Study Entices Thoughts Of Hands-On Healing

By Hilary Waldman

Steeped in white-coat science since she earned her Ph.D. in cell biology at Columbia University 20 years ago, Gloria Gronowicz is about the last person you'd expect to put stock in the touchy-feely discipline of energy medicine. But then the University of Connecticut researcher saw it with her own eyes, under a high-power microscope in her own laboratory, where, once, only well-accepted biological building blocks — proteins, mitochondria, DNA and the like — got respect.

Therapeutic Touch performed by trained energy healers significantly stimulated the growth of bone and tendon cells in lab dishes.

Her results, recently published in two scientific journals, provide novel evidence that there may be a powerful energy field that, when channeled through human hands, can influence the course of events at a cellular level.

"What she's showing is an association that defies explanation with what we currently know," said Margaret A. Chesney, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and former deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health." She's Daniel Boone

Gronowicz and others said more studies are needed to figure out how and why Therapeutic Touch seems to stimulate cell growth — and if the findings can be applied to patient care.

"Should somebody with osteoporosis or a broken leg go to their Reiki practitioner?" Gronowicz said. "We don't know."

Through history and across cultures, spiritual healers have long believed that the laying on of hands could cure disease and relieve pain. In the last 30 years or so, many forms of energy healing — sometimes called Reiki, Qigong, Therapeutic Touch, or Healing Touch — have found their way into hospitals and other clinical settings.

Still, it is often derided as hocus-pocus, although some medical practitioners have come to accept it as a harmless diversion that, if nothing else, might relieve stress.

Even when early studies showed some evidence of healing in patients treated with energy therapies, it was impossible to say whether the improvement was a result of the touch. More likely, critics suggested, the nurturing therapy simply improved the patient's frame of mind, promoting a healing response.

Gronowicz was in the doubting camp. She had spent her career studying the biology of bone cells. Her work with hormones, growth factors and tissue engineering has shed light on the very elements of bone — a slow, sometimes tedious effort she hopes might someday help doctors find treatments for crippling diseases.

But when a colleague asked her to collaborate on an experiment looking into the power of Therapeutic Touch, she was curious. As a full professor in the department of surgery, with tenure and respect, Gronowicz had the stature to dabble in an endeavor that some of her scientific colleagues might criticize as a fool's errand.

"If I was just starting out, it would be the end of my career," Gronowicz said.

She applied for a National Institutes of Health grant to fund an experiment designed to isolate the mind/body conundrum from the question of energy healing by applying Therapeutic Touch techniques to presumably inanimate bone cells cultured in an incubator.

At first, even the NIH's branch that funds research in alternative and complementary medicine turned her down. Eventually, she received $250,000 for her study.

Then, over the course of three years, Therapeutic Touch practitioners arrived at the lab twice a week, cleared their minds and, for 10 minutes at a time, held their hands a few inches from cell-filled plastic lab dishes that were clamped in a metal stand.

"I remember going in and thinking, 'How am I going to direct compassion and healing to a petri dish?'" said Holly Major, a nurse and Therapeutic Touch practitioner at Griffin Hospital in Derby, who worked on the UConn study.

The laboratory environment was foreign to Therapeutic Touch practitioner Libbe W. Clarke, who usually practices in her Rocky Hill living room, where clients rest on a massage table surrounded by Native American artifacts in the dim glow of lightly scented candles.

"I said, 'I've got no body that's at least 5 feet long, I've got this little dish,'" Clarke said. "But my mind said to me [that] this is a living thing. It was almost like I was working on a patient. It felt the same."

To put Therapeutic Touch to the test, cell cultures were divided into three groups.

One dish of cells was treated by a trained healer. A second set of cells was treated by untrained students who were instructed to hold their hands over a petri dish for 10 minutes twice a week. A third dish of cells stood ignored in its metal stand.

After the treatment, the dishes were returned to an incubator. Scientists who later examined the cells under the microscope didn't know which group each dish had been in.

To Gronowicz's astonishment, the cells treated by trained Therapeutic Touch practitioners grew faster and stronger than those that received the sham treatment, or none at all.

"Therapeutic Touch stimulated growth in bone, tendon and skin cells at statistically significant rates," Gronowicz said.

She tested the cells using several different biological markers for growth, and each test confirmed her finding. In one test, Gronowicz found that cells treated with Therapeutic Touch grew at double the rate of untreated cells.

In addition to seeing increased cell division under the microscope, the bone cell cultures treated with Therapeutic Touch also absorbed more calcium, the essential mineral for growing strong bones. Her findings were published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Gronowicz also looked at bone cancer cells. Cancer occurs when cells grow out of control, so a treatment that stimulates growth could be detrimental to people with cancer. But unlike healthy cells, bone cancer cells did not appear to be stimulated by the touch therapy — an interesting, though not fully explained, finding, Gronowicz said.

Beyond growing bones, the findings may begin to explain why people with strong social support systems appear to be healthier and recover from disease better than those who are isolated. Maybe it's not all in their heads.

"In this case, the bones didn't know, that's why what she did is so intriguing," Chesney said. "To our knowledge, those cells didn't know who was a healer and who wasn't."

February 23, 2008

Reiki healing for children

Using an ancient healing art, one mother says she found a way to calm her boisterous son. Julie Cross investigates Kerry Geldart practices reiki on her son, Jake Worley, age 6

By the age of 4, Jake’s life was pretty stressful. His parents had broken up when he was 18 months old and he was spending half the week with his father and half with his mother, Kerry Geldart. He had never slept well, but now he was waking three or four times every night,
calling anxiously for his mum.

“He was very nervy, but at times overly boisterous. He had a lot of insecurities due to a lack of a structured routine in terms of shared parenting,” says Geldart, 37, who at the time was a part-time finance manager living in Brighton.

They seemed stuck in a rut. But, when Jake broke his wrist after falling off a climbing frame at the park, Geldart’s friend Rifa Bhunnoo, a practitioner of reiki, which claims to direct healing energy via the hands, offered to treat him. “I had my doubts,” Geldart recalls. “Jake was asleep when Rifa arrived. She didn’t disturb him, but spent about 40 minutes placing her hands on his head, body and wrist cast. “When he awoke he was in the sunniest of moods. It was stunning.”

From that point on, she says, Jake no longer needed painkillers. Geldart had also noticed how calm and relaxed he had seemed after the session and it spurred her on to learn reiki so she could treat Jake at home.

“Reiki works by intention, through the desire of one person to ease the burdens of another, which is why a parent performing reiki on a child works so well,” claims Geldart. “As well as improving my own wellbeing by using it on myself to destress, relax and think clearly, I soon saw the positive effects it was having on Jake. I started using reiki at bedtime by placing a hand on his forehead,” she says. “He would tell me that he loved the warm feeling it gave him. More importantly, he began to sleep through the night, which was a huge relief and meant that we were both more energised. He also had an increased attention span and was much less boisterous.”

It aims to heal mind, spirit, body and soul

Reiki is an ancient holistic therapy that was redeveloped by Mikao Usui, a Japanese doctor, in the late 19th century into the form used today. It involves placing the hands on or near different parts of the anatomy, with the aim of healing the mind, spirit, body and soul.

Bhunnoo, 34, who is based in Brighton, claims that those receiving reiki often feel a warmth from the hands, even when they are not touching the body, or a coolness, a mild tingling, or sometimes nothing at all. Most people feel deeply relaxed after a session and the effects normally last for a few days. She says that children are much more open to the therapy than adults because they have no prejudices or preconceptions. She insists that it is perfectly safe, as the body takes as much reiki as it needs.

Bhunnoo explains that anyone can learn reiki and can use it to help others; it’s just a matter of learning how to do it. She says that by channelling the energy around them, people can even do it on themselves.

Emma Saunders, a reiki master based in The Wirral, who has treated young adults with hyperactive tendencies, says: “Reiki is like learning to drive; you have to get into the driver’s seat to learn.” Reiki, she says, is the name of the energy that is within all living things. “What we in the West call our ‘personal space’ is referred to as our ‘aura’ in the East. This energy or aura surrounding us picks up negative energy from people we don’t like, from difficult relationships or from illness. That energy can then find its way inside us, causing blockages,” Saunders says.

She says that reiki works well on hyperactive teenagers because it is deeply relaxing.

Robert Jefford, the chairman of the Reiki Federation, says that reiki should never replace conventional medicine. “As a healing therapy it works extremely well alongside conventional medicine. Reiki therapists cannot diagnose; in fact, it is illegal.”

For Geldart, reiki has not only helped her son to resolve his emotional issues, it has also helped her to come to terms with being a single mum. “I feel so much more confident now that I use reiki in my life. I feel that we bond when I give Jake reiki and I use it on myself to relax and destress,” she says.

Happy for mum to use “the Force”

She says that reiki gave her the self-belief to move to Warwickshire, near her family, when she was offered her dream job as development manager for a not-for-profit environmental organisation. She says that Jake, now 6, is much more settled and is a happy, sociable little boy. “I really think the positive changes in our life are down to reiki. Jake is a Star Warsfan and he refers to reiki as ‘the Force’. Whenever he wants some reiki, he says: ‘Use the Force, Mummy.’ How can you argue with that?” she laughs. As reported by The Hartford Courant, July 28, 2008.

Olympics: 'You have to be a believer' [NZ's medal winners]

5:00AM Wednesday August 20, 2008

By Jarrod Booker

It was only two years ago when a distraught Hayden Roulston, confined to a hospital bed in intensive care, turned to his father Brian and told him: "That's it. That's the end of my career. It's finished."

An anguished Brian Roulston urged him to wait until he recovered from the effects of a serious heart problem, "and then evaluate everything", before giving up on his cycling dream.

Through the "miracle" of unconventional treatment, the boy from Ashburton is now on top of the world with a silver and a bronze medal in Beijing, and an opportunity to add a third medal in competition last night.

"It's just a pleasure to see him back on the bike, because he lives for it," a proud Brian Roulston told the Herald.

"The hard work he put in when he was younger - he used to go out and do three, four, five, six-hour training rides by himself in the rain and the wind in mid-Canterbury. You have got to be highly motivated to do that."

Hayden Roulston's dream was always to win an Olympic medal for his country, but it seemed impossible in 2006 when he was diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia.

The rare heart disease affecting the muscle of the right ventricle can cause sudden death. Roulston was suffering shortness of breath and an irregular heart beat.

As he was reflecting on retirement at 25, it was a chance encounter that breathed new life into his cycling career.

A friend of Roulston's was at a restaurant when a woman collapsed. Julie Reid, a practitioner of the Japanese hands-on healing process, reiki, happened to be there and went to help. The friend saw what happened and struck up a conversation about Roulston's problem.

What followed was a meeting between Ms Reid and Roulston, and a course of treatment which helped him, against the odds, to make a successful return to top-level cycling.

"He rang me and just said 'I have met this amazing woman - what I am going to tell you will freak you out'," Brian Roulston said. "And I think his mother will still say she is very doubtful [about reiki], but you have to be a believer. And it's history now. Ever since he started the reiki he has never, ever had a problem with his heart."

It was not only the health problems that threatened to hold Roulston back. Run-ins with the law over fighting in public have also cost him.

"He's had his ups and downs," Brian Roulston said. "But he has put all them behind him now - and his health problems, and a few family problems, and he has come through all that on the right side of the ledger now. He's silenced a lot of critics, I can tell you that."

When in Pain, PGA Tour Players Turn to Healer

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By DAMON HACK

Published: August 9, 2007

TULSA, Okla., Aug. 8 — The most sought after guru at the 89th P.G.A. Championship once spent 730 days
blindfolded.

Jim Weathers earned recognition from massaging Phil Mickelson’s injured left wrist during the Memorial
Tournament and the United States Open.

Jim Weathers made his living jumping out of airplanes in the middle of the night and once broke his neck when
a squat rack fell on him. He does not teach bunker shots or putting techniques, but no teacher at Southern Hills
Country Club can boast the client list or mystique that Weathers has.

“No one really knows exactly what I do,” said Weathers, who has been called a shiatsu master, a reflexologist
and a healer. “They try to say, ‘Hey, he’s a massage therapist,’ but it’s more than that.”

In the traveling circus that is the PGA Tour, rife with players, caddies and officials hop-scotching the globe, the
muscular Weathers is at tournaments 36 weeks during the year. His latest recognition came from massaging Phil Mickelson’s injured left wrist during the Memorial Tournament and the United States Open, but Weathers has worked with as many as 40 players on the Tour.

The son of a Choctaw Indian father and a mother of Irish descent, Weathers took a circuitous route to his occupation. He grew up in Napa Valley, Calif., graduated from high school and joined the Army before becoming a Green Beret.

While parachuting out of an airplane in Japan, Weathers said he clipped a tree on his descent and was injured. Taking the advice of four different people, Weathers visited an 84-year-old healer named Toshi Namiami, who performed reflexology on him.

“She convinced me that she had been waiting for me for 30 years,” Weathers said Wednesday. “And I said, But I’m only 19 years old.

“I ended up studying under her for two years, blindfolded. I’ve been doing this ever since I got out of the military.”

Weathers, 46, practices Reiki — a Japanese technique that channels energy to heal and reduce stress — and uses other Eastern techniques in treating clients. After two decades working in various sports, including Indy car racing, rodeo and the professional water ski tour, he met the PGA Tour player Ted Purdy five years ago at a motivational seminar in San Antonio and has been a fixture on the Tour since.

In 2003, Jerry Kelly, a two-time PGA Tour winner, sought out Weathers at a tournament because he was experiencing pain in a shoulder joint.

“The two bones were rubbing against each other,” Kelly said Wednesday. “I was going to have surgery the next week. I did five sessions with Jim that week and it was the best I had felt on a golf course in over a year. When I went in for the pre-op for the surgery, there was a space between the bones of the AC joint and I didn’t need the surgery anymore. Jim made a believer out of me pretty quick.”

Weathers said: “I do with the muscles of the body what a chiropractor does with the bones. I realign everything like a pulley, which makes them stronger, more alert, and allows more oxygen to the brain. It’s quite an art.”

During a 90-minute session with a golf player, for example, Weathers will have the golfer lie on his stomach, begin at his feet and work up to his head. The golfer will then turn over to his back, and Weathers will work up again.

On Wednesday, Weathers and Kelly did a shorter, 15-minute session, where Weathers squeezed his shoulders and massaged the back of the neck with rapid chops with his hands.

“The C3 and the C4 are going nuts,” Kelly said of the warmth he felt on his spine as Weathers worked.

“The body is not built to do what we do with the back, the twisting and the loading and the releasing,” Kelly said. “It’s an unnatural motion. Jim has an energy that has healing potential. That’s just the way it is. He’s intuitive.”

At Oakmont in June, where the rough was thick, Mickelson said Weathers was never busier.

“The first practice round on Monday, Jim Weathers had six other appointments, people hurting their ribs, their back, their wrists,” Mickelson said.

Weathers, who lives in Boise, Idaho, said he had trimmed his client list to 10 golfers, including Mickelson, Purdy and Kelly. He said he occasionally gets calls from athletes competing in other sports leagues and, when he has the time, he offers his services.

“Even the White Sox called me,” Weathers said. “I went and worked on them and they won six out of the next seven. It looks like I need to go back and work on them again.”

Healer, motivator impresses golfers with many talents

Former Green Beret makes living working with athletes

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Michael Arace

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

TIM REVELL | DISPATCH

On a gloriously sunny Memorial Day at Muirfield Village Golf Club, the fans ducked under boxwood bushes
and pushed against plastic fences to get a look at Jack Nicklaus on the practice tee. As they watched, a gigantic
man in an orange shirt approached the Golden Bear. The giant man wore a crew cut, was oaken-necked and
emblazed with a Green Berets tattoo on one of his rippled arms.

The giant man was Jim Weathers, a special forces veteran turned shaman. His business card reads:
Motivational Speaker, Flexologist, Shiatsu Master. Through his fingers flows 5,000 years of self-healing tradition.

Weathers put his fingers on Nicklaus? hands, then his shoulders. He hit some pressure points. He rotated Nicklaus
arm in a strange fashion. Fans among the boxwoods and along the fence scratched their heads. This was not a
simple stretching exercise. It was an odd sight.

A half-hour later, Nicklaus headed to the locker room where, Weathers said, Nicklaus submitted his 65-year-old
body to a 90-minute treatment.

This was all set in motion the day before, when Nicklaus played a practice round with veteran PGA Tour player Jerry Kelly. Nicklaus made some mild complaints about neck problems and other irritations. Kelly, one of a number of tour players employing Weathers, said something like, "Jack, you’ve got to see my guy. He’s going to be here (Monday)."

Kelly was a wreck when he first met Weathers. Kelly had problems with his shoulder joints and was facing surgery. This was before the Tour Championship last November. Kelly took five treatments and finished third that week.

Fred Funk, who won The Players Championship in March, and Ted Purdy, who won the Byron Nelson two weeks ago, are among the dozen or so golfers who are devoted to the shaman. If the connection to winning isn’t direct, the players, at least, see a correlation. Which is part of the idea. The mind is a powerful device.

"There is an energy within all of us," Kelly said, "and I’m learning just how to recognize it and bring it up. It’s not a physical energy, it’s more of an inner energy. It’s difficult to explain. You’ve heard of adrenaline rushes and sugar highs. This is an internal energy that brings about a calmness."

Weathers said, "I don’t believe what I’m doing is making them win. But I believe that when there is balance in our self and our energy is balanced, we are able to get the most out of our abilities. . . . It’s something like (former race-car drivers) A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones used to say to me, that there are legends all over the racetrack who never know how to win, just because they never knew what it was to win."

Weathers was a Green Beret, stationed in the Pacific, when he suffered rib and back injuries during a parachuting exercise. He went to a Japanese healer because he didn’t want to cede eight weeks to recuperation. That is how he met Goshi Namiami, 85 years old and blind, in Tokyo.

Weathers: "She said, I can’t work on you - you have too much energy. I’ve been looking for you for 30 years. You are a shaman. "

Weathers was ultimately convinced to become Namiami’s protege. For two years, he studied reflexology (as it is named in the West) and shiatsu under the master. He studied while blindfolded so he could "learn to see through the fingers."

Reflexology, according to the Web site www.reflexology.org, "can be used to help restore and maintain the body’s natural equilibrium. . . . A professionally trained reflexologist can detect subtle changes in specific points on the feet, and by working on these points may affect the corresponding organ or system of the body."

Shiatsu is sometimes called a massage therapy. It’s more like chiropractic application for the muscles, the intent being to realign musculature and restore balance. Think of it as acupuncture, but with fingers rather than needles used to manipulate pressure points. Weathers said that when he is done with a shiatsu treatment, his subject has had the equivalent of a full night’s sleep.

"There is energy in the nerves and their pathways," Kelly said. "Shiatsu restores energy and lets the body heal itself. It unblocks energy to let blood flow and allow healing."

The average fat guy on the other side of the ropes might consider this quackery.

"But if (Weathers) worked on that fat guy, the fat guy would change his mind," Kelly said. "The fat guy would feel better and actually lose weight. He could even do it sitting on the same couch every night, watching the same TV show, drinking the same beer."

For 25 years, Weathers has been crisscrossing the continent and treating race-car drivers, rodeo competitors, ultimate fighters and myriad other athletes. He makes a good living as a traveling shaman ? and he uses a large chunk of his earnings to finance personal crusades.

Weathers warms up when he talks about the abused girl in Las Vegas he is healing, or the quadriplegic surfer in Hawaii who is now walking in a pool, or the arthritic child in California who is getting out of a wheelchair. You can feel his energy.

"When they say, ‘I can’t pay for this,’ I say, ‘Jerry Kelly picked up the tab for this one,’ " Weathers said. "I do this because I love it, and how many people can say they truly love what they do? And I’m still learning, every day, about the power of the mind. Goshi is still with me.

Science News

Biofield Therapies: Helpful Or Full Of Hype? Review Looks At Reiki, Therapeutic Touch And Healing Touch

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2009) — Biofield therapies, which claim to use subtle energy to stimulate the body's healing process, are promising complementary interventions for reducing the intensity of pain in a number of conditions, reducing anxiety for hospitalized patients and reducing agitated behaviors in dementia, over and above what standard treatments can achieve. However, longer-term effects are less clear.

Dr. Shamini Jain, from the UCLA Division of Cancer Prevention and Control Research, and Dr. Paul Mills, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, and the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Diego, US, publish their review of the science behind biofield therapies online this week in Springer's International Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

A significant number of patients use biofield therapies -- Reiki, therapeutic touch and healing touch -- despite very little research proving that they work. These techniques have been used over millennia in various cultural communities to heal physical and mental disorders. They have only recently been under the scrutiny of current Western scientific methods.

In a detailed review of 66 clinical studies looking at biofield therapies in different patient populations with a range of ailments, Jain and Mills examine the strength of the evidence for the efficacy of these complementary therapies. They show that overall, published work on biofield therapies is of average quality -- in scientific terms.

Bearing that in mind, they find strong evidence that biofield therapies reduce pain intensity in free-living populations, and moderate evidence that they are effective at lowering pain in hospitalized patients as well as in patients with cancer.

There is also moderate evidence that these therapies ease agitated behaviors in dementia and moderate evidence that they reduce anxiety in hospitalized patients. There is inconclusive evidence for the efficacy of biofield therapies on symptoms of fatigue and quality of life in cancer patients, as well as for overall pain reduction, and anxiety management in cardiovascular patients.

The authors conclude that there is a strong need for further high-quality studies and suggest specific areas for further research. They add: "In order to better inform patients of the potential benefits or non-benefits of these biofield-based interventions, clinicians and scientists within behavioral medicine should familiarize themselves with current theory, practice and research of such techniques."

Journal reference:

1.Jain S & Mills PJ. Biofield Therapies: Helpful or Full of Hype? A Best Evidence Synthesis. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 2009; DOI: 10.1007/s12529-009-9062-4