a control, and they were tasked with simply sitting, relaxing and listening to calming instrumental music (provided for them on CD) for the same amount of time every day over the study period. At the end of the www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
Science in the News
Luders said, “The insula has been suggested to function as the hub for autonomic, affective and cognitive integration. Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding in the insula.”
However, researchers found additional benefit to the meditators at the cellular level—increased telomerase activity. Telomerase is an enzyme that maintains the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes, which forms little caps or end pieces that are called telomeres. Shortened telomeres are known to be correlated to a number of health risks and diseases. If there is insufficient or no telomerase enzymatic activity, then each time a cell divides the telomeres get shorter and shorter. If they get too short, the cell dies. Psychological stress is associated with reduced telomerase activity. However, since telomeres naturally shorten over time from cell division, this process also is correlated with “cellular aging.” Apparently, Kirtan Kriya meditation, by increasing telomerase activity, slows this cellular aging process significantly and confers cells with greater immunity from damage. The meditators showed a whopping 43 percent increase in telomerase activity compared to only a 3.7 percent increase for the control group. The pilot study results were “striking,” said Dr. Helen Lavretsky, given the improvements that were shown in mental health, cognition, and telomerase activity over such a brief number of weeks and from such a short period of daily meditation. “We found that the effects on cognitive and mental functioning and telomerase activity were specific to the Kirtan Kriya. Because Kirtan Kriya had several elements of using chanting, mudras and visualization, there was a ‘brain fitness’ effect in addition to stressreduction that contributed to the overall effect of the meditation.” Lavretsky plans a follow-up study to provide further confirmation of these finding by conducting a neuro-imaging study of the brains of Kirtan Kriya meditators.
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Evidence Accrues for Acupuncture Recent research has verified the benefits of acupuncture for various ailments and health conditions. Here is a short sampling of some of the findings:
Science in the News
• In a study with laboratory rats, acupuncture has been found to help protect the liver from fibrogenesis and injury when used in conjunction with oral curcumin. • Scalp acupuncture has been shown to help relieve vascular dementia. In a trial of 184 patients, those who received acupuncture on the scalp, instead of the body, showed improvements in day-to-day functioning, cognition and social behaviour. • A Chinese study has revealed that needling the Governor (GV 20 and GV 14) and Conception vessels promotes neural regeneration after cerebral ischemia injury. Cerebral ischemia is a reduction of oxygen to the cerebrum, and when prolonged can lead to cardiac infarction. Acupuncture at these specific points appears to promote the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing vessels. • A host of studies has shown the effectiveness of acupuncture in treating infertility. Results indicate acupuncture, electroacupuncture and/ or laser acupuncture upped the success of in vitro fertilization and increased the rate of live birth rates when administered near the time of either oocyte aspiration or controlled ovarian hyperstimulation. One study also showed that acupuncture helps prevent egg implantation failure.
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• In a meta-analysis of 29 reliable studies, covering 18,000 patients, acupuncture has been confirmed to be effective for chronic pain, especially for back and neck pain, osteoarthritis and chronic headache. Despite another study recently done specifically on migraine headaches that failed to show the physical efficacy of acupuncture treatments for this type of headache, a German study recently revealed that migraine sufferers, as well as those with other kinds of chronic or acute pain, reported subjectively that they felt significantly better after receiving acupuncture. The German study also explored the mechanisms for how acupuncture might relieve pain. They zapped people’s ankles with short bursts of electricity and, using brain imaging, recorded how the pain centres of the brain responded. Then they repeated the zaps and immediately followed them with the insertion of acupuncture needles. When they did, the pain centres of the brain appeared significantly calmer. So while researchers don’t know exactly how insertion of the acupuncture needles physiologically affected the brain, they now have hard evidence that it does. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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n this issue’s book reviews I am doing something different—reviewing two books that are a few years old. Why? Because if you missed them, it’s worth your time to go back and read them. These two books couldn’t be more different. One is about some of the most persuasive and well-controlled lab experiments in energy healing every conducted. The other is about how to communicate in a way that not only cuts through the white-noise clutter but that makes your message “stick” in the minds of your audience.
THE ENERGY CURE: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF HANDS-ON HEALING By William Bengston, PhD, with Sylvia Fraser
Remember the saying “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”? That maxim usually applies, until now. Now there is evidence for hands-on energy healing that not only sounds incredible but is incredible—and it’s real. There is very little ambiguity involved in the experiments conducted by William Bengston, PhD, and recounted in his 2010 book The Energy Cure.
Book Review
There is a strain of mice that are bred for conventional medical research on mammary cancer. When injected with a particular strain of mammary cancer cells, all the mice die. None has ever lived longer than 27 days. As the researchers work to find a treatment for this type of mammary cancer, they know with certainty that unless they have a viable treatment, all the mice—without exception, in any lab around the world, in every experiment—will die. This strain of cancer is 100% lethal to these mice. Or at least it was until William Bengston, a professor of sociology who “accidently” learned energy healing, began trials on a particular method of hand-on healing. Then, suddenly, all of the mice survived. Some died from other causes, but not one died from mammary cancer. And not only did the mice survive, but they somehow acquired immunity to this cancer despite being injected with thousands of times the normally lethal dose of these cancer cells.
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Was there something special about William Bengston’s ability to heal? Hardly believing his initial results, Bengston was determined to find out. So, he and his colleagues enlisted the help of totally sceptical professors, researchers and students. He taught them the healing method, although at that point it was hardly formulated into anything that could be called a method, and many of their mice survived as well. Those mice also developed immunity to this cancer. The experiments continued over many years, and the results remained the same. The only viable explanation for the survival of these mice was the energy healing they had been the beneficiaries of. Since that time, Bengston has gone on to treat people with all kinds of illnesses and diseases. Many were cured. Of those who weren’t, many received relief and improvement in their conditions. Sometimes the healing failed. Like anything else, when scaling up from mice to people, the complexity increases as well. However, Bengston has continued cataloguing the results of his healing work and experiments. He has discovered that fast, aggressive diseases, such as certain types of cancer, heal better from energy healing than do those diseases, such as Parkinson’s and arthritis, that take a long time to develop. He has discovered that the patient’s belief in the healing doesn’t seem to matter, although he has also learned that despite what they say many people unconsciously really don’t want to heal. The experiments themselves are fascinating, but so is the psychology of healing that Bengston uncovers as he explores his own talent for energy healing and that of others. He has since developed a methodology for learning energy healing, and he shares it in this book and in workshops. If you missed this book when it was first published, I urge you go back and read it now—and, perhaps, learn the techniques and try energy healing yourself. Sounds True, 2010, 978-1591799115, paperback US: $18.95, UK: £23.86
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Books reviewed by Joan Parisi Wilcox
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
An employee at a leading upscale store refunds money to a customer for a purchase bought at another store—and his company praises him for it. An Army cook, supplied only with the standard military culinary ingredients, creates a mess hall that is the military equivalent of a five-star restaurant. A fast-food restaurant owner spots a local story that becomes one of the all-time most popular advertising campaigns in US history. A high-tech entrepreneur shows up for a meeting at a premier venture capital firm totally unprepared yet ends up wowing the financiers. What do all these people have in common? Their actions and achievements depended on “getting the message right.” It might seem odd to see a book about communications being reviewed in Quantum Health magazine, but I guarantee you it is relevant. We all know the problems that can crop up in communication, and now, thanks to this book, we have the solutions. Whether talking to your spouse or kids, teaching in a workshop or in the classroom, talking to patients and clients, delivering a lecture, debating with an adversary, or marketing a product or service, you owe it to yourself to get your message across effectively. To do that, you have to make your message “stick,” and this is the book to teach you how. As a professional writer for more than thirty years, including a couple of years in advertising, I have read scores of books about writing, communication and formulating messages, but I have never come across a book that made such an impression on me. The Heath brothers write, “Given the importance of making ideas stick, it’s surprising how little attention is paid to the subject.” So, they set out to determine why www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
some ideas succeed and others don’t—and their analysis is brilliant. They show you all the traps of poor communication and then provide the solutions. And there’s nothing boring or stuffy about the way they get their own message across. This book will engage you from the first page and keep you interested until the last. The Heath brothers have “stickiness” down! So, just what is a “sticky” message? One by which “your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact—they change your audience’s opinions and behavior.” Despite what you may think, just about any message, idea or communication can be made sticky. The formula for doing so is encapsulated in the acronym SUCCES: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. The Heath brothers describe what these techniques mean and how best to use them. You will learn from the mistakes and successes of others— discovering how they got into communications hot water and how they got themselves out of it. The pay-off is that you, too, will be able to improve your communications, including finding the core of your message, capturing people’s attention, getting others to quickly and accurately understand and remember your core ideas, making people care about what you say, and motivating them to act on your ideas.
Book Review
MADE TO STICK: WHY SOME IDEAS SURVIVE AND OTHERS DIE
It’s one thing to have a great idea or an important message. It’s another thing altogether to communicate it so well that others immediately “get it” and so share your passion. Make it “sticky” and you will dramatically up your chances for success. US: Random House, 2007/2008, 978-1-4000-6428-1 Hardback, $26.00 UK: Arrow, 2008, 978-0-0995-0569-3, Paperback, £7.99
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W
hile healthcare practitioners primarily consider themselves healers, if they are selfemployed then they have an equally important role as businessperson. Healthcare is a business, whether you are in the conventional medical arena or an alternative and complementary (CAM) medicine field. After creating my own thriving CAM practice and consulting with others to do the same, I have compiled a list of important approaches that CAM practitioners can use to expand their business and thrive. In this article, I share a few key tips. The bottom line in business for many CAM practitioners is that they undervalue their services and themselves—they simply don’t change enough. I hope by the end of this article you will be taking steps to make sure your fees are in line with your real value.
Become Framework Independent Framework independence is a term from psychology that means “the ability to go against convention.” In essence, it means thinking outside the box, and in CAM this is a way of being in relation to conventional medicine. We have all heard of our intelligence quotient (IQ), but there are other types of intelligence as well, such as spiritual intelligence and emotional intelligence, and they are important for approaching the world in a well-rounded way. Each of our multiple types of intelligence influences our ability to develop framework independence.
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All these types of intelligence have an impact on our physiology—through our emotions, beliefs, thoughts and personality styles. That’s why a CAM motto is to “treat the whole person.” In this regard we are “framework independent” from the more conventional medical view, where genes, organs and the material/biochemical are the focus of explaining and treating illness. However, CAM practitioners can be as specialised as conventional medical professionals, and they may even become trapped in thinking their modality is the best or only way to foster health. This is why framework independence is so crucial. It means that while we are not easily swayed by the pressure to conform to popular or majority decision or conventional www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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thinking, we also are open-minded and considerate of alternative theories—able to listen to others points of view, be receptive to criticism and critique, and welcome diversity. Developing both skills is crucial to being a successful CAM practitioner. In terms of working on the frontier of medicine and defending research when challenged, Dr. Kilmer McCully, the discoverer of the link between high homocysteine levels and the increased risk of heart disease, provides a good example. The conventional view did not accept his theory and research, and in fact, it was roundly rejected for decades, and ultimately he was dismissed from Harvard Medical School for insisting on his view. Now, more than 20 years later, his theory has been vindicated and this knowledge is now part of conventional medicine. Dr. McCully was once asked at a conference if he had any regrets about so vigorously defending his research to the point of the loss of a prestigious career. He said that while he did not have any personal regrets, he did regret that approximately three million people died before his research findings were accepted by “convention.” Dr. McCully and so many other frontier scientists are extreme examples of having to defend against other people’s lack of framework independence. It is important to realize that framework independence works both ways—as CAM practitioners we must have the courage to resist the conventional opinion when we know it is not complete or is wrong, but at the same time we don’t want to display the same lack of flexible thinking and openness to change by becoming entrenched in our personal beliefs either. Developing and practicing framework independence is not only a way to remain open at the personal level, but is a core feature of businesses that grow and expand. As new research is conducted, your CAM practice may have to respond or shift. As the marketplace changes, so does the businessperson. As clients change, so does the business and service offerings. As the economy shifts, so does marketing and pricing and so on. All of these shifts involve being framework independent. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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Balance Your Idea of Service Richard Barrett, the author, speaker and social commentator on the evolution of human values in business and society, wrote in his latest book, The New Leadership Paradigm, that business leaders in the twenty-first century need to stop being obsessed with being the best business in the world, but instead create a new set of values and foster a new vision to become instead the best business for the world. Recent events in the financial world have caused many of us to seriously challenge corporate greed, short-term thinking and myopic versions of self-interest. There is now more emphasis than ever on the need for a “service to others” mentality as opposed to “service to self.” Management leaders are now more open than ever to hiring “servant leaders” who will use their positions for the betterment of everyone rather than for only a single group or institution. Interestingly, in my experience, this shift in values is not something that is so often needed or required in the world of CAM practitioners. In fact, we seem if anything to suffer from the opposite extreme, something that could be called “helper syndrome.” Many of us may have rejected other corporate professions or left them because our natural inclination already is to help and serve others. If corporate big cheeses tend to look after themselves too much, CAM practitioners don’t tend to look after themselves enough. This lack of self-care is, in my experience, a major problem in the CAM community. Many CAM practitioners are empathetic, caring people who naturally focus outwards on helping others. Many of us are Type 2 on the Enneagram System of Nine Personality Types—people who need to be needed by others and whose self-worth and sense of moral right and wrong are tied up with being a giving, serving person. The Enneagram System of Nine Personality Types is a system for psychological typing that has been developed partly through perennial wisdom and partly through the work of different psychology practitioners. Typing is not about categorising, judging or limiting a person, Quantum Health 33
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but more about increasing self-awareness in order to best utilise and even transcend a particular trait. Unfortunately, people with “helper syndrome” tend to take self-sacrifice to extremes, believing that looking after yourself is the same as being selfish. A few years ago, I observed a wave of burnout amongst many CAM practitioners, including amongst the most successful, busy practitioners. The core reason was lack of self-care. The lesson I and others learned from that is we serve others better by also turning the “healer” aspect of ourselves inwards for ourselves as often as we do outwards toward others. The practitioner has to come first so that he or she is operating at a level whereby the service rendered is always of a high order. Ultimately, the lesson is about maintaining a balance between self and other. Just as the excessive masculine energy of corporate greed needs curtailing, the excessive feminine energy of overly nurturing needs to be evaluated as well. We serve ourselves and others best when we integrate the best of the masculine and feminine energies. A potential trap of our service orientation can be that we become almost addicted to being needed. We would do well to continually check 34 Quantum Health
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in with ourselves to evaluate whether we have crossed the boundary from helping clients to supporting their dependence on us. Leading CAM practitioner Dr. Deitrich Klinghardt often talks about the need for CAM practitioners to not create a parent-child relationship between themselves and their clients. After all, we never really change or heal others—we only facilitate our clients healing themselves. In fact, this is where learning to be “selfish” without guilt—making your own health and well-being a priority—can not only make you a better practitioner, but can also make you a positive example for your clients. What may surprise you is that the single most important measurement of whether you are taking care of yourself is how well your business is doing, which brings up the issue of pricing and fee structures.
Value Yourself and Your Service As a healthcare practitioner you are not only selling a therapy or modality—your expertise—as a healing option but also your time. If you are not succeeding financially in your practice, you can’t up your volume—there are only so many hours in a clinic day—but you can change your fees. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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Unfortunately, this is something that many CAM practitioners fail to do for a variety of reasons: their perceptions of what the market will bear, the overall state of the economy, comparing their fees to what other practitioners are charging and so on. It may surprise you to learn that a common business rule of thumb is that at least 20% of your clients should be rejecting working with you because your price is too high for them! There are often other core, and often unspoken, factors in low fees, including low self-esteem and self-confidence issues, and feelings of burnout or the flagging of physical energy or passion for your work. If you are resistant to raising your fees, check in about why. Is it scarcity thinking? Low self-esteem? Fear? Your fees are directly correlated to how well you serve as a CAM practitioner because they impact how well you balance your work and personal life, whether you have time for research and professional education, and how easily you can make time for personal development and creativity. Correct pricing is a crucial aspect of your level of success. Although it may seem obvious, you may be a gifted practitioner but a lousy business person. If so, admit it and get help! There are plenty of small-business consultants who can help. You can probably find a free networking group in your area. Or you could even trade your services with an accountant or business consultant. There are ways to get the help you need, but first you have to recognize that you need it. And, even if you are surviving and even thriving, you may still not have set your business up in a way which provides you the greatest rewards—rewards you deserve. So, set aside some time to evaluate your fee structure. As you do, consider these reasons you can’t afford to undercharge for your services: • As a helper type, when clients ask us for discounts or argue that they can’t pay our fees, we are tempted to do them a favour and offer a reduced price because we want to help them or don’t want to lose a client. But because you are in the business of selling your time and you can’t make time up in volume discounts, you’ll end up www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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working harder, putting in longer hours to make up for those discounts. By increasing prices, even modestly, and correctly charging for your time in the first place, you can probably keep the same number of clients, but you will be doing the same amount of work and earning more money. • Your price really does have an influence on how you attract clients. Sometimes when practitioners aren’t charging enough and they’re not charging the price that really reflects the value of the services they’re providing, a resentment factor arises—and energetically clients will feel this. It’s like the practitioner has put up an invisible “closed for business sign” that deters new business. Check to see if you have any hidden resentments against clients who don’t seem willing to pay for your value and if that might be keeping you from attracting new clients. • If you’re undercharging, you may have to work five days per week and have no time or money to invest in your ongoing personal and professional development. This means that over time the services you offer your patients may not be keeping up with the latest innovations and advances. In the long term, if you don’t invest in yourself, you will lose clients to more innovative practitioners • When you undercharge and end up working too many hours, you are at risk of cutting corners, so the quality of your work may be affected. At some point you’re going to end up underpreparing for consultations, which may affect efficacy as well as the safety of treatment because you are tired and verging on burnout. • Working too many hours means you don’t have the time to step back and think strategically about your business. As Michael Gerber says, you have to put in time working on your business rather than putting all of your time working in your business. When you work on your business, you spend quality time looking at the larger picture of why you are offering the services you do and how you might work smarter. And, you have adequate time for paperwork and admin work, for developing marketing strategies, looking at cost efficiencies, networking—all Quantum Health 35
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endeavours that make for a more efficient and successful business. • It won’t just be you who loses out if you undercharge and end up going out of business— the world loses out on what you have to offer.
Making the Leap to Higher Fees If you still don’t believe me that changing your fee structure won’t hurt you in the long term, let me use my own practice as an example. I once was a practitioner with a typical practice—a schedule full of appointments but the feeling that I wasn’t moving forward. Then I remade myself and my practice, repositioning myself as the provider of premium, specialized and high-value services. I valued myself, re-valued my offerings and restructured my practice. And I charge accordingly. Now, I only do about four consultations per week for an international group of patients. This allows me ample free time to do other things I love, such as create products that are not dependant on my presence in consultations, have more personal time to recharge and indulge in cooking and exercise and other activities that keep me fit and healthy and contented, conduct supplement research so that I stay at the cutting edge of what frontier science has to offer in health, organise clinical research on my protocols for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, create educational videos for my patients, run a group forum, travel internationally to conferences, write for health magazines and give back by supporting the regulatory body that oversees my profession.
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You may not be able to remake yourself as I have, but you can improve your bottom line. I promise you! I have developed a full-proof four-step process for calculating your fess and testing to see if you are charging enough for your services. You can access this free report on my website by signing up to the free newsletter at www. expertpractitioner.com. The report also contains the 7 Myths about Pricing, how to educate your patients to accept higher prices and how to deal with resistance and objections.
Find Your Inner Authority In truth, to value yourself properly you have to connect with your voice of authority. This is crucial, in my view, to becoming a higher profile and successful practitioner. Connecting with your voice of authority is connecting with that part of you that has total conviction about what you are doing and offering. And, it’s about voicing that belief. “Voicing” doesn’t have to be only through words—it can be through your fee structure. Your fees are part of your becoming a visible, credible person whom other people will naturally be curious about or drawn to. You can move from your voice of inner authority while also remaining framework independent, enjoying the benefits of both approaches to your profession. An issue that tends to keep practitioners from moving with a voice of authority is the credentialing process across disciplines. But having a string of acronyms after your name says nothing about your ability to provide great service. Let me tell you about my own showdown with this issue.
At least 20% of your clients should be rejecting working with you because your price is too high for them.
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My website for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME patients used to be called “CFS/ME Expert.” One day someone from some kind of society for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome emailed me and asked “Who are you to call yourself an expert?” I could guess from her title and the organisation she was involved with that she thought having conventional medical credentials was a requirement to be able to label yourself an expert. I don’t have conventional medical credentials. But her question motivated me to do some research about the definition of “expert.” I found the following bit of information in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: to be classified as an “international expert” you must have completed 10,000 hours in your area of expertise. I realised that just in consultations alone I had amassed more than 7000 hours in the area of CFS/ME health consultations. I had easily completed more than 3000 additional hours in research and study. So, yes, I consider myself an “expert” according to my area of experience and knowledge in this area. And I feel confident in telling you that your medical credentials—no matter how many degrees and professional training courses you may have completed—are not where your “voice of authority” comes from. It comes from within and from your own experience and knowingness. So ask yourself, “What experience do I have that makes me an expert in a particular area?” Value your formal education as well as your on-the-job education. Factor your research and experience into your fee structure. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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In conclusion, I ask you to take a long, hard look at how you feel about your own perceived value, for this self-scrutiny is really the key to your success, more so than the local and national economic situations, the saturation of practitioners in your specialty in your area and other aspects of the business that people tend to place above self-worth. Don’t be egoistic; be realistic. You owe it to yourself to take stock. And if you are asking yourself, even unconsciously, “Who am I to charge this much?” I ask you to take to heart the following quotation, from Marianne Williamson’s best-selling book A Return to Love. This message can easily be applied to the business of CAM: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . .Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.” Niki Gratrix is an award-winning CAM practitioner, thought leader, writer and speaker on CAM, mind-body medicine and spirituality. She runs a thriving international practice for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME patients (www. NikiGratrixEnergy.com), conducts courses for CAM practitioners in mind-body approaches to complex illness (www.expertpractitioner.com) and teaches about Co-Creation with the Higher Self (www.NikiGratrix.com).
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Research & Development in Energy Medicine
Research & Development
By Dr. Thornton Streeter, DSc The integrative approach to medicine has been greatly enhanced by recent advances and improvements in technologies that have widened our understanding as to what a human being is and, therefore, what the optimal course of treatment for a particular concern may be. In a modern hospital there is a vast array of screening tools such as blood work, sonography, CT scanning and MRI, but these are limited to assessing the physical body and often involve invasive procedures that tend to provide information about a disease when it is more advanced and difficult to treat. For many scientists, the limitations of the biochemical view of health and the urge to identify conditions when they are in their earliest stage have empowered them to look in other areas of the electromagnetic spectrum for answers. The real promise of the technologies discussed here is their ability to identify imbalances on both a physiological level and bio-energetic level, which reveal insights of an individual’s health trajectory into a particular disease state. In this issue of Quantum Health, I discuss biofield and biophotonic imaging technologies.
In 1965, Jacob Gershen-Cohen of the Albert Einstein Medical Center performed a study of more 4,000 cases of breast cancer where infrared thermal imaging showed 94% sensitivity and only a 6% false positive rate. The latest range of infrared imaging devices takes medical thermal analysis to a new level of accuracy. As more research is conducted and published we are seeing a clear picture that each disease has its own trademark infrared onset pattern. For example, in Figure 1, we see an image of a young man with the early warning signs of cardiac disease based on the clearly visible increase in inflammation along the carotid artery.
Imaging the Physical Body Medical thermal imaging is a non-invasive technique that although certified since 1982 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a Class 1 imaging device has largely been ignored by the medical establishment. Yet, it has huge potential in predictive and preventative screening.
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Figure 1
In the infrared image in Figure 2, we see increased thermal activity in the hand, which has been identified as an early warning sign of diabetes. www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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by Nigel Garion Hutchins and is manufactured at the historic Copeland laboratories. The JAK 3000 takes electrographic imaging to a new digital level.
Figure 2
These images reveal the power of medical thermal imaging as a preventative health tool and a quick, non-invasive tool for diagnosis.
Physicist Fritz-Albert Popp of the International Institute of Biophysics in Germany is a pioneer in the emerging science of biophotonic imaging and has spearheaded a growing interest in this form of biofield imaging. All living systems emit biophotons (ultraweak particles of light), but healthy individuals seem to leak less of them out into the environment. However, when a hands-on energy healer is working, a surge in biophotonic activity can be measured, increasing from an average of 300 biophotonic pulses a second up to levels as high as 10,000 biophotonic pulses a second, suggesting that energy is somehow being emitted by the healer and, presumably, received and used by the recipient’s biofield to enhance health and well-being. Now that we know about biophotons, we can better understand what “energy field” imaging has been measuring since its inception decades ago. We have been on a long journey since the first electrographic image was captured in France in the 1890’s. Semyon Kirlian gave us a more detailed understanding of how to image the energy body or energy signature of matter, and one particular technique for doing so—Kirlian photography—carries his name. The latest iteration of Kirlian imaging is the JAK 3000 technology (Figure 3), which was developed www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
Figure 3
The plant in Figure 4, which was imaged using the JAK 3000, reveals a rich array of detail in biophoton emissions.
Figure 4
The theory is that when this technology is applied to the human energy field, not just the current state of an individual’s physical health can be revealed, but also the individual’s future state of health.
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Gas Discharge Visualisation (GDV), now known as Electro-Photonic Imaging (EPI), is another energy imaging device. It was developed by Konstantin Korotkov in Russia, and it focuses on the analysis of both the human body and its etheric aspect. The corona discharge surrounding the fingertips is imaged and analyzed based on the photons emanating from the Su Jok meridian system. The symmetry, area, density and fractality of the corona are some of the main data used in subtle energy research. In Figures 5, you can see a standard GDV image of the full body biofield before and after a treatment modality has been used. In this way, the effects of the treatment can be gauged visually. Notice how breaks in the body-field are filled in after the treatment.
Figure 6
Like Korotkov in Russia, British scientist Harry Oldfield developed imaging techniques derived from the Kirlian method. However, after Richard Gerber, author of Vibrational Medicine, visited his laboratories, Oldfield switched his attention to a new live videographic technology that came to be known as PIP biofield imaging. In this technique, a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera is transformed into a sensitive light meter, revealing gradations of light intensity as visible colours.
Figure 5
Figure 6 shows the biofields of two students as one sends “love energy” to the other. You can actually see an energy stream entering the biofield of the “receiving” student on the right.
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In the series of images in Figure 7, you can see the benefit to energy medicine modalities that work with biophotonic exchange as the subtle energy interactions are made clearly visible. Thus, scientists have a new way of evaluating the efficacy of medicines from an energetic perspective. Since the standard double-blind method of evaluating medical techniques does not work well in the realm of energy medicine, this kind of biofield and biophotonic imaging technology provides a new and powerful way for complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners and frontier scientists to amass evidence for the efficacy of CAM treatments.
The Future of Biofield Imaging Looking to the future, we now have the core theory and technological knowledge to develop increasingly powerful non-invasive and predictive biofield assessment devices that will lead medicine down an entirely new path. Some of the promising technologies, amongst a host of them, that I would personally like to see receive research support and/or further development
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are the Hunt Vision camera, developed by Dr. Valerie Hunt, professor emeritus of the University of California−Los Angeles; the Ruth Drowns radionic camera; and Raymond Royal Rife’s universal microscope. I would also like to see additional study into the health applications of ultraviolet photography, which was first explored by Victor Inyushin. This photographic method is currently widely used in industry in the hightension electricity field for identifying otherwise invisible corona discharge. It might have myriad applications in the health field. In the next issue of Quantum Health, we will look at research and development taking place in the field of meridian imaging technologies. If you would like to find out more about energy medicine and imaging devices that are already available globally, visit www.energymedicine2012. com, a website I created and manage to bring together frontier scientists and energy medicine practitioners. This site is a resource for just about everything taking place in energy medicine. If you would like to contact me, please do so by email at drthornton@biofieldsciences.com or visit my website at www.livingenergysecrets.com/streeter
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Figure 7
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Conferences of Note 2012
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The Conference Calendar is a sampling of the notable conferences taking place across the globe. It is not an exhaustive listing. If you have a conference you would like others to know about, please email us the relevant information and we will evaluate it for inclusion in the calendar.
JUNE 2012 13-16
MAY 2012 13-15
22-26
Snow Bird, Utah
American Holistic Nurses Association 32nd Annual Conference www.ahna.org/Conference.aspx
June 14-17
San Francisco, California
Energy Kinesiology Association www.energyk.org/index.php/annualconference Berkeley, California
International Association 2nd Annual International for the Study of Dreams Conference on Integrative Annual Conference www.asdreams.org/subidxconfuture.htm Medicine Jerusalem, Israel
www.mediconvention.com
15-18
Portland, Oregon
Integrative Medicine and Health − International Research Conference http://imconsortium-congress2012.org
29 - June 3
www.scienceandnonduality.com
22-27
Cape Town, South Africa
30th International Congress of Psychology www.icp2012.com
San Diego, California
Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology https://m360.energypsych.org/event. aspx?eventID=33234
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16th Annual Meeting − Association for the Study of Consciousness http://theassc.org
Doorn, The Netherlands
Science and Nonduality Conference (Europe) May 31-June 3
JULY 2012 2-6 University of Sussex, Brighton, England
AUGUST 2012 August 2-5
San Antonio, Texas
Healing Touch Worldwide Conference www.healingtouchprogram.com/ conference/2012
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Durham, North Carolina
55th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association www.parapsych.org
San Diego, California
13th Annual Science and Clinical Application of Integrative Holistic Medicine Jointly sponsored with the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine
SEPTEMBER 2012 14-17
Naran, Japan
International Homeopathic Medical Society Conference www.lmhi.net
21-22
Firenze, Italy
Fifth European Congress for Integrative Medicine www.ecim-congress.org
OCTOBER 2012 October 8-10
28-November 1
NOVEMBER 2012 2-4
Toronto, Canada
7th IN-CAM Research Symposium www.incamresearch.ca
16-18
Sarwak, Malaysia
Alternative and Complementary Medicine Worldwide Conference www.acmconference.net
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Society for Integrative Oncology www.integrativeonc.org/index.php/eventshome
11-14
St. Charles, Illinois
American Music Therapy Association www.musictherapy.org/events
24-29
San Rafael, California
Science and Nonduality Conference (USA) www.scienceandnonduality.com
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Blinded by Science A Conversation with Matthew Silverstone By Sarah Turner, Science Editor
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atthew Silverstone is a British entrepreneur whose life was turned upside down when his teenage son became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. When Western science failed to find a cure, Matthew sought help from the practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine. He found a practitioner, Lloyd Geddes, who was able to lead his son to a full cure. However, some of the healing practices that Lloyd recommended, such as asking his son to touch a tree, confounded Matthew. How could touching trees aid healing? To find answers, Matthew began to conduct research in medicine and science. One insight led to another, and that discovery process changed Matthew’s life. He realized there was an enormous amount of frontier science that most people—including most conventional doctors—knew nothing about, including how nature can heal, how natural cycles and planetary influences affect the body, the nature of water and its relevance to health, and how the body works at an energetic and informational level. Eventually Matthew wrote a book, Blinded by Science, that compiled this astounding body of research for the layperson. In this interview, Sarah Turner, head of NES Health research and Quantum Health’s Science Editor, talks with Matthew about his discoveries.
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Was there something in particular that got your research started and that led to you writing the book? MS: The reason I wrote the book was because whilst my son was being treated in the early months, Lloyd, a healer we were working with, asked my son to go touch a tree; he said that it would help make him better or restore him. I thought it was one of the most ridiculous suggestions I’d ever heard. But I actually watched him touch a tree and have a physical reaction, and that physical reaction was the same as when he was with Lloyd doing a treatment. I wondered, How is it possible? How is it possible that a tree can affect us physically? So, pretty much a year later, when I started researching, I went to the British Library and looked up trees, all the research I could find on www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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trees and the behaviour of touching trees and all that sort of 1960’s LSD stuff like seeing colours when you are on acid, and I found that there was virtually no research on this aspect of trees. But I did find some good research about tree growth in relation to the planets. These were serious studies about tree growth in relation to the moon, Mars and Jupiter, and how there is a direct relationship between the cycles of the planets and moon and tree growth. Different trees have different growth patterns. From the whole idea of “how is that possible” I followed up on the whole planetary thing and its effect on biology. And researching one paper would take me to another paper—and it took me a year and a half to come up with the conclusion I did on water. Water was the key to it. It all took a very, very long time. And I understand why people don’t get it, because you have to join up all the dots. You have to go to research papers from physics, chemistry, biology, plant anatomy, astrophysics. . . . Once I understood the role of water and its special properties, then pretty much the whole book fell into place. I explain vibration first, and once you understand how everything vibrates, then you can understand the role of water.
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Would you describe your findings on vibration?
MS: Sure. It’s a very simple premise—that everything vibrates. When you go down to the very basic structure of the atom, you get vibrations. Every cell vibrates; they are like little electric circuits that give off vibrations and frequency, and stick a million different vibrations together and they perform one particular [holistic] frequency. So, all the different parts of any mass, which is pretty much everything in the universe, vibrate. Like the heart vibrates at its particular frequency, although not everyone’s heart is at the exact same frequency, as it will vibrate at a unique specific frequency depending on whose body it’s in. And then the whole vibrates differently than the parts, so you and I vibrate differently. This is not something that is debatable. This is a fact of physics. But it’s something that for some reason Western science misses—not Eastern belief Quantum Health 47
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systems or South American belief systems. There is a corruption of Western science so that it is not open to the blindingly obvious. What’s blindingly obvious is that everything vibrates. If you understand that everything vibrates, then—it’s the whole Gaia theory, where people say that everything is interlinked. It’s sort of a no-brainer, in as much as if everything vibrates then our thoughts and everything have a relationship to each other. You can measure a healing vibration. But for some reason science has chosen not to look at vibrations, and certainly not medical science, probably because there is no money in it. So everything has become chemically based as opposed to vibrationally based, which is a shame, because I have researched lots of science and it is unequivocal that everything vibrates. But it’s sad to have had to write an introductory chapter to remind people of this basic aspect of science that we should all take for granted. As an example, let’s use pancreatic cancer. There is some research from 1935 that suggested that this cancer may be due to a virus, and that if you blast the virus with the same frequency as the virus vibrates at then you can kill the virus and cancer cells. But this research was ignored or forgotten for decades. Then in 2011 medical specialists began to explore treating pancreatic cancer with ultrasound—with sound waves—as if this were a new idea. Vibration as a factor in health and illness is only now beginning to be accepted by modern science, but it is old science! It could revolutionize medicine, but because so few modern scientists know about it or even believe it is possible, we don’t yet have this kind of vibrational medicine.
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So we need more of an interdisciplinary approach in science to understand things. MS: Absolutely. Let me give you an example of something that is so obvious and yet we don’t understand it—our senses. We all take our senses for granted. We know what they are. But if you look at our senses, what are they? They are all vibrationally based. And yet science hasn’t 48 Quantum Health
stepped back and said, “Hold on, our senses are vibrationally based.” Like sound and light and taste—you can’t have taste without water—they are all vibrations. So, if our senses are vibrationally based it would logically follow that vibrations come first and biochemical reactions come second. But for some reason we have taken as fact that everything is chemically based and not vibrationally based. If we can reverse the order, then we can explain to science, and the world, that the vibrations cause the chemical reactions.
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Do you think things are starting to shift round?
MS: No! It’s like people trying alternative medicine. They only try it when conventional medicine has failed. It’s only through the failure of the drug companies that more people are trying homeopathic pills and alternative medicine. To change medical institutions, and the way medicine is taught, that is a fifty-year battle. For which I have done my little bit, maybe nudging people in a particular way. I don’t think many doctors will read my book. I don’t think many doctors will believe me because they will have to rethink so much. If I may digress a second. . . . I am a layperson, and yet I have discovered how I think blood flows around the body. The fact that I can come up with the simple little idea that the blood flows not in concentric circles but in spirals. . . They [conventional biologists] don’t understand that blood flows in a spiral! You know, I don’t expect much. I expect a few people to spread the word, mostly laypeople, maybe a few scientists. But pretty much we are preaching to the converted, which is a shame.
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Well, the newer generation, who are so used to field theory with the new technology, may get it more easily—that there is more to understand than the biochemical model. MS: Well, the problem I found with science is that it is quite regional. UK science compared with French science compared with Italian science—they aren’t necessarily going down the www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
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same route. For example, the biggest stuff about electromagnetics seems to be coming out of Italy. If it comes out of Russia, not many people will read it. From China, same thing. If it comes out of Italy, people will know of it only if it gets translated. Someone wrote to me recently and I thought it was one of the most exciting bits of research I’ve come across. But it’s in Italian, so you can’t get it published in the UK, can’t get it translated. It’s a book, Bioenergetic Landscape: Project for a Healing Bioenergetic Garden, in which the author, Marco Nieri, has done all the modelling and research to show how trees improve your health—specific trees for specific illnesses. He’s developed gardens in Italy and can clearly show specific trees can cure specific illnesses, simply by being near to them. That’s a 20-year science project. No one’s heard of it, and I’d never heard of it despite all my research, because it’s in Italian. The last chapter in my book sort of suggests that this is possible, but I couldn’t find the science to prove it, and he’s got the science! He’s developed a device to read the frequency of trees and the human body. So the problem is about where the science comes from, which countries. It’s a niche thing with peer-reviewed journals, in terms of who reads what.
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When you were doing all that research, what was most revelatory to you?
MS: I probably said, every day for a year and a half, “Why don’t we know this?” There was so much research but next to no one knows about it! One thing I liked the most was that nature can make us better. At the moment we have basically alienated ourselves from nature—from the sun, planets, trees, plants. We need to get back to nature. We’ve cut it out of our lives. That’s probably the biggest thing. Also, diet, what we eat, and where we live. That probably explains a lot of why we are sick, including myself and my family. We’re probably not as well as we otherwise might be.
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Have you changed your lifestyle since writing the book?
MS: Only that which I can change, which is diet. I don’t drink tap water and I haven’t for years. I drink only bottled water. I’ve made the changes that I can. I can’t change the fact that now when I log on I get thirty wireless signals in my home when I used to get one. I cannot not be on the mobile phone or not use the computer. I should live in the countryside in an isolated house! Obviously we can’t all do that. So I make the changes that I am able to without living a completely isolated life. But from a health perspective, I think if we all remember to get back to nature that would be the one key thing.
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In your book, you’ve devoted entire chapters to certain people, like J.C. Bose. Why? MS: The way I found Bose was through other people’s bibliographies, and I read something of his, I think it was on plant growth. Then I found his twelve books, and they are very unusual books. He simply relates his studies. Maybe he will write about a study he did and it’s four pages long, and then there is no conclusion. He just says, This is the study I did and this proves that, and let’s move on to the next one. And over twelve books and twenty years he just kept on developing those same principles of science. And he kept creating new machines, so he would get better results. I know that is not the normal thing to do, but I think everyone needs to go back and read his original research because then science would be far better. He’s an unsung hero.�He’s a genius, his work anticipated many technologies and principles that are now commonplace, and we need to spread the word about things he discovered that are not yet accepted widely. As one example, he found that metals behave and adapt in sort of the same way as living organisms do, as plants and humans. When you look at how the moon affects us, it’s not through the water in our blood but the metals in our blood and body. He showed that metals respond to poisons the same way that humans and plants do. It could lead to a whole new way to Quantum Health 49
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When you look at how the moon affects us, it’s not through the water in our blood but the metals in our blood and body.
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understand the properties of metals. Who knows where that could lead? And plants respond to external influences just as the human body does. This leads to the conclusion that we can use them to learn about how the body works in entirely new ways. The implications are stunning, especially in terms of not having to harm animals to do medical research. Another example is that he showed how tapping, rather than applying a steady vibration, may have more of an effect on a plant’s electrical response. This may have application to human physiological effects. There are some alternative therapies that use tapping on certain points on the body to induce healing. Bose’s experiments with plants may provide some of the science to back up these tapping techniques.
Certain aspects of homeopathy and acupuncture become quite clear. My book is all about asking questions and finding the science behind them, and saying, Ah, that’s why! So for anyone who is open-minded and wants a new way of looking at science, there’s my book to help them find out what is happening in these different fields. That’s who I’ve written it for, that’s why I wrote it. And I’ve come out the other end a completely different person.
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How can readers learn more about your research and book?
MS: They can go to my websites, www.blindedbyscience.co.uk and www.naturalnews.com.
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What are your next projects?
MS: I’m interested in looking into cures for cancer through vibration, with machines that can do that. If you understand the properties of water and the properties of vibration then everything else follows, especially in alternative health. 50 Quantum Health
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