Science Supports Mental or Spiritual Healing

Scientific Evidence that Mental Healing is Effective

Oct 4, 2009

Scientific studies show strong evidence that "mental healing" works. Many of these studies have been replicated hundreds if not thousands of times.

While science has been busy discovering that everything is energy, the scientifically trained often still scoff at “mental healing” as magical thinking. The scientific evidence supports mental healing fairly consistently. Dean Radin in The Conscious Universe (p.156) says “…the implications for distant healing are clear.” Radin refers to a body of experiments performed by William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz at the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, studying “people attempting to influence the nervous system of remote percipients.” (Ibid, p 153.)

Mental Intentions Affect Biological Systems

Braud and Schlitz performed thirty-seven experiments that measured nervous system responses such as blood pressure or muscle tremor in human and animal receivers, as a “sender” attempted to influence them mentally. A response could be measured in the receiving organism significantly more frequently than chance would allow. In fact, when combining these experiments, the odds against getting these results by chance were over 100 trillion to one.

In similar studies, a sender directed emotional thoughts at a receiver, without the receiver’s knowledge, sometimes hundreds of miles away. These independent studies were conducted by Douglas Dean at Newark College of Engineering, Jean Barry in France and Erlendur Heraldsson at the University of Utrecht. These experiments monitored blood volume in the finger of the receiver as the indicator of nervous system response. As the sender directed emotional thoughts toward the receiver, there were significant changes in finger blood volume.

Studies of Healers

Healing effects of those who practice mental or faith healing have been studied scientifically as well. In her book The Field, Lynn McTaggart has compiled information on a number of studies of healing.

In the 1960s, experimenter Bernard Grad studied faith healers. Healers worked with containers of seeds that had been soaked in salt water to hinder their growth. The treated seedlings grew taller than those in the control group. When faith healers "healed" containers of water, analysis of the water showed a slightly altered molecular structure, similar to the effects of magnetization. Grad also had healers treat skin wounds on laboratory mice. The wounds healed faster for mice treated by a healer.

AIDS patients treated with spiritual or religious healing had a better survival rate in a study done by Elisabeth Targ and Sicher in the 1980s. The subjects and control group had the disease with similar severity and prognoses, but those receiving remote healings lived longer than the control group. This study involved healers who used various methods, yet these differences did not affect the results. The healers who performed the best, however, reported a different orientation and attitude than the others. These healers reported that they called on higher powers for healing and submitted their individual will to the healing process.

These and other studies support the notion of mental or spiritual healing, but it remains a mystery how a healer’s intentions can affect another person, often at a distance. While many healing traditions propose models that describe what happens, one biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, proposes the morphogenetic field, an energy field that can span time and space and allow non physical communication between organisms.

Sheldrake, Rupert. The Sense of Being Stared at and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind. New York, NY: Random House 2003

The copyright of the article Science Supports Mental or Spiritual Healing in Energy Healing is owned by Ruth Wilson Zamierowski. Permission to republish Science Supports Mental or Spiritual Healing in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.