CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., August 1, 2005: David Ian Miller conducts an interview with Marilyn Schlitz, vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and senior scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center, on the controversial subject of prayer and healing.
Researchers at Duke University have recently published research that indicates that cardiac patients showed no improvement in their condition when many people prayed for them. However, Marilyn Schlitz indicates that there is 45 years of “Good solid laboratory-based, quantitative studies — that support the idea that one person’s intentions may influence another person’s physiology at a distance under well-controlled laboratory conditions.” Schlitz comments that one study cannot prove or disprove a particular hypothesis.
Schlitz herself is presently conducting a study funded by the National Institute of Health. She explains, “The study is a three-part clinical trial working primarily with breast cancer patients who are going through reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy. Participants either get distant healing or they don’t, and they either don’t know which group they’re in or they are told about it. By considering the placebo effect we are able to look at whether or not there’s an additive effect of knowing that you are receiving distant healing.”
As people pray in many different ways, Schlitz has defined prayer as compassionate intention in her research. Healers that have been invited to participate in the study may be trained in Reiki, the Barbara Brennan School of Energy Medicine, Christian Science or the Tonglen Buddhist tradition. Schlitz says, “In the study the healers are asked to hold a compassionate intention for the well-being of another person — in whatever way that works for them. In our current study on wound healing we ask healers to send compassionate intention to their assigned patients for 30 minutes each day for eight days. We measure distant healing by implanting a tiny Gore-Tex patch under the skin. What you see on the surface is a little suture. Under the skin is a spaghetti-like strand of Gore-Tex that has little pores in it. This provides a kind of collection device for measuring collagen. Collagen is an aspect of the wound-healing process. And so we are looking at it as an indicator of wound healing.”
Schlitz further adds, “Data from distant-healing experiments actually suggest that consciousness is more than what goes on in the brain, or that the brain has the capacity to transcend itself in ways that we have yet to understand. To me, that’s where a real breakthrough may come in our understanding of who we are and what we are capable of doing and being.”