Commentary: A Method Used to Train Skeptical Volunteers to Heal in an Experimental Setting

329 This paper is meant to serve as a companion piece to the paper entitled “Resonance, Placebo Effects, and Type II Errors: Some Implications from Healing Research for Experimental Methods” (pp. 317–327). That paper reports anomalous phenomena in my work on the effects of a healing method applied to experimental mice injected with fatal dosages of mammary adenocarcinoma. Specifically, in addition to a very high percentage of remissions in the treated experimental animals, a significant percentage of untreated control animals also mysteriously remit. Furthermore, in three of five experiments reported in the paper, these remissions were seemingly produced by nonbelieving volunteers with no previous experience in healing. I explain this as an instance of resonant bonding of the experimental and control groups, wherein a treatment given to the experimental group inadvertently results in a treatment given to the control group. I speculate that this resonant bonding may be produced either through consciousness or by shared experiences on the part of experimental subjects. I suggest a parallel to anomalous placebo effects that have been widely reported in the literature, and the possibility that similar resonant bonding might be at play there. In fact, resonant bonding may be widespread in many fields. If that is indeed the case, many researchers may be unknowingly committing type II errors in their research, wherein they fail to observe that a significant event has occurred because at the end of an experiment there is no significant difference between experimental and control groups. The major point of the paper is that resonant bond formation may be a widely occurring, yet not recognized, phenomenon. I challenge researchers in all fields to reexamine their data through the prism of resonant bonding. I fully recognize that the data portion of the paper on resonant bonding claims extraordinary rates of remissions in laboratory animals apparently produced by a type of handson healing. Although outside of the scope of the resonant bonding thesis, readers may very well want to know the methods used by the volunteer healers. This paper describes the training methods used in those experiments. Although there are many places and organizations that claim to teach healing, from an empirical standpoint whether or not healing can be taught is still an open question. Thus, in presenting the techniques used in my experiments, two caveats are in order. First, if the resonant bond hypothesis is correct, it is a very difficult problem to determine whether healing can indeed be taught. Simply put, if a resonant bond has been formed among experimental subjects, it becomes problematic whether each healer who has practiced a technique has individually produced the observed healing. It may be that, like the control group subjects, any individual volunteer healer’s apparent positive effect might be due to a resonant treatment given by another. Second, it is logically possible that the apparent healing in my research is not actually learned through the techniques described, but is rather somehow passed on from person to person. At this point in my research, I simply don’t know how important the above two caveats are.