Unexplained Healing
Techniques
review by Jule Klotter
The Mystery of Healing
by Stephen A. Appelbaum, PhD
Lumen Editions (Brookline Books), P.O. Box 1047, Cambridge, Massachusetts
02238 USA; phone 800-666-2665
Softcover, 285pp, 1999, $16.95
The Mystery of Healing tells about Stephen A.
Appelbaum's exploration of diverse, unexplained healing techniques,
many of which are labeled supernatural. Dr. Appelbaum, a psychoanalyst
and clinical psychologist, worked at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka,
Kansas, for several years. Currently, he is Visiting Professor in the
Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Combining "a romantic
indulgence which decrees that anything might be true until proven
false..[and] a classical-scientific horror at the unsubstantiated which
decries that anything that might be true isn't until it has been shown
to be so," Appelbaum sought out mediums, psychic "surgeons," hands-on
and faith healers, and voodoo healers in his attempt to understand the
mystery of healing. His search also led him to C. Norman Shealy, MD,
and Shealy's holistic healing center that focuses on pain relief and
to Stanislav Grof, MD, a pioneer in LSD research and non-drug transpersonal
awareness and regression techniques. In his journey, Appelbaum hoped
to identify commonalities among these different practices that would
lead to a better understanding of healing.
Proving or disproving the effectiveness of these unconventional
techniques is not Dr. Appelbaum's purpose. Healing itself is Appelbaum's
focus. His journey led him to some curious findings. For example, he
traveled to the Phillipines in order to observe, videotape, and even
experience "psychic surgery." Psychic surgeons are said to use only
their bare hands to remove growths and other organic-looking material
from a person's body. In Appelbaum's observation, some people had no
response to the procedure; others indicated improvement in their conditions.
According to one apprentice of the technique, illusion and trickery
are common practice. Yet, a German surgeon who had the opportunity to
observe at close range while Juan Flores, a famous psychic surgeon,
worked on his wife, could not tell Appelbaum whether or not Flores'
hands had actually entered her body. The surgeon's wife, who had a slow-growing
hip cancer, had greatly benefited from a previous session with Flores
some years earlier. This beneficial effect, rather than a belief in
the authenticity of psychic surgery itself, had caused the couple to
return to the Phillipines for another session.
What causes these unexpected beneficial effects? Do
healers possess a special power? Is the healing power simply within
each of us, waiting to be activated? Or does healing result from an
interaction between healer and the ill? A special power may explain
the "tooth pullers" that Appelbaum learned about while in the Phillipines
from Dr. Constanza Fernandez. Found primarily in rural areas, Phillipine
tooth pullers are medically untrained healers who use forceps, bare
hands, or fingers wrapped in a handkerchief to remove teeth. Like many
healers, they claim to channel a power that comes from God. Dr. Fernandez
had studied the phenomena for her PhD research, observing hundreds of
tooth extractions performed by five different healers. The extractions,
which are done without anesthesia usually take only a few seconds. Minimal
bleeding results from these extractions, and most of the subjects that
Fernandez questioned reported little or no pain.
Dr. Femandez had had a tooth puller remove an extra
tooth, whose crown was still partly covered by gum, from her own mouth.
Her dentist had recommended that the tooth be removed but wanted to
wait until she recovered from giving birth. The tooth puller removed
the tooth within seconds. She felt a "quick, sharp but not painful sensation."
Bleeding stopped within minutes, and the area healed without pain or
infection. Similarly, a friend of hers, who had a wisdom tooth removed
in about five seconds with slight pain, experienced neither pain nor
infection afterward.
Dr. Fernandez and her husband drove Appelbaum to an
area outside Manila where he met and observed a tooth puller in action.
Appelbaum was able to feel the tooth before the procedure to verify
that "it was firmly anchored in the gum." He witnessed that teeth were
removed, holes were left in the gum, and little bleeding occurred. This
ease in removing teeth is not isolated to the Phillipines. Although
he cannot explain it, Appelbaum refers to an 1979, Chinese Medical
Journal article by Chinese dentist Gong Xuehin, who used acupressure
to remove 30,000 teeth without pain and little bleeding.
Dr. Appelbaum's journey also led him to Western researchers,
such as Bernard Grad, PhD. Grad, a biological researcher and geriatrician
at McGill University's Allen Memorial Institute (Montreal, Canada),
has researched healing attributed to laying on of hands. His experiments
in the mid-1970s showed that Oskar Estebany, a recognized hands-on healer,
could influence the healing of wounded mice and the growth of barley
seeds. Grad wondered if psychological factors, in particular a person's
mood, could affect another organism. He had a psychiatrically normal
man, a neurotically depressed woman, and a psychotically depressed man
hold bottles of water. The water from each person was used to water
a group of seeds. A control group of seeds received water that had not
been held by anyone. "...the seeds treated by the psychiatrically normal
man grew better than did all the other groups of seeds....When the mood
of the neurotically depressed woman improved she, too, showed an ability
to influence the seeds." None of these people were known to have healing
abilities.
Other studies indicate that a healer's positive or negative
mood can affect the results of his/her work. During the relaxed summer
pace of Rosary Hill College (Buffalo, New York), M. Justa Smith, PhD,
a biochemist, was amazed to find that healer Oskar Estebany increased
the activity of enzymes in a solution simply by holding its container.
The enzymes had been purposely damaged by ultrasound irradiation. Months
later when Estebany was dealing with stressful circumstances, he was
unable to affect enzyme activity. Appelbaum says that other studies
have shown that patients whose psychotherapists are "empathetic, therapeutically
genuine, and...view patients positively," do better than patients whose
therapists do not have these qualities.
The quality of empathy may also be a crucial ingredient
in the mystery of healing. Lawrence LeShan, who has trained people to
perform psychic healing, describes the process as "the healer becoming
as one with the healee. Without that context, results tend to be transient,
while with it, results tend to be permanent." From his own observation
and from psychological tests that he gave to 24 healers in the hope
of defining common personality characteristics, Appelbaum found that
healers, like artists, have imaginative abilities: "...like many artists..[healers]
are disinclined to accept the world as it is; they are inclined to make
something different of it." Also, like many artists, healers tend to
be reluctant, or unable, to explain what they do. Appelbaum raises the
possibility that the positive, empathetic relationship created between
healer and healee may resemble the symbiotic relationship of mother
and child. "A case can be made for healing being an expression of the
kind of love that predominates early in life, a love that is based on
the wish and expectation of mother and child that mother will make it
all right," he writes.
The Mystery of Healing is one man's exploration
of various healing techniques in an attempt to identify underlying factors.
It does not offer conclusions about the effectiveness of these techniques
but it does present questions and offers possible explanations for why
some people recover from disease and others do not.