James & Barbara Hyman’s Energy Healing:
The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Feature;
Volume 1 June 2011
By Robert Halprin MS PhD
James Hyman says his experiments reveal our natural power to heal based on our ability to sense and manipulate human energy fields. Has he discovered scientific truths, or has he only demonstrated the human talent for self-deception.
James Hyman and his 'practice manager' ex wife believe many things. They believe in life after death, past life regression, chanting mantras heal you from anything and they believe there is scientific evidence to support these beliefs. Hyman is now focusing his powers of belief on a new field: energy medicine. In a series of new web sites, primarily located at the following URL; http://www.emotionalrelease.com , Barbara Hyman explains that we all emit human energy fields, that we can sense each other’s fields, and that healers can influence these fields to heal illnesses and injury. She believes these are not just theories but scientifically supported facts.
The web site has numerous “gee-whiz” testimonials of supposed energy healing (which are frankly not very convincing and could be easily outdone by any self-respecting purveyor of quack remedies). She goes on to describe her husband James Hyman's claims that he has the ability to detect and alter human energy fields. Throughout the web site she descends into blethering about quantum physics, the oneness of the universe, the connectedness of all things, and the possibility that energy awareness will solve all of mankind’s problems.
She goes on to describe purported measurements of subtle human energy emissions, Kam Yuen's influence on human energy fields, the power of 'The Secret,' the healing power of Qigong (of which James is of course a 'Master') among other phenomena of dubious reality or significance.
She makes a big deal of the fact that humans emit energy (of course we do, it is picked up by EKG, EEG, etc.), and she would like to think energy healers, especially her 'genius' husband James can pick up that energy and decode it in the same way your radio picks up Rush Limbaugh out of the atmosphere. And then she would like to think that energy healers can send something back into the patient’s body to enable healing. She misses the crucial fact that there is information encoded in the electromagnetic waves your radio detects, but there is no reason to think there is any analogous information coming from the body, much less any way to change that information and send it back to produce healing. I only wish we could use “energy healing” on radio and TV waves to improve the quality of programming!
She makes a big deal of the fact that everything affects everything else. She seems to mean this in a holistic, metaphysical, New Age, “the universe is one and is conscious and we can create our own health” sense. Science recognizes that small events can have far-reaching effects, but that doesn’t mean one thing can predict or control another. Theoretically, a change in the magnitude or position of your body mass will enter into the overall gravity equations of the universe, but that doesn’t mean one thing can control or predict another. You could hardly expect to meaningfully influence someone out there beyond Alpha Centauri by losing ten or fifteen pounds (a practice of which Ms. Hyman might be better off practicing as opposed to constantly espousing the same drek over and over again). You can’t expect to change the EEG of an astronaut in the Space Station by exercising to change your own EKG. We are talking about very small influences. If a gnat pushes an elephant, it’s not likely to fall over; it’s not likely to even notice. And then there are inconvenient complications like quantum theory and chaos theory.
There is nothing of substance in these multiple free web sites. Indeed the mere fact that she has to repeat the same things over and over again on virtually every free forum offered on the Internet would render any intelligent being to recognize the obvious, i.e. she is attempting what is known in main stream scientific circles as; "Proof By Assertion.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
Proof by assertion, sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is a logical fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam). In other cases its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.
The Hyman's claims lose credibility because they have never been in a controlled, double blind clinical study. Nothing Ms. Hyman has ever written has been accepted for publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. I feel sorry for James Hyman: he’s a smart guy, he means well, he really believes he has found something wonderful, but he has a blind spot and just doesn’t get it when others try to point out the flaws in his methods and reasoning.
See Harriet Hall M.D.“How To Test Energy Healers: Critiquing the Alt Med Experiments, Skeptical Inquiry, January/February 2011.
Also see; "Undercover Investigative Report On 'Quantum Theta Energy Healing" QuackWatch March 2011,
To put the accusation of “politics” into perspective, consider the Helicobacter experiments. When researchers first suggested that ulcers might be caused by bacteria, they were laughed at. They published their results, peer review had a field day, other labs looked into the idea, more data came in, results from various lines of research coalesced, and within a mere ten years it became standard practice to treat ulcers with antibiotics. It didn’t matter that the idea sounded crazy at first; science responded to good evidence. (See Kimball C. Atwood IV, “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism,” Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2004.) If Hyman had evidence of equal quality, he would get an equal hearing by the scientific community.
A good scientist considers the entire body of available evidence, not just the claims of one group of researchers. The Hyman's never bring up the fact that other experiments have directly contradicted their assertions. They never get around to mentioning Emily Rosa’s landmark experiment, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, which showed that therapeutic touch practitioners could not sense human energy fields as they claimed. She tested twenty-one experienced practitioners of therapeutic touch.1 They all thought they could detect Rosa’s human energy field and feel whether she was holding her hand over their right or left hand, but when they were prevented from seeing where her hand was, their performance was no better than chance.
Rosa was nine years old at the time, and the article grew out of her school science fair project. The experiment was beautiful in its simplicity. Adult true believers had published much research on the techniques and effects of therapeutic touch, but in the true spirit of childlike questioning, Rosa went back to basics and asked the crucial question: “Is the phenomenon itself real? Can they really feel something or is it possible they are fooling themselves?” Amazingly, no researcher had ever asked that question before. They had ignored one of the basic principles of the scientific method as explained by Karl Popper: it’s easy to find confirmation for any hypothesis, but every genuine test of a hypothesis is an attempt to falsify it.
Emily Rosa's experiment is dismissed by other so called 'energy healers' or 'therapeutic touch' practitioners as having five “potential problems”:
1. It was a science-fair project done by a young girl.
2. She was the only experimenter.
3. She randomized by flipping a coin, which he calls “an unreliable procedure.”
4. One of the authors was the founder of Quackwatch.
5. The subjects did worse than chance.
These objections are just silly; they are either inaccurate or are ad hominem attacks:
1. It shouldn’t make any difference whether Rosa was a young girl or an old man or a sentient purple octopus from an alien planet. It shouldn’t matter whether she did the experiment for an elementary school project, a doctoral dissertation, a Coca Cola commercial, or a government grant. What matters is the quality of the evidence. In this case, her project was well designed and executed, had clearly significant findings, and was of high enough quality to be approved for publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.
2. She was not the only experimenter. Others were involved; the experiment was repeated under expert supervision on Scientific American Frontiers. This should preclude any accusations of deliberate cheating or inadvertent failure to follow the protocol properly. Rosa was the only one to carry out the trials, but what would multiple testers have added to the experiment? The results didn’t depend on any special ability or quality of hers, but on the ability of the subjects who claimed they could sense anyone’s energy fields. For the televised trials, they even got to “feel” the “energy” from each of Rosa’s hands and choose which one they wanted her to use in the trials. About half chose her left hand and half her right. No one objected, “I can’t feel energy from either hand.”
3. Flipping a coin is not an “unreliable procedure”—unless the flipper is deliberately cheating. The number of heads and tails was approximately equal, and the distribution appeared random. The editors of JAMA found the method acceptable. There are situations where coin-flipping could legitimately be criticized, for instance in psi experiments where researchers are looking for minuscule differences in large bodies of data and even their computerized random number generators have been criticized for not being “perfectly” random. But in this experiment, the results were clearly significant; it is hard to envision how a different method of randomization could have altered the results. The coin flip was only used to determine which of the subject’s hands she would hold her hand over. The subjects claimed to be able to sense energy fields with either hand, so it shouldn’t have made a bit of difference to their perception. Faulty randomization might have allowed the subjects to perceive a pattern and guess, which would have tended to give false positive results rather than the negative results Rosa got.
4. One of the authors, the founder of Quackwatch, was admittedly skeptical of therapeutic touch. Yes, someone with possible bias was indirectly involved in the experiment. If that is an objection, there is an even greater objection to Hyman's own examples: he and his colleagues are all strongly biased toward belief in energy phenomena and they were directly involved in their experiences as told by 'testimonials' on their web sites. "Testimonials" are personal accounts of someone's experiences with a therapy. They are generally subjective: "I felt better," "I had more energy," "I wasn't as nauseated," "The pain went away," and so on. Testimonials are inherently selective. People are much more likely to talk about their "amazing cure" than about something that didn't work for them. The proponents of "alternative" methods like Barbara & James Hyman's so called "quantum theta energy healing" (QTEH) can, of course, pick which testimonials they use. For example, let's suppose that if 100 people are sick, 50 of them will recover on their own even if they do nothing. So, if all 100 people use a certain therapy, half will get better even if the treatment doesn't do anything. These people could say "I took a "quantum theta energy healing therapy session with 'healer' James Hyman & my disease went away!" This would be completely honest, even though the therapy had done nothing for them. So, testimonials are useless for judging treatment effectiveness. For all we know, those giving the testimonial might be the only people who felt better. Or, suppose that of 100 patients trying a therapy, 10 experienced no change, 85 felt worse, and 5 felt better. The five who improved could quite honestly say that they felt better, even though nearly everyone who tried the remedy stayed the same or got worse!
5. It is simply not true that the subjects did “worse than chance.” Their performance was consistent with chance. If they had done worse than chance (significantly worse) that would have tended to support Schwartz’s claim that some kind of effect was present, even though it would have been the reverse of what he claimed to find.
In my opinion, none of these “problems” invalidates the conclusion that the therapeutic touch practitioners failed to do what they claimed they could do. And if they think these were valid problems, why didn’t they simply repeat her experiment in their own lab with multiple experimenters and a more reliable method of randomization? They could have published a failed replication study, and the scientific community could have proceeded to evaluate both studies and sort out the truth. In reality, Rosa’s experiment was a great example of a young child being able to see more clearly than prejudiced adults—a real “Emperor’s New Clothes” story.
If a rigorous scientist thought he had found evidence that people could detect “human energy fields,” he would maintain a healthy skepticism; he would immediately try to prove himself wrong, and he would enlist his colleagues to help show him where he might have gone wrong. He would try to rule out all other possible explanations (the subject might be sensing heat, sound, motion, air currents, might be able to see under the blindfold, etc.). If the phenomenon proved robust, he would try to refine his understanding by doing things like varying the distance to see if it obeyed the inverse square law and interposing a sheet of cardboard or glass to see if the effect could be blocked. Then he would try to use instruments to measure what kind of energy was being sensed.
When a believer thinks they have found something to justify their belief, their approach tends to be less rigorous.
What about “if there is no convincing science or plausible mechanism to support them, let’s stop wasting our time chasing moonbeams”? All of energy medicine hinges on one basic claim: that people can detect subtle human energy fields. If the Hyman's are wrong about that, the rest of the claims for so-called “energy medicine” fizzle away.
Since 1996, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has offered a substantial reward (currently $1,000,000) to anyone who can demonstrate an ability to detect a “human energy field” under conditions similar to those of Rosa’s study. Of the more than 80,000 American therapeutic touch practitioners who claim to have such ability, only one person attempted to demonstrate it. She failed. The JREF challenge is admittedly not a definitive scientific test, but prudence would seem to dictate that if no one can even meet this simple challenge, we shouldn’t be wasting research money on what is probably a myth.
Others have attempted to establish the “science” of energy medicine and have failed. Even the National Association Of Alternative Medicine (NAAM), which is willing to consider almost any possibility in alternative medicine, is skeptical. It distinguishes between real energy (sound waves, electromagnetism, and other energies measurable by physicists) and the kind of “putative” energy Hyman is trying to validate. It concludes that the “putative” energy approaches “are among the most controversial of CAM practices because neither the external energy fields nor their therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly by any biophysical means.”
Another proponent of 'energy healing' Gary Schwartz sounds like a scientist. He tries to talk the talk and walk the walk. He even makes some skeptical noises to try to convince us he is objective. But there is also a lot of very unscientific language in his written work.
For instance:
Human rage and pain, especially generated by terrorism and war, create a global energetic climate whose negative effects can extend from the physical and environmental—potentially including climate—to the psychological and ultimately spiritual. . . . [P]ollution is not simply chemical, it is ultimately energy based and therefore conscious as well.
Really? Conscious pollution? So maybe if we talk nice to pollution it will cooperate and go away? Or should we try doing Reiki to lower the atmospheric CO2 levels? Does Al Gore know about this?
“Energy medicine” is an emperor whose new clothes still look awfully transparent to critical thinkers and to the scientific community no matter what glorious colors and fabrics Schwartz and his colleagues imagine they are seeing.
Pseudoscience
Since most people have never studied quantum physics they do not understand why these sham ideas are a perversion of it - in fact, this relies on people thinking that quantum mechanics is "too hard" or "only for scientists" in order for the scams to work and stop people questioning them.
People do, however, recognize that quantum physics says that nanoscale reality is very different from what we know, and perhaps some pop science authors can take some blame for this. Concepts such as "non-locality" or "quantum probability waves" or "uncertainty principle" have become social memes of a kind where people inherently recognize that something "strange" is going on. Practitioners of fraudulent and silly ideas can tap into this feeling of mystery to push their sham concepts. i.e: “Quantum Theta Energy Healing.”
Notes:
1. “Therapeutic touch” is a bit of a misnomer because these practitioners don’t actually touch but simply massage the air a few inches from the patient’s body. They are convinced that they are detecting and manipulating the energy field, balancing and smoothing it, and correcting any abnormalities, thus allowing the body to heal itself.
2. Hall, H. 2005. A review of Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Skeptic 11(3): 89–93. Available at quackfiles.blogspot.com.
3. § Quantum Flux[4],
4. § Quantum Stirwand
§ Quantum Therapy
§ Quantum healing
§ Quantum biofeedback
§ Shoo!Tag
4. ↑ The Dancing Wu Li Masters (William Morrow & Co., 1979, ISBN 0553249142)
5. ↑ The Tao of Physics (Shambhala Publications, 1975, ISBN 1570625190)
6. ↑ Reviewer Jeremy Bernstein of the New Yorker Magazine, quoted by Martin Gardner in a 1979 review for Newsday, described Zukav's and Capra's physics by saying "A physicist reading these books might feel like someone on a familiar street who finds that all the old houses have suddenly turned mauve."
7. ↑http://www.emotionalrelease.com/
8. http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=229
9. ↑ http://www.quantumagewater.eu/contents/en-us/d1.html
10. ↑ http://www.quantumtherapy.net/
11. ↑ http://www.newscientist.com/special/seven-wonders-of-the-quantum-world
References:
· Rosa, L., E. Rosa, L. Sarner, and S. Barrett. 1998. A close look at therapeutic touch. Journal of the American Medical Association. 279:1005–1010. Schwartz, Gary E., with William L. Simon. 2007. The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal. New York: Atria Books.
Thanks To Harriet Hall M.D. (The SkepDoc) For The Template & Partial Content ; http://www.skepdoc.org
