Reconnective Healing
The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine Vol. 23, No. 8, pp. 590-598 (2017)
An Integrative Review of Scientific Evidence for Reconnective Healing
Baldwin, Ann L. (1,2), and Trent, Natalie L. (3)
1. Department of Physiology, College of Medicine, University of Arizona
2. Laboratory for the Advances in Consciousness and Health, Department of Psychology, University of Arizona
3. Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Harvard Medical School
Abstract
Background: Biofield therapies offer a novel, non-invasive approach to treating chronic diseases based on assessing and adjusting an individual's physiological and emotional responses through their bio-energetic field. Reconnective Healing™ (RH) is defined as: “…not just energy healing, but instead a more comprehensive spectrum of healing composed of energy, light, and information.”
Objectives: Several biofield therapies, such as Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and Johrei, have already been reviewed in the literature but RH has received little attention even though it is taught and practiced worldwide. This review provides a critical assessment of RH as a healing modality.
Methods: Scientific research articles published in peer-reviewed journals addressing RH were identified using relevant databases and archives. Information was extracted from each article that met selection criteria for evaluation of quality of reporting and design. This review summarizes and critically evaluates the five currently published peer-reviewed research papers involving RH and assesses whether RH provides consistent physiological outcomes between the studies.
Results: These results, taken together, suggest: (i) exposure of a healer or healee to RH, either directly or indirectly, amplifies their degree of autonomic arousal and energy, (ii) RH can reduce pain and improve range of motion in people with shoulder limitations, and (iii) when individuals experience RH as a group, their autonomic nervous systems simultaneously show sudden similar responses consistent with the idea that RH is mitigated by entrainment of biofields.
Conclusions: Since these studies are extremely varied in design it is not possible at this point to reach conclusions about the general effectiveness of RH. More clinical and physiological research performed on different populations under a range of conditions is needed in order to support this healthcare approach.
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https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/acm.2015.0218Excerpts:
“The allopathic system, which is so successful for treating acute illnesses, is not as effective with chronic diseases because drugs taken on a long-term basis can become ineffective or produce unacceptable side-effects,1 leading to poor medication adherence.2"
“On a wider scale, surveys indicate that those with the most serious and debilitating medical conditions, such as cancer,6,7 chronic pain,8,9 and HIV,10 tend to be frequent users of CAM. For this reason, it would be more beneficial for the patients if their primary care physicians were open to both allopathic and CAM types of treatments. However, this kind of integration depends largely on the establishment of an evidence base for safety and effectiveness of CAM approaches. The purpose of this review is to critically assess the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of a worldwide CAM modality, Reconnective Healing™ (RH), which is classified as a biofield therapy.”
“Biofield therapies are based on the philosophy that humans have an energetic dimension. Such therapies are believed to balance out disturbance in the energy field caused by physical and psychologic symptoms. Indigenous systems of healing such as Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, which go back thousands of years, rest on concepts of a vital force or subtle life energy that is central to healing. These subtle energies may actually refer to something similar to the present-day concept of the biofield. Biofield therapies are among the most controversial CAM modalities; they involve the practitioner interacting with the body's bioenergetic field, rather than with the physical body. Measurements of extracellular ion fluxes and voltage potential differences in living organisms led to the hypothesis that an electrostatic field surrounds and penetrates the human body.11,12 Endogenous biofields, as detected from the heart (ECG), brain (EEG), and muscle (EMG), are recognized clinically as indices of health and disease. Modern superconducting quantum interference devices have become important tools in clinical medicine for measuring the biomagnetic fields of the heart and brain.13"
“Several therapeutic procedures, based on the use of the hands to sense and alter endogenous biofields, have been developed with the goal of improving physical and psychologic health. Among the most commonly practiced of these biofield therapies are Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, and external qigong.14 A recent review concludes that the clinical effectiveness of biofield therapies is strongest in symptom management for pain and cancer and evidence is promising for clinical populations with arthritis, dementia, and heart disease.15 A review of biofield therapies not involving physical touch reported that two thirds of the higher scoring trials demonstrated statistically significant beneficial treatment outcomes.16 Specifically, Therapeutic Touch reduced pain and/or anxiety in the elderly, in people recovering from surgery, in burn victims, in adults with tension headaches, and in HIV-positive children. In single studies, quality of life was improved by external qigong in cocaine-dependent adults and by Healing Touch in patients with cancer. Reiki reduced psychologic depression in adults. In another review, Anderson and Taylor17 described studies showing that Therapeutic Touch improved function in people suffering from arthritis and reduced complications from bone marrow transplant. Healing Touch also significantly decreased the length of hospital stay and anxiety levels in patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass graft, compared to those receiving standard care and visitation. Thrane and Cohen18 reviewed the effect of Reiki for pain and anxiety in randomized clinical trials. Of the 12 papers on the subject, only 7 met the selection criteria (4 with cancer patients, 1 with postsurgical patients, and 2 with older adults). Most of the seven studies yielded statistically significant results either for pain or anxiety or both. Thus, although the scientific evidence is sparse, and sample sizes are mostly small, biofield therapies do appear to be useful for reducing pain and anxiety in various patient populations.”
“A therapy that is relatively recent compared to Reiki and qigong and involves interactions with biofields is RH. RH, as discovered and developed by Eric Pearl DC, in the early 1990s, ‘is not just energy healing, but instead a more comprehensive spectrum of healing composed of energy, light and information. It is not something we do. It's something we allow, become, catalyze and help facilitate.’ RH is taught worldwide by means of seminars and workshops. Descriptions of the different levels of training are available at thereconnection.com. Similar to some other biofield therapies, in RH, the biofields of both healer and healee are thought to resonate with an external environmental field.
“There is evidence that naturally occurring fields can alter biofields and can even change cellular function. For example, Harold Saxton Burr, PhD, of Yale Medical School, showed that changes in environmental electromagnetic fields, such as caused by thunderstorms, substantially affected the biofields of trees.19 In another case, biologically generated dynamic frequency information (ECG recordings from a person focusing intentionally on feelings of appreciation) significantly increased DNA synthesis of cultured fibroblasts.20 In addition to producing classical electromagnetic fields, oscillating electric dipoles in the body can act as antennae to produce nonclassical fields21 that do not fade with distance.22"
“During RH training programs, students are trained to concentrate on their clients' energy fields by focusing on the sensations in their own hands...During RH, the sensations become stronger as practitioners move their hands away from the client's body. The further away they move their hands, the stronger the sensations feel, rather like stretching a rubber band. While the healer is feeling the changes in the sensations in their hands, they are also observing the physical responses of the clients that have a tendency to increase as the practitioners move their hands further and further away from the recipient. These effects are visibly clear and distinct, such as eyelids fluttering uncontrollably, eyes rapidly darting from side to side, and fingers and/or feet twitching. These types of responses have also been reported with other biofield therapies such as Reiki.26 Sometimes clients have no recognizable experience at all, or their experience may emerge hours or days after the session. More often, the experiences tend to be immediate and the healing results almost instantaneous.”
“Although people who have given and/or received RH have experienced its beneficial effects first hand, those who are not familiar with RH may be more skeptical. According to Eric Pearl DC, Founder of The Reconnection LLC (Personal Communication), over 20,000 mainstream healthcare practitioners, including MDs, DOs, DCs, PTs, and nurses, have trained in RH and have incorporated it into their private practices across five continents. This number is based on the fact that The Reconnection LLC records show they have trained over 100,000 people and that 20%–30% are professional healthcare providers.”
“The present review identified five studies; a case study,30 effects of RH charismatic leaders addressing conference attendees on ambient energy level,32 RH treatments on five randomly selected volunteers,33 physiologic changes in RH healers after performing RH,25 and a well-designed RCT.31 Since these studies are extremely varied in design, it is not possible at this point to reach firm conclusions about the general effectiveness of RH.”
“...the recently published randomized, placebo-controlled shoulder study provides robust clinical data from 78 individuals with limited ROM, demonstrating that a short session of RH is at least as effective as an equal duration of Physical Therapy in improving ROM and pain relief.”
“Regarding clues as to the possible mechanisms for mediation of RH, one common finding from the three published nonclinical RH studies is that exposure of healer or healee to RH, either directly or indirectly, amplifies their autonomic physiologic arousal and increases their energy as shown by GDV and HRV. In the two GDV studies performed in a group context, the autonomic responses of individuals within each group to RH appeared to be synchronized, consistent with the claim that Reconnective Healers can access environmental fields that influence their own biofields, and that these changes are passed onto their patients' biofields by entrainment.”
“This paper and the studies by Baldwin and Schwartz25 and Baldwin et al.,31 were partially funded by The Reconnection; this funding source did not play any part in the analysis of data nor in the writing of the papers.”
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Comments: it is unfortunate that Harvard Medical School and the University of Arizona are involved in promoting this pseudoscientific nonsense.
See the description of Reconnective Healing on the web site:
“Reconnective Healing is the new Energy, Light and Information of our planet. It’s a highly evolved form of energy interaction that continues to advance our health, balance, and quality of life progress with infinite freedom and expanded consciousness. It promotes our ability to heal ourselves and impact the lives of others. Recognized by today’s science as the Reconnective Healing frequencies, Reconnective Healing is comprised of this new, all-inclusive spectrum of energy, light and information. These vibrational frequencies encompass the energy systems and benefits of all energy healing techniques, yet are accessible without complicated steps, procedures or rituals… and can be learned by everyone.”
http://www.thereconnection.com/
