How Does Energy Medicine Work?
A while back, we touched on the issue of energy medicine and faith, and hopefully helped some of you reach an informed position on what energy medicine can mean to you. Now, I’d like to take things a little farther. Nearly every week here on my blog I talk about how nonphysical issues can affect us physically and about how making changes to your thoughts and beliefs can improve your life in every way—in other words, I talk about energy medicine. But what exactly defines the practice of energy medicine? What are its mechanisms and limitations? Is it real medicine, or just some kind of placebo therapy? Today, I want to demystify this often misunderstood subject, and help you understand the reality of what it can do.
When I talk about energy medicine, I always like to start in the same place: in the 1900’s, with a guy scribbling on a chalkboard. He has big ideas and funny hair, and his name is Albert Einstein. On the chalkboard he scrawls, “E=MC2,“ and the world is never the same. For the longest time, I didn’t really understand his revolutionary discovery, until a friend of mine (who’s much smarter than me) explained it. “It’s actually very simple, Alex,” he said, “On one side of the equation is energy, and on the other side is everything else.”
It’s that startlingly simple. EVERYTHING boils down to energy, from the cells of your body to the chair it’s probably sitting on. When Albert made this discovery, it altered the course of every scientific field that exists, except one: medicine.
Fast-forward a century or so. Dr. Irving Kirsch, professor emeritus of psychology at two universities and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, went on 60 Minutes and made a shocking announcement. “Antidepressants don’t work.” Not only that, he went on to say that many other types of modern pharmaceutical drugs have no greater effect than a sugar pill. You see, when a pharmaceutical company submits drug trials to determine whether a product will go to market, they’re permitted to pick and choose the trials they submit, and aren’t required to show those leftovers to anyone. Which trials do you think those companies submit, and which ones do you think never see the light of day? Dr. Kirsch had gone looking for those missing trials and found pretty much what you’d expect him to find. Thus, his statement that the efficacy of these drugs was vastly overrepresented. Since placebos work just as often as the actual drugs and have no side-effects, his new solution was just to prescribe placebos!
But it wasn’t always this way. According to Albert Szent- Györgyi, Nobel laureate in medicine, “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.” Obviously, medicine has advanced tremendously over the centuries, but I and many other, more prominent doctors believe that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Even Dr. Oz on the Oprah Winfrey show said that “the next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine.”
So what exactly do we mean by that? What is it that energy medicine can do for us? I’m going to use the Healing Codes as an example, here. A cell that becomes clinically stressed has closed itself off from the rest of the body, no longer receiving nourishment or eliminating waste. When that happens, its energy start to deplete, and these are the only circumstances under which disease genes can manifest. What the Healing Codes appear to do better than anything else I’ve ever seen is supply energy to the cell, so that it can open and resume normal function.
From 1998 to 2002, I put the Codes to the test in an unofficial study using the heart-rate variability test, which is the gold standard for measuring stress of the autonomic nervous system, and has been for over thirty years. The results were that over 85 percent of clinically stressed individuals were brought into healthy balance within ten minutes of using the Healing Codes. According to then thirty years of medical literature, nothing can do that. The fastest something like that was thought to be possible was through at least six weeks of extensive diet, exercise, and rest. So how is the Healing Codes able to do this?
I have no idea.
That’s not a joke. I really don’t know why it is able to do these things, and the reason is simple: we don’t yet have any way to measure the unconscious memories that the Healing Codes treats.
This happens constantly throughout history, such as with Dr. Semmelweis in the 19th century. Dr. Semmelweis boasted a shockingly low mortality-rate for new births thanks to his theory that washing his hands between operations could help prevent infections and fever. He began encouraging other doctors to follow his example, but not because he knew how it worked—simply because it did work. At the time, he was laughed out of medicine for this ludicrous theory, but today? A surgeon wouldn’t dare enter an operating room without first washing his hands. The truth is that even in mainstream medicine, we simply don’t yet understand the healing mechanisms behind the treatments we prescribe every day.
In the Physician’s Desk Reference—the medical doctor’s Holy Bible—Dr. Ben Johnson, MD, says that at least a third of all medications say, “mechanism of action unknown.” The translation being: we don’t know how it works, we just know that it does. It’s why we constantly test our medications through double-blind studies. One of my mentors, Dr. Roger Callahan, pioneering founder of the field of energy psychology, once told me, “Double-blind studies were designed to tell if something is making a difference when nobody can tell if it’s making a difference.” We base our healing methods on what we know works, not on what we can fully document and explain.
Energy medicine has existed in many forms for at least three or four thousand years, and we still can’t explain it. Skepticism is natural and even healthy to a point, but let’s be practical! If it takes us another fifty years to develop instruments that can measure and explain how energy medicine works (and all the evidence indicates that it really does work), are you just going to wait until then to start feeling better? In seventeen years of practicing the Healing Codes, we’ve never heard a single validated case of harm, so what do you have to lose? Keep an open mind and judge your results.
Have a wonderful, blessed day!
