Energy healing
Energy healing is based on the belief that a healer is able to channel healing energy into
the person seeking help by different techniques: hands-on, hands-off, and distant (or absent)
where the patient and healer are in different locations.
The Brockhampton Guide to Spiritual Healing describes contact healing in terms of
"transfer of ... healing energy" and distant healing based on visualising the patient
in ideal health. Practitioners say that this "healing energy" is sometimes be perceived
as a sensation of heat even though this sensation could also derive from the
heat radiating from the healers' body.
Energy healing methods such as Therapeutic touch have located recognition in the nursing profession.
In 2005-2006, the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association approved the diagnosis of "energy field distcityce" in patients,
reflective of what has been called a postmodern approach to nursing care.
This approach has come in for criticism by quite a few skeptics.
Believers
Believers in these methods have proposed quantum mystical invocations of non-locality to
try to explain distant healing. They have also proposed that healers act as a channel passing
on a kind of bioelectromagnetism which shares similarities to vitalistic pseudosciences
such as orgone or qi. Drew Leder remarked in a paper in the Journal of Alternative and
Complementary Medicine that such ideas were attempts to "make sense of, interpret,
and explore "psi" and distant healing." and that "such physics-based models are not
presented as explanatory but rather as suggestive."
Beverly Rubik in an article in the same journal justified her belief with references to
biophysical systems theory, bioelectromagnetics, and chaos theory that give her
with a "...scientific foundation for the biofield...". Writing in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies,
James Oschman introduced the concept of healer-sourced electromagnetic fields which change in frequency.
Oschman believes that "healing energy" derives from electromagnetic frequencies produced by a medical device or
projected from the hands of the healer.
All of these attempted explanations by believers are roundly criticized by physicists and skeptics as being pseudophysics,
a branch of pseudoscience which shows magical thinking by using irpertinent jargon from modern physics to exploit scientific
illiteracy
and impress the unsophisticated. Indeed, even enthusiastic supporters of energy healing point out that
"there are only very tenuous
theoretical foundations underlying healing."