Energy Medicine - E-Book

The Scientific Basis

James L. Oschman

• Publisher: Churchill Livingstone
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780702065552
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Medicina alternativa y complementaria

See how energy therapies can normalize physiology and restore your patients' health! Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd Edition provides a deeper understanding of energy and energy flow in the human body. Using well-established scientific research, this book documents the presence of energy fields, discerns how those fields are generated, and determines how they are altered by disease, disorder, or injury. It then describes how therapeutic applications can restore natural energy flows within the body. Written by recognized energy medicine expert Dr. James Oschman — who is also a physiologist, cellular biologist, and biophysicist — this resource shows how the science of energetics may be used in healing diseases that conventional medicine has difficulty treating.

• Easy-to-understand coverage simplifies the theory of energy medicine and the science behind it, providing detailed, coherent explanations for a complex subject.
• Well-established scientific research shows why and how energy medicine works.
• Multi-disciplinary approach covers energy medicine as it applies to various healthcare disciplines, from acupuncture to osteopathy to therapeutic touch and energy psychology.

Chapter 1

Introducing and Defining Energy and Energy Medicine

Preconceived notions are the locks on the doors to wisdom.

Merry Browne

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

Henry David Thoreau

… help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.

William Penn

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

William Hazlitt

Chapter Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to remind readers of how much they already know about energy from their daily experiences of the energetic world within and around them. All of our sensory systems are energy sensors. Before reading further, you might take a few minutes to tune into your own sensory systems, one at a time, to remind yourself of what we usually take for granted – our ability to create a three-dimensional awareness of the world around us using a variety of senses. For example, if you close your eyes and listen, you will find yourself at the centre of a world of sounds. Because of our binaural sound detecting system, we often know the direction from which each sound is coming and can perhaps estimate our distance from its source. Also, listen carefully for a very high-pitched sound that seems to be inside your head. A search of the web shows that many people hear this. Some feel that is tinnitus or some hearing problem. However, it is often a normal part of the operation of the brain, a phenomenon referred to by Stone (1986) as the ‘ultrasonic core’. In Human Tuning, Beaulieu (2010) describes how day-to-day stresses can change the sound in the head and how the normal condition can be restored with tuning forks. It is not generally known that the ears produce sounds as part of the hearing mechanism. These are called otoacoustic emissions, and they are generated from within the inner ear. They were first demonstrated by Kemp (1978).

Again, with your eyes closed, tune into your thermal body – your awareness of the temperature of the different parts of your skin surface – and your touch body – your awareness of the various pressures on different surfaces of your skin. This can include the places where you experience the weight of your body in contact with surfaces – your gravity body.

To derive full benefit from the contents of this book, set aside previous notions about the subjects of energy and energy medicine and the ways nature works. Simply look at the information with an open mind and with ‘new eyes’. The following quotations may encourage this process. Some of the emerging concepts in energy medicine may surprise the educated person because they are different from what they learned in school. When possible, conventional academic texts and journals are cited here. However, some of the most vital and important aspects of the subject will not be found in any medical texts or peer-reviewed scientific journals and therefore cannot be verified from conventional sources. Other information comes from recent research and little-known but very reliable sources and simply has not yet been incorporated into mainstream academic inquiry. Still other sources are ancient healing practices that have not been explored by modern medicine for one reason or another, in spite of the wisdom they have to contribute. Please take a step back from what you have learned about biology and medicine. About half of what we have been taught about nature is wrong or out of date, and the other half is half-wrong. The half-wrong concepts are the most deceptive because they create an illusion that we understand something or have a complete picture when we really do not. Every simple or partial answer can conceal a set of important, unanswered, and, often, unasked questions. In this way, potentially productive lines of inquiry can be closed down, as Francis Bacon stated in 1620 (see the frontispiece of this book).

Forms of Energy in Nature and Their Sensation

We begin with a discussion of the forms of energy found in our environment that we sense with our so-called ‘five senses’. Sensation is not, as we shall see, what we usually think it is. Humans actually have far more than five senses. One scholar (Murchie, 1978) recognized 48 senses and trimmed his list to 32:

■ Sight, including polarized light and seeing without physical eyes, such as the heliotropism or sun sense of plants.

■ The sense of one’s visibility or invisibility, related to the ability to either advertise or camouflage one’s presence through control of pigmentation, luminescence, transparency, screening, and other means.

■ Sensitivity to nonvisible radiations, such as radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays.

■ Temperature sense, related to the ability to insulate, hibernate, or estivate. In the human, this sense has separate receptors and nerves. Animals estivate to escape elements of their environment, such as living in hot, desert climates where water is scarce; behaviour is oriented around staying as cool as possible during the day and collecting moisture at the rare times it is available.

■ Electromagnetic sense, including awareness of magnetic polarity, such as organisms that migrate along the magnetic field of the earth.

■ Hearing, including sonar and the detection of infra- and ultrasonic frequencies beyond human awareness.

■ Pressure awareness, including underground and underwater, as in the lateral line organ of fish and the Earth tremor sense of burrowers, as well as a barometric sense.

■ Touch, including on the surface of the skin and the awareness of muscular motion, tickling, vibration as found in spiders; awareness of heartbeat, blood circulation, breathing, and other bodily functions.

■ The sense of weight and balance.

■ The sense of space or proximity.

■ Coriolis sense, or the awareness of the Earth’s rotation.

■ Smell.

■ Taste.

■ Appetite, hunger, and the urge to obtain food.

■ Humidity sense, including thirst, evaporation control, and the ability to find water or evade a flood.

■ Pain, including external, internal, mental or spiritual distress, or a combination of these, and the impulse to weep.

■ Fear, including the dread of injury or death, or attack or suffocation, falling, bleeding, disease, and other dangers.

■ The procreative urge, including sex awareness, courting, mating, nesting, brooding, parturition, maternity, paternity, and raising the young.

Many, if not all, of the sensory systems are vibration detectors. Vibration, in turn, is one of the most important characteristics of the energies within and around us. In other words, virtually all energies are rhythmic – they are rarely constant, but vary from time to time, often coming in pulses or oscillations. Even heat, which is usually a scalar quantity (having magnitude but not direction), resolves into the rate of vibration of atoms or molecules. We are burned when we come in contact with a hot object because the atoms in the object are vibrating rapidly and transfer their violent momentum to our tissues, damaging them. Finally, we will see how the simple definitions of energy used in physics can help us understand the nature of both energy and energy medicine.

The ‘Five Senses’

Energy comes in different forms, and we are familiar with many of them because we sense energies all the time to interpret what is going on within and around us and to track our interactions with the world around us. We are taught that there are five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell (Figure 1.1). Each of these senses involves organs with specialized cells that have receptors for specific kinds of energy. These cells transduce or convert the vibrations into a local ‘generator’ or ‘receptor’ potential, which is then converted into trains of action potentials that are conducted through nerves to the brain, which integrates and interprets the incoming information to create our ever-changing picture of the energy world around us and of our place and movements within that world.

Figure 1.1 The traditional ‘five senses’ enable us to detect the energies present in our environment.

Sight is the most sophisticated sense in humans. In terms of our evolutionary history, smell is probably the oldest of the senses – the simplest and most ancient bacteria and protozoa have chemical senses that enable them to move toward nourishment and away from toxic environments. Given the length of time olfaction has been exposed to the evolutionary process, it may be a far more sophisticated sense than we usually realize. In terms of neuroscience, the sense of smell is a ‘first responder’ because of the short pathways between the olfactory bulb in the nose and the limbic system and hippocampus. Animals can usually react to and interpret an odour before they can see its source. The reason for this is that it takes from one-quarter to one-half second for the brain to form a visual image in the visual cortex and even longer for the brain to interpret the image. Our sense of smell is virtually instantaneous.

At a fundamental level, many of our senses detect different forms of vibration. Light and sound are obviously vibrational or frequency phenomena, although they travel through different media. Light moves through so-called empty space (later we will see that space has a structure, see Figure 13.11), whereas sound requires a medium such as air or water. The mechanisms involved in taste and smell are not as well understood. While there is debate on the topic, it seems likely to this author that taste and smell are also vibratory senses, although this is not the conventional view (see Burr, 2004 for a perspective on the arguments about the nature of olfaction). Touch involves four kinds of sensations that can be identified: cold, heat, contact, and pain. Heat and cold are obviously vibrational senses; contact and pain are more challenging to explain. For complementary and alternative therapies, the study of the physiology and energetics of touch are of profound importance.

Touch has a vibrational aspect. One of the ways we can determine what we are touching is by moving our fingers over it. Most objects can be identified by their texture. Different textures, in turn, set up qualitatively different v...