Biofield “Science?” A “MeSH-mash" of Woo?

Stress-testing the Principle of Charity admonition.

 

Earlier in the week I got an email notifying me of the latest issue of Scientific American (I'm a subscriber). I cited one of the articles and an OpEd in my prior post. 

(BTW, “MeSH” is NLM-speak for “Medical Subject Heading.”)

I ran across this book ad as well.

Uh-oh...

Read the Amazon blurb, then did a bit of Googling, quickly found this (pdf):

ABSTRACT
Biofield science is an emerging field of study that aims to provide a scientific foundation for understanding the complex homeodynamic regulation of living systems. By furthering our scientific knowledge of the biofield, we arrive at a better understanding of the foundations of biology as well as the phenomena that have been described as “energy medicine.” Energy medicine, the application of extremely low-level signals to the body, including energy healer interventions and bio- electromagnetic device-based therapies, is incomprehensible from the dominant biomedical paradigm of “life as chemistry.” The biofield or biological field, a complex organizing energy field engaged in the generation, maintenance, and regulation of biological homeodynamics, is a useful concept that provides the rudiments of a scientific foundation for energy medicine and thereby advances the research and practice of it. An overview on the biofield is presented in this paper, with a focus on the history of the concept, related terminology, key scientific concepts, and the value of the biofield perspective for informing future research.

INTRODUCTION
Medicine is in transition. Conventional biomedicine is giving way to an expanded, integrative medical model that emphasizes healthcare as well as illness care, treats people not just diseases, and incorporates multiple therapeutic approaches, old and new, to offer patients greater choice…

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS
The biofield concept, emerging initially from vitalist perspectives, offers an increasingly useful approach to explain a variety of physiological phenomena. Its applicability continues to evolve in terms of empirical inquiry. Endogenous biofield interactions with environ- mental, geocosmic, and other exogenous fields provide the rudiments of a scientific foundation for a holistic view of life and a modus operandi for numerous CAM modalities. The family of energy healing practices that have been widely practiced since antiquity, now called biofield therapies, may involve biocommunication and/ or energy transfer through the biofield. While the bio- field concept is a useful construct to guide new research on energy healing and other CAM modalities, it is also a requisite for a better understanding of contemporary developments in biophysics and biology. Moreover, information connected with the biofield may serve as a bridge between mind and body, which is fundamental to understanding mind-body interactions.

The biofield is also an important metaphor to guide further research. There are numerous examples from the history of science where metaphor and analogy have been key elements in the construction of successful theories. The use of metaphor in science is especially appropriate and critical for success in the exploratory phase of investigation when detailed descriptions and theories are unavailable. Metaphors provide foundational material for forming hypotheses, conducting studies, and eventually elucidating testable theories. Scientific metaphors can be key elements for posing truly novel questions, which upon experimental testing, advance our knowledge and understanding. The concept of the biofield, while still in its nascent stages, may well serve this purpose as biology moves from a local, chemistry-based model to an interconnected, information-based viewpoint. Further investigations in biofield science and healing, especially those involving multidisciplinary collaborations—including clinical and preclinical trials, physiology, biophysics, device technology, and theoretical and philosophical models—will guide the way to a new paradigm in biology and medicine.

"Emerging field of study?" "Principle of Charity?"

Hmmm... I've been having to parse the Woo for a long time. Let me rewind to nearly a quarter-century ago, excerpting my essay recounting my late elder daughter's terminal cancer ordeal.

ONE IN THREE
The search for survival and healing
Should you or a loved one be beset by advanced and life-threatening cancer, gird yourself for an overwhelming onslaught of information, much of it in conflict, all of it ostensibly requiring your immediate consideration and action lest you accede to fatal delay.

My empirical triage effort began within days of Sissy's admission to County. While we were still struggling to come to grips with everything coming fast and furious from the doctors and medical administration, well-meaning friends and acquaintances began peppering us with unsolicited advice and literature, some of it conveying a bizarre ignorance that would leave me floundering for the politic response that would not demean and offend. Pejorative retort suppression would become an ongoing emotional exercise (repeatedly aided by the quiet and gentle reproach of my saintly wife).

It commenced with a reprint of an "article" hawking a book wherein it would be recounted in further detail just why "all cancers" were caused by intestinal flatworms! (The author ended nearly every sentence with one or more exclamation marks!) The curative regimen would simply involve purging the gastrointestinal tract of these carcinogenic parasites through a regimen including colonics and herbal mixtures. The boyfriend delivering this wonderful news was utterly sold on its merit: Salvation was at hand!

Mercifully, Dr. Wren got me off the hook on this one with a diplomacy worthy of a Secretary of State.

Next would come the "Hoxsey" video, a slick production exuding first-class "documentary" production values--sinister in tone--detailing the history of the miraculous herbal anti-cancer "formula" purportedly discovered by one uneducated Harry Hoxsey decades ago while treating horse hide lesions on his father's farm. The video-- replete with ominous background music and newsreel headline cutaways-- recounts the foul banishment of this alleged "savior" to Mexico by the greedy and venal American Medical Association. The Hoxsey clinic in Tijuana today still attracts innumerable desperate cancer sufferers bereft of more conventional clinical options and ready with cash.

After close consideration, I had no choice but to count myself in the company of those regarding this stuff as the worst sort of quackery.

Essiac tea (brand name: Fluoressence). The story is told that a Canadian nurse--one Rene Caisse--was the recipient of a mysterious healing herbal recipe used by an Ojibwa tribal medicine man that caused all manner of malignancies to disappear in short order. It is predictably alleged that the Canadian counterpart to our A.M.A. in concert with Ottawa would see to the suppression of this wondrous substance.

Proponents of this beverage invariably mention that "Essiac" is "Caisse" spelled in reverse. In my case, no particular epiphany would be forthcoming in the wake of this "Sgt.-Pepper-Played-Backwards" intimation, and, after much digging concerning the ingredients and their asserted efficacy, I could find nothing clinically interesting in Essiac.

"Resonance" machines? What? Another phone number slipped to me at the hospital had me listening to a sales pitch extolling a $1,500 "radionics therapy" device used to destroy tumors by resonating with the electro-biological "cancer frequency" of malignant tissues.

Right.

Not flatworms! No, it was "bacteria in the blood," the result of diet, specifically consumption of items such as chicken, that was the source of all cancer, another "doctor" explained to me over the phone from his Tijuana clinic. "We can't get the docs in the States to understand this," he intoned with weary resignation. His methodology: purge the blood through a revised diet that, among other things, eschewed chicken and mandated the consumption of lamb. Why? A devotee of this practitioner had a ready retort: "Y'ever watch chickens eat? They peck at the ground, picking up all kinds of bacteria." Oh.
 
Lamb, on the other hand, came from "root-eating" livestock that, while foraging through the subterrain, ingested the beneficent, supposedly cancer-curing below-ground nutrients central to this serum antiseptic "therapy." We could come down to the Tijuana clinic for an initial two-week stay for blood assessment and initiation of therapy. $2,500 per week. But, according to our locally referred contact--'he'll work it out with you if money is a problem; he's a very compassionate man. He really cares for his patients, he takes the time to listen to their concerns.'
 
In contrast to the "arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent" American clinicians who controlled medical practice in The States (the oft-repeated mantra of the more strident segment of the "alternative healing" movement) clearly implicit in this appeal.

The foregoing comprise a more or less representative sampling of our experience thus far with the quackery end of the alternative therapy spectrum, a distribution of propositions whose opposite terminus abuts the breadth of mainstream clinical research and practice, where methods as yet "unproven" but more logically reasonable and promising vie for acceptance by the medical establishment. In the middle lie tougher calls: does shark cartilage really shrink tumors, functioning as an angiogenesis inhibitor? (one skeptical journal article called it "the laetrile of the 90's") Hydrazine sulfate? (also reported on extensively in the mainstream clinical literature and generally--though not uniformly--dismissed as 'ineffective.') Nucleotide Reductase? Plant oils? Blue-green algae?

All of these unconventional therapeutic assertions--many of which would prove to be merely unproductive, outlandish, maddening distractions--would have to be checked out while also slogging through the vast archives of mainstream clinical literature, a quest that would take me through the most recent three years of month-by-month National Cancer Institute (NCI) hepatoma citations…

'Arrogant, narrow-minded, greedy, and indifferent?'
Is science the enemy? To the extremist "alternative healing" advocate, the answer is a resounding 'yes'! A disturbing refrain common to much of the radical "alternative" camp is that medical science is "just another belief system," one beholden to the economic and political powers of establishment institutions that dole out the research grants and control careers, one that actively suppresses simpler healing truths in the pursuit of profit, one committed to the belittlement and ostracism of any discerning practitioner willing to venture "outside the box" of orthodox medical and scientific paradigms.
 
One e-mail correspondent, a participant in the internet newsgroup alt.support.cancer, vented splenetic at length recently regarding U.S. authorities' alleged hounding, arrest, and imprisonment of alternative healers. He railed that law enforcement, at the behest of the AMA/FDA Conspiracy (a.k.a. the "corrupt AMA/FDA/NCI/ACS cartel"), had made the practice of alternative medicine illegal in the U.S. Moreover, he considered the fact that medical science can only claim "cures" for approximately 10% of the roughly 10,000 classified human diseases an a priori indictment of the mainstream profession.

I know: this is akin to the U.N. Black Helicopters/One-World-Government Conspiracy stuff of the not-too-tightly-wrapped. Still, I couldn't resist--pointing out in (no doubt futile) reply that no one came with guns drawn and cuffs at the ready the night at Brotman Rehab when "Healing Angelite Crystals" practitioners--devotees of India's Sai Baba--came from Topanga Canyon to hover for hours in ceremony over Sissy (to the curious and wary befuddlement of the night shift nurses); neither did Security nor the medical staff at Brotman confiscate the goopy-looking herbal tonic we brought in, an elixir prescribed for Sissy by a Chinese herbal pharmacist doing business quite openly in Chinatown near downtown L.A.; nor would SWAT teams pounce on the backyard in the Valley where we took part in evening-long Lakota Souix "healing sweat lodge" ceremonies conducted by the venerable Wallace Black Elk; and finally, Wyndie, one of Sissy's highly skilled and effective physical therapists at Brotman did not have her certification revoked for counseling my daughter on the Hindu principles of the Chakras and efficacy of aromatherapy.

Moreover, I had to respond, the fact that we can only cure 10% of known diseases implies nothing regarding the quality of mainstream medical research and practice, unless the alternatives industry can provide hard, "case-mix adjusted," scientifically valid data showing their methods to effect consistently and significantly better outcomes-- which they cannot (a dearth of peer-reviewed studies being a central characteristic of "alternative" practice). Additionally, I asked, can anyone even cite historical curative percentages from 30, 50, or perhaps 100 years ago? Indeed, even such statistics would prove problematic--"shooting at a moving target," as it were--in that more subtle and clinically unresponsive maladies continue to be discovered and classified while the easier to treat are dealt with more readily. And, classificatory observation is easy compared to the work and resources required to effect cures; we should expect that identification will outpace remedy. Finally, 50 years ago death certificates listing demise from "natural causes" would today likely have identifiable diseases recorded as the cause of death.

Purveyors of medical quackery should fear the hot breath and hard heel of competent authority, but I see no evidence of suppression of alternative therapy methods that are not certifiably fraudulent. All manner of "unproven" substances are sold quite openly at retail, both in the health food stores and in the national chain outlets; all that need accompany the product is the legal boilerplate disclaimer acknowledging an absence of FDA blessing, along with the inoculating phrase 'dietary supplement.’…

For the bulk of the alternative healing industry, the real frustration has nothing whatever to do with clinical and political repression, and everything to do with lack of access to the pockets of third-party payers. While such may be a very real economic problem for health care consumers and the vendors of alternative products and services, it has little to do with clinical "narrow-minded arrogance." Peer-reviewed studies of the unpatentable epigallocatechin alone have, after all, somehow found funding hundreds of times thus far….

Every discipline has its share of the "arrogant and narrow-minded," but I have mostly found mainstream health care professionals to be a dedicated, unpretentious, and self-deprecating lot quite aware of the limits of their knowledge and the risks of presumption. Once, during a series of health care quality improvement seminars I attended at Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City during my Peer Review tenure, a speaker--himself a noted pediatric surgeon--wryly observed that "the best place to hide a hundred dollar bill from a doctor is inside a book." The Director of the seminar series, Dr. Brent James of IHC (and a Fellow of the Harvard School of Public Health), noted in our opening session that physicians would probably admit--off the record, of course--that perhaps only 10% of their clinical decisions made during daily practice could be traced to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Dr. James also made the droll observation that, were you to walk into the typical medical adminstrator's office, "you'd be much more likely to see copies of the Wall Street Journal rather than the New England Journal strewn about."

What can one take away from such remarks? First, the many physicians I have come to know in the past few years are in the main acutely sensitive to the problems of clinical conceit and "paradigm blinders." Indeed, the Utah pediatrician's"$100 bill" wisecrack was offered to an audience of doctors and their allied health personnel during quality improvement training. Second, the body of peer-reviewed medical literature does not constitute a clinical cookbook; even "proven" therapies--particularly those employed against cancers--are generally incremental in effect and sometimes maddeningly transitory in nature. The sheer numbers of often fleeting causal variables to be accounted for in bioscience make the applied Newtonian physics that safely lifts and lands the 747 and the space shuttle seem child's play by comparison. Astute clinical intuition is a necessary component of a medical art that must, after all, act and act quickly--so often in the face of indeterminate, inapplicable, or contradictory research findings.

Finally, with respect to Dr. James' Wall Street Journal quip, the capitalist imperatives within which health care clinicians must operate are, in the aggregate, neither of their making nor under their control. Moreover, blanket indictment of the profit motive as necessarily inimical to optimum medical care and research is a rather simplistic notion. Strategies aimed at maximizing investors' net returns probably spur at least as many medical advances as they inhibit...

A Healing Burger
Or, the "healing pizza/chocolate shake/friesî? One day not long ago, after we'd visited with a pleasant, seemingly intelligent woman of recent acquaintance who had also endured a long struggle with cancer and was committed to a "holistic healing" regimen, I ribbed Sissy that we ought cruise down Sunset for lunch, specifically to order some "healing burgers,"--my facetious reaction to having been cut off mid-sentence the prior evening after uttering the phrase "fruit juice" in the course of responding to a query concerning Sissy's daily diet. "Oh, no! No fruit juice!" "No sugar!" "No fat!" "No meat!"
 
The magical quality that "holistic" evangelists impute to various vitamins, herbs, and certain foods (the latter for both good and ill), frequently shouts down the more circumspect and common-sense notion of an adequate and balanced diet. In my mind I parry their personal anecdotes with the equally anecdotal evidence of the long and mostly healthy lives of the large extended family comprising my in-laws. Most of these rural northern Alabama farmers manage somehow to live into their 90's despite life-long daily breakfast doses of sausage and eggs with biscuits and gravy--along the rest of the typical meat-laden, putatively carcinogenic and arteriosclerotic farm fare that would make a brown rice zealot shrink in horror.

Most of these dietary-herbal and related recuperative obsessions ring resonant with the "bargaining" stage of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's dying process model. Please, Lord, I'll change my indulgent, unhealthy ways, please-- just spare my life! See, I'm doing my herbal/ carrot juice/ seaweed/ colonic/ aromatic/ crystalite/ meditative/ mega-vitamin/ macrobiotic/ psycho-spritual penance; please, please spare my life!

Quantum quandaries
Given the stakes, productively traversing these vast and snarled thickets spanning credulous hearsay to incontrovertible fact has become an ongoing priority, and will so remain so long as need be. My lengthy academic and professional involvements with quantitative analytic disciplines, however, have proven both blessing and curse in helping Sissy deal with her struggle. While my fluency with empirical data and technical jargon helps me parse the literature and interact intelligently with the doctors, I am never certain of just how hard to lean on my scientific skepticism, given both what I know of the epistemological limits of "science" and the relentless barrage of sometimes intriguing alternative therapy assertions I encounter. While close study of biostatistical and epidemiological methodologies and critical works such as Peter Huber's Phantom Risk and Galileo's Revenge, Gross, Levitt, and Lewis's The Flight From Science and Reason, Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and Kahneman and Tversky's Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases tends to make one not suffer fools gladly, the predisposition can easily slip over into "narrow-minded arrogance."
 
It was, after all, a Santa Monica Chinese practitioner of acupuncture and herbal medicine, one Dr. Yi Pan, who first called Sissy's attention to a problem with her liver several years prior to her HCC diagnosis. She'd been referred to him by a girlfriend for attention to a menstrual problem. Dr. Pan had a diagnostic acumen requiring no x-rays, CT scans, or blood tests. Yet, the internet medical fraud site www.quackwatch.com dismisses traditional Chinese medicine as "ineffective," as do many other critics of alternative practices.

Tragically, Sissy summarily discounted his prescient admonition. I can only speculate wistfully on the implications of our having known three years earlier.
 
Renowned paleontologist Steven J. Gould eloquently cautions us in The Median Is Not The Message--wherein he recounts his triumph over the particularly frightful type of cancer known as mesothelioma--that indeed the individual is not a "statistic," that variation rather than expectation is the "hard" reality, and that in such recognition lies the potential for rational optimism. Yes, and probabilistic variation--with its seemingly paradoxical notion of order borne of randomness--is also fundamental to our dawning awareness of the broader implications of quantum theory. Unquestionably, we transcend our "data," changing that which we measure by the ineffable force of observation, and in such awareness may lie a key to healing, it is proclaimed.
 
But--is Deepak Chopra merely a cynical huckster, misrepresenting the ostensibly Hindu/Zen-like principles of sub-atomic wave/particle theory to sell books and tapes such as Quantum Healing to an apparently large and eager audience of scientific dilettantes mesmerized by the spurious conflation of the Ayurvedic and the sub-atomic? Is the deadly serious Chapter 14 of Scott Adam's otherwise hilariously flip best-seller The Dilbert Future mere dramatic counterpoint--a sophomoric and specious "self-help" interpretation of the principles of quantum mechanics so beautifully explicated in Gary Zukov's 1978 book The Dancing Wu Li Masters? Chopra, after all, has left himself a very big out by declaring that perhaps only 1% of those in dire medical need can lock onto the principles necessary to effect 'quantum' self-healing, a caveat akin to the "sold-as-a-dietary-supplement-only" and "not-intended-for-the-treatment-of-any-disease" disclaimers found on all herbal remedies. And, Scott Adams touts his empirical slovenliness almost as a virtue…

You see my Yellow Flags problem here?

I've not yet subjected the Jain et al paper to any formal "Argument Analysis and Evaluation" effort, wherein you ID and assess every premise-to-conclusion element and chain (pdf). Looks like it would entail maybe 50 hours to do so (we need an AI app for this). The paper contains 85 end-note references citations, many of which may contain actual empirical findings rather than being merely "metadata." Don't know yet. 

 

I've alerted the folks at Science-Based Medicine.

 

UPDATE

___

apropos OF THE TOPIC? FROM ANOTHER OF MY BLOGS, 2009

 

 

In the mid-late 1990s, while caring for my terminally ill daughter in Hollywood, I recall reading that there were more MRI machines deployed in the Los Angeles area than in the entire nation of Canada, the inference being that the American economics of hugely expensive sense-extending diagnostic imaging technologies such as MRI units, CAT scanners, cardiac dynamic stress test machines, etc tended toward the economically problematic. Every medical institution feels compelled to have them to be credible, competitive Players in the market, but everyone also needs to keep them all profitably humming, with viable billable payers at the end of the back office line. And, every additional install exacerbates the billable utilization problem. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Well consider a brief true story from several decades ago, written by surgeon and writer Dr. Richard Selzer:

On the bulletin board in the front hall of the hospital where I work, there appeared an announcement. “Yeshi Dhonden,” it read, “will make rounds at six o’clock on the morning of June 10.” The particulars were then given, followed by a notation: “Yeshi Dhonden is personal physician to the Dalai Lama.” I am not so leathery a skeptic that I would knowingly ignore an emissary from the gods. Not only might such sangfroid be inimical to one’s earthly well-being, it could take care of eternity as well. Thus, on the morning of June 10, I joined a clutch of whitecoats waiting in the small conference room adjacent to the ward selected for the rounds. The air in the room is heavy with ill concealed dubiety and suspicion of bamboozlement. At precisely 6 o’clock, he materializes, a short, golden, barrely man dressed in a sleeveless robe of saffron and maroon. His scalp is shaven, and the only visible hair is a scanty black line each hooded eye.

He bows in greeting while his young interpreter makes the introduction. Yeshi Dhonden, we are told will examine a patient selected by a member of the staff. The diagnosis is as unknown to Yeshi Dhonden as it is to us. The examination of the patient will take place in our presence, after which we will reconvene in the conference room where Yeshi Dhonden will discuss the case. We are further informed that for the past two hours Yeshi Dhonden has purified himself by bathing, fasting, and prayer. I, having breakfasted well, performed only the most desultory of ablutions, and given no thought at all to my soul, glanced furtively at my fellows. Suddenly, we seem a soiled, uncouth lot.

The patient had been awakened early and told that she was to be examined by a foreign doctor, and had been asked to produce a fresh specimen of urine, so when we enter her room, the woman shows no surprise. She has long ago taken on that mixture of compliance and resignation that is that the facies of chronic illness. This was to be but another in an endless series of tests and examinations. Yeshi Dhonden steps to the bedside while the rest stand apart, watching. For a long time he gazes at the woman, favoring no part of her body with his eyes, but seeming to fix his glance at a place just above her supine form. I, too, study her. No physical sign nor obvious symptom gives a clue to the nature of her disease.

At last he takes her hand, raising it in both of his own. Now he bends over the bed in a kind of crouching stance, his head drawn down into the collar of his robe. His eyes are closed as he feels for her pulse. In a moment he has found the spot, and for the next half hour he remains of us, suspended above the patient like some exotic golden bird with folded wings, holding the pulse of the woman beneath his fingers, cradling her hand in his. All the power of the man seems to have been drawn down into this one purpose. It is tell patient of the pulse raced to the state of ritual. From the foot of the bed, where I stand, it is as though he and the patient had entered a special place of isolation, of apartness, about which a vacancy hovers, and across which no violation is possible. After a moment the woman rests back upon her pillow. From time to time she raises her head to look at the strange figure above her, then sinks back once more. I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate, his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious -- not of him, not of Yeshi Dhonden for his gift of beauty in holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that, touched so, received. And I know that I, who have palpated 100,000 pulses, have not felt a single one.

At last Yeshi Dhonden straightens, gently places the woman’s hand upon the bed, and steps back. The interpreter produces a small wooden bowl into sticks. Yeshi Dhonden pours a portion of the urine specimen into the bowl, and proceeds to whip the liquid with the two sticks. This he does for several minutes until a foam is raised. Then, bowing above the bowl, he inhales the older three times. He sets down the bowl, and turns to leave. All this while, he has not uttered a single word. As he nears the door, the woman raises her head and calls out to him in a voice at once urgent and serene. “Thank you, doctor,” she says, and touches with her other hand the place he had held on her wrists, as though to recapture something that had visited their. Yeshi Dhonden turns back for a moment to gaze at her, then steps into the corridor. Rounds are at an end.

We are seated once more in the conference room. Yeshi Dhonden speaks now for the first time, in soft Tibetan sounds that I’ve never heard before. He has barely begun when the young interpreter begins to translate, the two voices continuing in tandem – a bilingual fugue, the one chasing the other. It is like the chanting of monks. He speaks of winds coursing through the body of the woman, currents that break against barriers, eddying. These vortices are in her blood, he says. The last spendings of an imperfect heart. Between the chambers of her heart, long, long before she was born, a wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must never be opened. Through it charged the full waters of her river, as the mountain stream cascades in the springtime, battering, knocking loose the land, and flooding her breath. Thus he speaks, and is silent.

“May we now have the diagnosis?” A professor asks.

The host of these rounds, the man who knows, answers. “Congenital heart disease,” he says. “Interventricular septal defect, with resultant heart failure.”

A gateway in the heart, I think. That must not be opened. Through it charge the full waters that flood her breath. So! Here then is the doctor listening to the sounds of the body to which the rest of us are deaf. He is more than doctor. He is Priest.

I know, I know, the doctor to the gods is pure knowledge you’re healing. The doctor to man stumbles, most often wound; his patient must die, as must he.

Now and then it happens, as I make my own rounds, but I hear the sounds of his voice, like an ancient Buddhist prayer, its meaning long since forgotten, only the music remaining. Then the jubilation possesses me, and I feel myself touched by something divine.

[1976: Richard Selzer, MD, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the art of surgery]

'eh?

 

Woo? Or astute "clinical" cognition emanating from a vastly different culture? A human MRI able to accurately probe the patient's "biofield?"

UPDATE

"Biofield Science" author Shamini Jain:

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