Allaxys Communications --- Transponder V --- Allaxys Forum 1
FRAUENPOWER! => ~~~ FRAUENPOWER! ~~~ => Topic started by: YanTing on October 15, 2018, 11:59:28 AM
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The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 525-527 (2018)
Commentary
How Tapping into “Energy” Can Trigger a Paradigm Shift in Biomedicine
Eric Leskowitz
Integrative Medicine Task Force, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Charlestown, MA
First page preview:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/acm.2018.0073
Excerpts:
"The practice of medicine has changed dramatically since I started Medical School in 1975. Back then, the prevailing attitude was that exercise was for jocks, yoga and vegetarianism were the domain of hippies, and lifestyle issues were basically irrelevant to health."
"A concurrent medical paradigm shift has seen behavioral factors—diet, exercise, and stress management—become well ensconced in our society's view of health. But another challenging shift might be necessary before we can fully understand health and illness: it is my belief that this deeper understanding requires that we come to terms with the widespread belief in invisible healing energies, the additional dimension of our human organism that is hinted at by NCCAM's adoption of the term 'biofield' to refer to electrical and magnetic processes that occur within and around the human body. Without this added element, medicine will be like Newtonian physics in the age of Einstein—useful, but only within a very limited range."
"Biomedicine remains alone among the world's healing traditions in its rejection of this healing energy, whether it is called prana (in yoga), qi (in Traditional Chinese Medicine [TCM]), élan vital, or animal magnetism.1 Our materialist dismissal of these intangibles has hindered our acceptance of many effective alternative and complementary healing modalities2 and limited our concept of what it means to be human.
"As a result, many therapies are considered beyond the pale because they invoke these invisible forces to explain their effects. Yet homeopathy,3 biofield therapies (including modalities such as Therapeutic Touch and Reiki),4 and distant prayer5,6 are supported by a credible, if mixed, peer-reviewed literature, with JACM a leading forum for research in these fields.4,7 But the lack of an established physiologic mechanism(s) of action makes these practices regular targets for skeptics. Nevertheless, some energy-based techniques are gaining acceptance because researchers are reducing their intangible elements to something more acceptable: in acupuncture, the piezoelectric response of the fascial matrix to mechanical stimulation is being actively researched as a potential mechanism,8 whereas acupoints and meridians are being reconceptualized, respectively, as intersections of connective tissue planes and as the fascial planes themselves.9"
"I will look at an approach that remains obscure in the halls of academic medicine, but is now in wide clinical usage: energy psychology (EP).
"EP is so widely used that lack of fast-track consideration by institutional gatekeepers is puzzling. For example, an online training guide has been downloaded over 2 million times, e-mail rosters of two EP-oriented organizations (Innersource, and EFTUniverse) have over 800,000 subscribers, a web-based conference (the World Tapping Summit) has averaged 500,000 viewers annually over the past 10 years, and EP's professional organization (the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology [ACEP]) has 1300 members...over 100 published studies—including 48 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 5 systematic reviews, and 4 meta-analyses—consistently show statistically significant clinical benefits to patients suffering a wide range of ailments, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain. Yet, the latest government guidelines for PTSD treatment released by SAMHSA (the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) does not even mention EP, despite its widespread use and increasingly solid research base. So the question must be asked—why not?
"By way of background, EP is the umbrella term for a range of therapies whose best-known form (emotional freedom techniques [EFT], or 'tapping') can be described in conventional psychological terms as an exposure-based desensitization process with a somatic component."
"...a growing body of research suggests that something significant happens when these points are stimulated at the same time that upsetting experiences are mentally reviewed."
"I propose the following reasons for this translational lag: institutional inertia, intellectual gatekeeping, and paradigm loyalty. Here are three examples of those sociocultural processes at work.
"(1) Resistance by professional organizations"
"(2) Resistance by professional journals"
"(3) Resistance in popular media—Wikipedia is a widely consulted source for medical information, yet it has been credibly accused of bias against holistic therapies.14 The Wikipedia article on EFT uses emotionally loaded terms ('pseudoscience,' 'highly bizarre') and omits mention of most research after 2005. However, ACEP's attempts to update and edit the entry were regularly scrubbed within days, and sometimes even hours.15,16"
"It is human nature, of course, to hold on to cherished beliefs, especially if one's identity (professional or personal) depends on maintaining a certain worldview. Although biomedicine has significantly shifted its institutional identity with its recent embrace of behavioral and lifestyle factors, I believe it will remain an incomplete healing system if intangible factors like 'energy' and consciousness are excluded from consideration."
"Surgeons continue to use general anesthesia, even though they cannot explain why it works. Energy-based therapies should be held to a similar standard: as long as they are proven effective, they should be endorsed while we work to outline a plausible mechanism of action."
"But there are some positive notes. Several academically based and research-oriented organizations now actively explore the reality of energy and consciousness. A recent special issue of Global Advances in Health and Medicine devoted solely to Biofield Science17 resulted from scientific meetings and discussions fostered by a recently established nonprofit collaborative called The Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI).19 Academic researchers at major universities and medical centers (including the University of California at San Diego and the MD Anderson Cancer Center) have partnered with CHI, as has The Institute of Noetic Sciences, with its 40-year record of conducting this sort of research.18"
"One hundred years ago, the discoveries of quantum physicist Max Planck triggered a paradigm shift, one that was met with great resistance by the scientific establishment of his era. He responded: 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' The current expansion and shift of scientific paradigms could potentially run a smoother course, if medicine finally comes to terms with the intangibles in its closet."
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Comments: as critics have pointed out, proponents of "integrative medicine" have tried to claim things like exercise, diet, and lifestyle issues as their own domain and then tried to use the benefits of these as evidence in favor of their approaches. I find the claim that medical schools did not recognize the importance of these in 1975 to be ridiculous.
Medicine does not reject "energy medicine" because it relies on "invisible forces" (all the known forces in science are invisible). Rather, it is because it conflicts with well-established scientific findings and is not supported by any convincing evidence.
Contrary to the last paragraph cited above, it looked like quantum theory was accepted relatively quickly. Here is what Wikipedia says:
"Following Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem (reported 1859), Albert Einstein offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect (1905, reported 1887). Around 1900-1910, the atomic theory and the corpuscular theory of light[10] first came to be widely accepted as scientific fact; these latter theories can be viewed as quantum theories of matter and electromagnetic radiation, respectively."
One difference is that quantum theory offered an explanation of phenomena that could be readily and reproducibly observed, whereas "energy medicine" offers no convincing data that requires explanation.