Can cancer cures come from healing hands?

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October 28, 1:20 PM Skepticism Examiner Randall Fitzgerald


“The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force
            in getting well.” –Hippocrates  (460 BC – 377 BC)


A nervous mouse scampers around inside its plastic cage at the approach of the biology student in her white lab coat. Only six days earlier the cancerous tumor on its belly had been so large that the mouse could barely move. Today the tumor is less than half its former size and the mouse has regained its vitality, apparently because of the unusual ‘treatment’ it is being given.


The lab assistant studies the mouse for a few moments, summoning a surge of compassion for this tiny creature as she begins the treatment session by placing her hands on either side of the cage. She keeps her mind blank, clearing it of judgment and negative thoughts.


 Mind clearing had been difficult for her and most of the other lab assistants at the start of this study. Her skepticism about the experiment had made her feel foolish every day that she hovered over the cage for the hour-long session, her outstretched fingers on the mesh of the cage casting a skyline of spindly shadows over the frightened and desperately sick mouse.


The fact that she and her fellow lab assistants had openly expressed their doubts about the intentions of this experiment was a reason they had been handpicked to conduct it by Margaret Moga, an associate professor in the Department of Anatomy at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Professor Moga is an expert on rodents, having gotten her Ph.D. from Loyola University of Chicago Medical Center with a dissertation on neuroanatomical pathways in rat brains. Her interest in alternative approaches to healing developed as a result of a positive personal experience she had with moxibustion, a 1000 year old Asian medical therapy for arthritic joints that involves burning an herb called mugwort over the area of inflammation. That healing experience using an ancient remedy, one often derided by her medical colleagues as a worthless superstition, had blessed Professor Moga with something rare in her profession – a genuinely open mind.

A Visualization Technique

As the lab assistant holds her palms over the mouse, she rapidly cycles a series of images through her mind’s eye. These images were generated by personal lists that she and the other lab assistants had prepared prior to the experiment. They each had written down 20 outcomes they wanted in their lives, specific goals that involved other people, their own health, ideal jobs, or mates, or material aspirations. Every item on the list was translated into images that represented the achievement of that particular goal. For instance, if a person had an injured back but wanted to attain back-bending yoga positions, he or she visualized being in that position effortlessly, rather than visualizing a successful surgery to fix their back.

 
These personal images were then memorized and the assistants practiced cycling them like a continuous movie that used their minds as projectors, a mental loop that could operate no matter what conflicting feelings and emotions might surface. While the cycling of these images went on, the lab assistants tried to feel an energy flowing out their hands into the caged mice.


Fifteen mice were a part of the experimental group receiving direct ‘treatments,’ while another 15 mice were the control group and received no direct attention after being injected with cancer cells. A third group of 25 mice were age-matched controls and did not receive injections. All three of these groups lived in cages in separate rooms of the animal facility on the Indiana University School of Medicine campus in Terre Haute.


Five animals from each group were sacrificed for autopsies at the beginning of the experiment, and then at intervals of 5, 9 and 13 weeks. Their blood hemoglobin levels were measured and their spleens were weighed at each stage to determine whether their immune systems had been activated. These findings were consistently surprising. The age-matched group without cancer had marginally lower hemoglobin levels but “significantly’ lower spleen weights than the experimental and control groups. At 12 weeks, for instance, the experimental mice had spleens three times the weight of the age-matched group.


Here is where the researchers italicized their published findings for emphasis – “At weeks 9 and 13, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups.” Believe it or not, none of the mice in either the experimental group or the two control groups had cancerous tumors anymore, though only the experimental group had received the ‘treatments.’ How could that possibly be?

Defying Conventional Wisdom

Based on everything we think we know or should know about cancer and mortality, all 30 of the cancer-injected mice in both the control and experimental groups should have died. The tumors that normally would grow quickly on their bodies after injection with cancer cells should have crushed their internal organs. Once injected with fatal doses of mouse mammary adenocarcinoma tumor cells,  the resultant malignancies should have killed 100 percent of the animals within 14 to 27 days after injection. That is what had always happened before when these cancer cells were introduced into mice during experiments conducted with cancer drugs. The same thing should have happened this time. After all, the only treatment being performed, if we can call it that, was the physical presence of lab assistants trained to project a life-affirming visual imagery into their ‘patients’.


But what was expected, what was defined as ‘normal,’ did not happen. None of the mice died of the cancer! Every single one of those not sacrificed for autopsies as part of the study, lived out their normal lifespan. Not only that, both the control and experimental groups of 15 mice each experienced similar survival rates, a phenomenon that, while it may sound like a product of error or even fraud, can possibly be explained based on bio-energy fields, or resonance field theories. In other words, a ‘scatter effect’ may occur when healers project their regenerative intentions.


There was something else of interest to report. When some of the fully recovered study mice were later injected with more cancer cells without any lab assistant ‘treatments,’ they did not develop cancer. They had evolved immunity to a disease that is the scourge of humankind.


If these had been humans who were the subjects of a cancer study, we might ascribe their miraculous spontaneous remissions to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect. But conscious or unconscious expectations of a cure cannot be induced in mice, at least as far as we know, so there must have been an activation of their immune systems by an alteration in their life energy field.  A hint of how this mechanism might work came in a second experiment by Moga that detected  low-frequency magnetic field oscillations in the vicinity of the treated mice cages.


When the study results, co-authored by Professor Moga and Professor William Bengston of St. Joseph’s College in New York, were published in the April 2007 edition of the peer-reviewed The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, it was called a replication experiment because it successfully duplicated the results of four previous studies that used the same cancer treatment protocols. It also produced data that expands our understanding of ‘bio-energy resonance fields,’ an evolving theory that all life is linked in an intricate web of influences operating at the quantum level.

Replication of Four Previous Studies

The four previous mice and bio-energy healing studies since 2000, conducted at two different institutions  – New York’s Queens College and St. Joseph’s College -- were all under the research leadership of Professor Bengston  In the first, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Bengston himself apprenticed in learning the ‘laying on of hands’ technique and participated in the study he had designed.


At the Brooklyn campus of St. Joseph’s College the extremely skeptical chairwoman of the biology department, Professor Carol Hayes, personally picked the three biology major volunteers to be trained as healers for one of the studies. Each of the three was a nonbeliever in the legitimacy of the laying on of hands as a healing technique. An added twist in this experiment was that each volunteer also took an experimental mouse home for daily treatments once the cancer cells were injected.


Four control mice sent to a distant city all died within the expected 27-day period, but all of the mice taken home by the volunteers went into remission from the cancer, while two mice in the laboratory group did as well. The remission pattern seen in the mice was the same in all of these experiments. After a tumor had developed, an encrusted area on its surface emerged as the healing sessions progressed, until the mouse’s body began to reabsorb the tumor in a process that would result in the complete disappearance of the malignancy. That might help to explain why, in the later Moga experiment, it was found that the mouse spleens had tripled in weight, though the enlarged spleens were free of cancer.


The remission rates for each of the four studies defied all conventional assumptions about survival rates. In the first experiment, five of five experimental mice remitted; the second experiment saw 7 of 7 cured; experiment three recorded  7 of 10 in remission; and experiment four documented 10 of 11 being healed. Furthermore, as the published study in 2000 noted, “Perhaps most persuasively, we were unaware that the experimental biologist at St. Joseph’s College had re-injected several remitted mice months after the experiments were over. Without further treatment, these mice were immune to the mammary adenocarcinoma.”


 If skeptical and inexperienced people can be taught to use a simple technique to achieve 90 percent and more healing rates in mice, what could be the impact of these healing influences on cancers in humans?  How effective could such techniques—combined with the placebo effect-- be on the entire range of human illnesses and diseases?  These are questions that will be addressed in future columns.

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