The Field (32 page)

They had one other common element: success in treating hopeless cases. Collectively, the healers had an average of 17 years of experience in healing and reported an average of 117 distant healings apiece.

Targ and Sicher then divided their group of twenty patients in half. The plan was that both groups would receive the usual orthodox treatment, but only one of the two groups would also receive distant healing. Neither doctors nor patients were going to know who was being healed and who wasn’t.

All information about each patient was to be kept in sealed envelopes and handled individually through each step of the study. One of the researchers would gather up each patient’s name, photograph and health details into a numbered folder. This would then be given to another researcher, who would then renumber the folders at random. A third researcher would then randomly divide the folders into two groups, after which they were placed in locked filing cabinets. Copies in five sealed packets would be sent to each healer, with information about the five patients and a start date specifying the days to begin treatment on each person. The only participants in the study who were going to know who was being healed were the healers themselves. The healers would have no contact with their patients – indeed, would never even meet. All they’d been given to work with was a photo, a name and a T-cell count.

Each of the healers was asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient for an hour a day, six days each week, for ten weeks, with alternate weeks off for rest. It was an unprecedented treatment protocol, where every patient in the treatment group would be treated by every healer in turn. To remove any individual biases, healers had a weekly rotation, so that they were assigned a new patient each week. This would enable all of the healers to be distributed throughout the patient population, so that healing itself, not any particular variety of it, would be studied. The healers were to keep a log of their healing sessions with information about their healing methods and their impressions of their patients’ health. By the end of the study, each of the treated patients would have had ten healers, and each of the healers, five patients.

Elisabeth was open-minded about it, but the conservative in her kept surfacing. Try as she might, her training and her own predilections kept surfacing. She remained fairly convinced that Native American pipe smoking and chakra chanting had nothing to do with curing a group of men with an illness so serious and so advanced that they were virtually certain to die.

And then she saw her patients with end-stage AIDS getting better. During the six months of the trial period, 40 per cent of the control population died. But all ten of the patients in the healing group were not only still alive but had become healthier, on the basis of their own reports and medical evaluations.

At the end of the study, the patients had been examined by a team of scientists, and their condition had yielded one inescapable conclusion: the treatment was working.

Targ almost didn’t believe her own results. She and Sicher had to make certain that it was healing that had been responsible. They checked and rechecked their protocol. Was there anything about the treatment group that had been different? Had the medication been different, the doctor different, their diets different? Their T-cell counts had been the same, they had not been HIV positive for longer. After re-examining the data, Elisabeth discovered one difference they’d overlooked: the control patients had been slightly older, a median age of 45, compared with 35 in the treatment group. It didn’t represent a vast difference – just a ten-year age gap – but that could have been factor in why more of them had died. Elisabeth followed up the patients after the study, and found that those who’d been healed were surviving better, regardless of age. Nevertheless, she knew they were dealing with a controversial field and an effect that is, on its face, extremely unlikely, so science dictates that you have to assume the effect isn’t real unless you are really sure. Occum’s razor. Select the simplest hypothesis when confronted with several possibilities.

Elisabeth and Sicher decided to repeat the experiment, but this time to make it larger and to control for age and any other factors they’d overlooked. The forty patients chosen to participate were now perfectly matched for age, degree of illness and many other variables, even down to their personal habits. The amount they smoked, or exercise they took, their religious beliefs, even their use of recreational drugs were now equivalent. In scientific terms, this was a batch of men who were as close as you could get to a perfect match.

By this time protease inhibitors, the great white hope drug of AIDS treatment, had been discovered. All of the patients were told to take standard triple therapy for AIDS (protease inhibitors plus two antiretroviral drugs such as AZT) but to continue their medical treatment in every other regard.

Because the triple therapy appeared to be making a profound difference on mortality rates in AIDS patients, Elisabeth assumed that, this time, no one in either group would actually die. This meant she needed to change the result she was aiming for. In the new study, she was looking for whether distant healing could slow down the progression of AIDS. Could it result in fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, less medical intervention, improved psychological well-being?

Elisabeth’s caution finally paid off. After six months, the treated group were healthier on every parameter – significantly fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer days in hospital, fewer new AIDS-defining illnesses and significantly lower severity of disease. Only two of those in the treatment group had developed any new AIDS-defining illnesses, while twelve of the control group had, and only three of the treated group had been hospitalized, compared with twelve of those in the control group. The treated group also registered significant improved mood on psychological tests. On six of the eleven medical outcome measures, the group treated with healing had significantly better outcomes.

Even the power of positive thinking among the patients had been controlled for. Midway through the study, all the participants were asked if they thought they were being treated. In both the treatment and the control groups, half thought they were, half thought not. This random division of positive and negative views about healing meant that any involvement of positive mental attitude would not have affected the results. When analyzed, the beliefs of the participants about whether they were getting healing treatment did not correlate with anything. Only at the end of the study period did the subjects tend to guess correctly that they’d been in the healing group.

Just to be sure, Elisabeth conducted fifty statistical tests to eliminate whether any other variables in the patients might have contributed to the results. This time, there were no more than chance.

The results were inescapable. No matter which type of healing they used, no matter what their view of a higher being, the healers were dramatically contributing to the physical and psychological well-being of their patients.
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Targ and Sicher’s results were vindicated a year later, when a study entitled MAHI (Mid-America Heart Institute) of the effect of remote intercessory prayer for hospitalized cardiac patients over 12 months showed patients had fewer adverse events and a shorter hospital stay if they were prayed for. In this study, however, the ‘intercessors’ were not gifted healers; to qualify to take part, they simply needed to believe in God and the fact that He responds when you pray to Him to heal someone who is ill. In this instance, all the participants were using some form of standard prayer and most were Christian – Protestant, Roman Catholic or non-denominational. Each was given a particular patient to pray for.

After a month, symptoms in the prayer group had been reduced by more than 10 per cent compared with those receiving standard care, according to a special scoring system developed by three experienced cardiologists from the Mid-America Heart Institute, which rates a patient’s progress from excellent to catastrophic. Although the healing didn’t shorten their hospital stay, the patients being prayed for were definitely better off in every other regard.
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More studies are now under way in several universities. Elisabeth herself began a trial (which, at the time of writing in 2001, is still going on) comparing the effects of distant healers with nurses, a group of health professionals whose caring attitude toward their patients might also act as a healing mechanism.
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The MAHI study offered several important improvements over Randolf Byrd’s study. Whereas all the medical staff in Byrd’s study had been aware that a study was being carried out, the medical staff in the MAHI study had no idea.

The MAHI patients also didn’t know they were participating in a study, so there would not have been any possible psychological effects. In Byrd’s study, of the 450 patients, nearly an eighth had refused to be involved. This meant that only those who were receptive to, or at least didn’t object to the idea of, being prayed for would have agreed to be included. Finally, in Byrd’s study, those doing the praying had been given a great deal of information about their patients, whereas in the MAHI study, the Christians had virtually no information about the people they were praying for. They were told to pray for 28 days, and that was it. They had no feedback about whether their prayers had worked.

Neither the Targ nor the MAHI study demonstrated that God Himself answers prayers or even that He exists. As the MAHI study was quick to point out: ‘All we have observed is that when individuals outside of the hospital speak (or think) the first names of hospitalized patients with an attitude of prayer, the latter appeared to have a “better” CCU experience.’
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In fact, in Elisabeth’s study, it didn’t seem to matter what method you used, so long as you held an intention for a patient to heal. Calling on Spider Woman, a healing grandmother star figure common in the Native American culture, was every bit as successful as calling on Jesus. Elisabeth began to analyze which healers had the most success. Their techniques had been profoundly different. One ‘flow alignment’ practitioner based in Pittsburgh felt, after attempting work with several of the patients, that there was a common energy field in all of them, which she came to think of as an ‘AIDS energy signature’, and she would work on getting in touch with their healthy immune system and ignore the ‘bad energy’. With another it was more a case of working on psychic surgery, spiritually removing the virus from their bodies. Another, a Christian in Santa Fe, who carried out the healing in front of her own altar with pictures of the Virgin and saints and many lit candles, claimed to have summoned up spirit doctors, angels and guides. Others, like the kabbalistic healer, simply focused on energy patterns.
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But what they all seemed to have in common was an ability to get out of the way. It seemed to Elisabeth that most of them claimed to have put out their intention and then stepped back and surrendered to some other kind of healing force, as though they were opening a door and allowing something greater in. Many of the more effective ones had asked for help – from the spirit world or from the collective consciousness, or even from a religious figure such as Jesus. It was not an egoistic healing on their part, more like a request: ‘please may this person be healed’. Much of their imagery had to do with relaxing, releasing or allowing the spirit, light or love in. The actual being, whether it was Jesus or Spider Woman, appeared irrelevant.

The success of the MAHI study suggested that healing through intention is available to ordinary people, although the healers may be more experienced or naturally talented in tapping into The Field. In the Copper Wall Project in Topeka, Kansas, a researcher named Elmer Green has shown that experienced healers have abnormally high electric field patterns during healing sessions. In his test, Green enclosed his participants in isolated rooms made with walls constructed entirely of copper, which would block electricity from any other sources. Although ordinary participants had expected electrical readings related to breathing or heartbeat, the healers were generating electrical surges higher than 60 volts during healing sessions, as measured by electrometers placed on the healers themselves and on all four walls. Video recordings of the healers showed these voltage surges had nothing to do with physical movement.
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Studies of the nature of the healing energy of Chinese Qigong masters have provided evidence of the presence of photon emission and electromagnetic fields during healing sessions.
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These sudden surges of energy may be physical evidence of a healer’s greater coherence – his ability to marshall his own quantum energy and transfer it to the less organized recipient.

Elisabeth’s study and the work of William Braud raised a number of profound implications on the nature of illness and healing. It suggested that intention on its own heals, but that healing is also a collective force. The manner in which Targ’s healers worked would suggest that there may be a collective memory of healing spirit, which could be gathered as a medicinal force. In this model, illness can be healed through a type of collective memory. Information in The Field helps to keep the living healthy. It might even be that health and illness of individuals is, in a sense, collective. Certain epidemics might grip societies as a physical manifestation of a type of energetic hysteria.

If intention creates health – that is, improved order – in another person, it would suggest that illness is a disturbance in the quantum fluctuations of an individual. Healing, as Popp’s work suggests, might be a matter of reprogramming individual quantum fluctuations to operate more coherently. Healing may also be seen as providing information to return the system to stability. Any one of a number of biological processes requires an exquisite cascade of processes, which would be sensitive to the tiny effects observed in the PEAR research.
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