Using Modern Measurements to Validate Energy Healing
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by: Ron Matthews
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For thousands of years, healers, shamans, psychics and spiritualists around the world have maintained that living, vibrant energy fields surround the human body. Numerous methods
evolved for understanding and evaluating these energy fields, along with protocols for manipulating these energies to help people in distress.
The Chinese developed the idea of Qi, a motive energy force that permeates all living things and that runs through meridians in the human body and is focused at what have come to be known as acupuncture points. In India Ayurvedic healers learned to see and balance chakras, the seven energy systems, first mentioned in the Vedas, that run up the center line of the body and which, on the physical level, correspond to nerve ganglia where there is a high degree of nervous activity and to glands in the endocrine system.
In the early days of medicine, Western medicine was not so different from the Eastern healing practices. However, Western medicine evolved in a completely different way, following the limits of anatomy and various disease theories. As understanding of bacteria, viruses and cancer grew, and as Western doctors chose to limit their view to what they could reduce to the five senses, traditional medicine became more and more myopic and grew farther apart from Eastern healing methods.
Researchers in traditional medicine have sought ways to validate the existence of the human energy systems using modern measurement equipment and techniques. Doctors have become increasingly more reliant on technologies to measure parameters of the human being. From the early radiographs to PET scanners, more knowledge led to better measuring devices. The sophistication and sensitivity of these devices has made it possible to measure and characterize
the energy systems of the human body that ancient healing traditions have taken for granted for thousands of years.
An X-ray is a form of ionizing radiation whose wavelength is small enough to allow it to travel through solid matter.
Ultrasound, sound with a frequency above the limits of human hearing, transmits sound energy into the subject and the reflected energy is measured. Ultrasound is used to visualize the growing fetus in the womb, and many internal organs.
CT scans use tomography, which is a kind of digital geometry processing to get a 3-dimensional image of the body from X-ray “slices.”
MRI, or nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, uses a powerful magnet to align the magnetization of atoms in the body. Usually the hydrogen atoms in water are aligned, and the rotating magnetic
field is measured with a scanner.
Functional MRI (fMRI) measures the hemodynamic response to neural activity in the brain. In this case it is the difference of magnetic susceptibility between oxyhemoglobin (oxygenated
blood) and deoxyhemoglobin (deoxygenated blood) that gives a magnetic signal measured by an MRI scanner.
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. It is a nuclear imaging technique. The patient is injected with a positron-emitting radionuclide tracer, and a computer reconstructs 3-D images of the area of the body being imaged. If the tracer is attach to an analog of glucose, PET scans give images of metabolic activity. PET scans may be aided or combined with CT scanning
and/or MRI.
Both EKG’s (electrocardiograms) and EEG’s (electroencephalograms) are used to evaluate the heart and brain, respectively.
These devices are used daily in Western medicine to make diagnoses. Lately, alternative medical practitioners, scientists and healers have discovered that many of these scanning devices can be used to validate their healing methods.
Information from fMRI’s or PET scans have helped validate work in Energy Healing. Other devices have been made specifically to look for the energy fields. Physicists, healers, doctors
and others have all contributed to the ever-growing array of machines that can aid in non-traditional medicine. From Kirlian photographs to the super-conducting quantum interference
device (SQUID), they continue to provide valuable information.
Subsequent articles will explore these measurements in detail.
About the Author
Ron Matthews is an Energy Healer who spent the first 30
years of his adult life working as an electromagnetic
physicist and an avid student of Qigong and Taiji Quan.
Ron has a robust Energy Medicine practice and has written
several Energy Healing home-study courses covering a wide
range of applications.
Visit his site at http://www.VitalForceHealing.com
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