medical dowsing is quackery, but...

[Guest guest]

I gotta admit that this web page gave me a start, because it is written

by a man who was trained as a biologist...so he's not yer average

loopy-head. Anyway, what gave me a start is that he said that sometimes

medical dowsing has worked, though no one can explain why, and he also

mentioned that prayer experiment that I sent info to the list about

earlier this morning.

 

Here's the URL to the article http://doctoryourself.com/dowsing.html and

to his main web page http://doctoryourself.com/index.html (favorite

quote: " If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

This especially includes your health care. " )

 

And here's the article text for those of you who don't want to open your

browsers:

 

" Medical Dowsing: Mesmer and Reich

 

--

 

Dowsing by Doctors

Home There is more to heaven and earth than ever you dreamt of in your

philosophy, Horatio.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Look, this website is just going to get weirder and weirder. As if you

haven't noticed. Now we're going to talk about medical dowsing. That's

right: like finding underground water with a forked stick and such.

Wait until you hear who has been into this stuff.

 

This next concept will be a hard sell, but it is true: I am not all

that easily taken in. In my pre-quack days, I was trained as a

biologist and a chemistry teacher. I've been a zoology and health

science college professor and a doctoral-level clinical nutrition

instructor. As scientist and educator, I've been well schooled in the

scholarly and the reproducible. " Scholarly " means that you can find a

pile of powerful people to back up what you want to say. " Reproducible "

means that what you say will stand up to independent verification, that

it works in real life, again and again.

 

The problem with scholars is that they are too damned emotional. Not

me, the other ones.

 

Progress in the sciences goes like this old portrayal: When somebody

has just proven a really revolutionary idea, everybody says it's too

new. When finally accepted as fact, it is said that everybody knows it

now; it is no longer news.

 

Acupuncture and accupressure are both old and now more or less

accepted. But here is an aspect that practically nobody considers to be

in the least scientific, and I saw it with my own eyes.

 

I was attending a weekend seminar back in 1976 on pure healing, that

is, prayer, touch, thoughts, and, er, dowsing. Rods, pendulums, sticks,

wires, the whole gamut of raving quackery was covered, but seriously in

this instance. As a practical test, participants were asked to draw

their one of their hands over their other hand and arm, about an inch

above it, and try to " feel " where the points were.

 

" Just what will the point feel like? " was the universal question.

" Doesn't exactly matter, " came the answer, such as it was. " You will

feel something: a bit of cold or warmth, like a draft; your hand may

draw down or float up a bit; you may merely know by intuition, in a

vague way, that that is the spot. "

 

I for one thought this was a lot of hooey. On the other hand, I had

paid my seminar fee and might as well learn something. I tried it, with

no confidence.

 

Hmm. I " thought " I felt something on my hand there. Yes, just there.

I localized the area by going back and forth, back and forth. Then, like

a pilot locating a radio beacon, I crossed at a ninety-degree angle to

localize it exactly. All rubbish. of course, but there was my best

guess, right... about... there.

 

I pressed my finger to the spot, got up, and crossed the room to look

at an authoritative thousand-year old acupuncture chart. There was

indeed an acupuncture point at the precise spot I had located.

 

Oh, bull. Must have been pure coincidence. So I tried another area,

on my arm. Up and down, back and forth, ranging and homing in to...

there. Check and repeat. Yep, there's the spot.

 

Get up, walk across to the chart, search and see if ... yes, there was

a point there, too. Still not convinced.

 

Third trial, on the leg. Quickly scan and quickly search, cross back

and forth, and feel for something, la de da. OK, there. I didn't even

half try this time.

 

Back to the chart, and there was an accupressure point there as well.

I pressed each of the points to be sure, and wow! Those were real

points, all right.

 

Reproducibility is important to a scientist, to me, to you. Thousands

of years of study of acupuncture and multicultural traditions of dowsing

are not to be discounted without seeing for yourself. I came, I saw, I

dowsed.

 

Months later, a woman and her husband came to my office. She was about

60, with considerable pain and stiffness in her wrist. Her doctors had

been unable to chemically relieve this discomfort for more than a few

hours at a time. She was open to alternative approaches, and I was

flushed with newfound enthusiasm for what I'd learned in charlatan class

that weekend.

 

So I showed her how to draw her hands over the wrist, floating them an

inch or two above the skin. I had her repeat this, back and forth,

crossing side to side as well. Then I had her husband course over her

wrist with his hand.

 

She felt better within minutes. Well enough to flex and bend. Well

enough to smile with surprise and pleasure. Well enough to successfully

and repeatedly continue the treatment at home. Well enough that I

remember it all so clearly, and it was two decades ago.

 

Placebo effect? Faith healing? Therapeutic touch? Here we walk the

line bordering the Twilight Zone. Yet favorable results with so little

risk deserve follow up. Scientific double-blind placebo controlled

studies show that prayer helps people heal more quickly even if the

patient does not know that he is being prayed for, and the

prayer-offerer isn't even acquainted with who she is praying for. Your

personal religious faith can probably rest comfortably with that. But

wagging your hands over your own wrists is perhaps another matter.

 

Let's take the argument to its extreme. Carefully controlled studies

show that prayer influences bacteria. And in one of my favorite bits

of research (reported in Supernature, by Lyall Watson), plants hooked up

to amplified lie-detector apparatus showed readings not only when their

leaves were dipped in hot liquids, but when the experimenter was

thinking of dipping their leaves in hot liquids.

 

To further stretch this, apparatus was devised (and you've got to love

this) that would mechanically and randomly drop tiny brine shrimp into

boiling water. A plant remotely gave readings each time a shrimp hit

the water.

 

Run, don't walk, away from this whole arena. Not because it is

fascinating enough for a Fox TV special, but rather because I ask you to

take it seriously, and further.

 

Not that you'd be the first. Radiesthesia, the medical and

more-or-less scientific study of dowsing and " personal magnetism " has

been under investigation for generations.

 

My first contact with this pseudoscience was via Bruce Copen, Ph.D. of

Sussex, England. Dr. Copen has the twin distinctions of being the

parent of several correspondence schools that have reputations as

diploma mills, and of selling radiesthesia equipment. Not only does he

sell pendulums, dowsing rods and how-to books, he also sells and

manufactures radionic machines. They are expensive, costing hundreds of

pounds each. They are probably illegal in the United States, as they

" cannot " work. Open one up, it is said, and you will note that the

power cord is not directly connected to any of the potentially

functional parts inside. Radionics machines are supposedly amplifiers

and transmitters of specific healing vibrations, sort of a short-wave

homeopathy. In a culture that struggles to accept prayer healing, even

with the credentials of Him whose life reset our very chronology of

history, we cannot reasonably expect any response but skepticism to

reinforced hardboard, simulated leather-covered, costly and electrically

illogical quack devices.

 

Radionics is even too far out for me, but any book on quackery cannot

avoid a mention of the way politicized science has met with the likes of

this.

 

One of the most famous legal cases against blatant quackery also

remains what is arguably the most infamous case of violation of the

United States' Bill of Rights. And it all started out so reasonably.

 

Wilhelm Reich, MD, was an associate of Sigmund Freud at Freud's

Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna, Austria. He later did research at

the University of Oslo, Norway, and in 1939 became Associate Professor

of Medical Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York

City. But Dr. Reich also claimed to have discovered a new form of

energy, fundamental to life and health. Previously unknown and since

ignored, Reich successfully demonstrated his " orgone energy " to no less

than Albert Einstein at Princeton University, on January 13, 1941. They

discussed the matter for somewhat under five hours.

 

Dr. Reich made devices to collect the stuff, called, appropriately

enough, " orgone accumulators. " He sold them, referring to their ability

to dissolve cancerous tumors, and thereby ran smack dab into the might

of the FDA. In Appendix C of his very unusual and now very rare 1972

book Orgone Energy, author Jerome Eden provides a bibliography of twenty

scientists who verified the existence of orgone energy. Freud and

Einstein are not among them. Perhaps Dr. Reich's other research on the

human orgasm (that is not a typo) took him just too far out of the

scientific orbit. (Not that Freud should have any scruples about that

subject.) The fact that Mr. Eden's books include Planet in Trouble: The

UFO Assault on Earth does little to establish his literary reputation.

Too bad, for Eden is the translator of two of Franz Anton Mesmer's

works: Memoir of F. A. Mesmer, 1799 and Maxims on Animal Magnetism.

Eden also authored Animal Magnetism and the Life Energy, a biography of

Mesmer and his methods. Reich and Mesmer were separated by time but

were probably closely joined in principle.

 

But that was certainly no endorsement worth having. In 1954, FDA had

Dr. Reich charged with fraud in United States District Court for Maine,

Southern Division, for claiming that orgone existed, could be collected,

and could then prevent and cure disease. The FDA won. Reich's orgone

devices were seized and destroyed. Closer to any Constitutional issue,

all his written literature, scientific papers and articles, and books

were burned if they had anything to do with orgone accumulators.

 

" Reich's monumental sociological work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism,

was ordered destroyed in Hitler's Nazi Germany, and Reich himself was

forced to flee that country. " (Eden, p 65) For a man who fled from

Hitler in 1938, and became an American citizen to ensure his freedom,

the burning of his scientific works in 1956 by the US Government seems

oddly poetic punishment. Our First Amendment specifically safeguards

freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

 

Unless you sell orgone accumulators, that is. Even Mein Kampf enjoys

the protection of the First Amendment.

 

And just try to find a copy of Reich's Function of the Orgasm, for that

matter.

 

This scientific soap opera is not over yet.

 

The FDA's prosecuting attorney, Peter Mills, had just recently been Dr.

Reich's own personal lawyer, and had in fact drawn up the Reich

Foundation's incorporation papers. Mills left the foundation in 1952,

and joined the FDA the very same year. (Eden, p 68) There was evidence

of perjury on the part of the FDA witnesses and talk of a communist

plot. Orgone was said to be an antidote to nuclear radiation and

fluorescent lights. Reich was brought to court in chains. He talked of

UFO's. A court-ordered psychiatric examination found him to be

perfectly sane. The Supreme Court refused to review the case. (p

69-72)

 

In contempt of the court's judgment against him, Dr. Reich refused to

allow FDA agents access to his private notes. In contempt of a court

injunction, he persisted in his promotion of orgone accumulator

technology.

 

This landed him in federal prison, where he died eight months later.

He was 60. " FDA never produced any evidence to substantiate their

contention that the accumulator was worthless. " (p 89)

 

The canon of science knowledge is a heavily edited affair. I finished

college chemistry and physics and no one told me that famous scientists

were also devout deists. For example, the great mathematician and

astronomer Johann Kepler first described the elliptical orbits of the

planets, but also said they stayed in these orbits because of " Holy

Spirit Force. " Convenient how we embrace one of his conclusions, and

disdain the other.

 

And then there is my favorite Sir Issac Newton story. Sir Issac, it is

said, was once demonstrating a brass mechanical model of the solar

system to a friend.

 

" Who built it? " asked the friend, who happened to be an atheist.

 

" No one, " replied Newton.

 

" What? " responded the man. " Of course someone made it, Sir Issac.

Look at the intricacy, the precision, the construction. "

 

" But no one made it, " said Newton. " Why do you assert that someone

did? "

 

" It is clear just from observing its complexity, its perfection of

motion, its beautiful operation, that this machinery obviously had its

creator. "

 

" Is it not interesting, " said Newton, " That you ascribe a creator to

this model, and not to the real solar system itself? "

 

Albert Einstein is said to have stated that God does not play dice with

the universe. Later in his life, Einstein also said this:

 

" As I grow older, the identification with the here and now is slowly

lost. One feels dissolved, and merged into Nature. It makes me feel

happy. The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious. "

 

Dr. Reich challenged even Einstein's conception of mystery and has left

us with the eternal question as to whether there is a discernible,

operable link between our living body and the boundless heavens.

" Animal magnetism, " " orgone energy, " or whatever it be called, and

however muffled it may be, continues to intrigue original thinkers.

Call them alchemists in search of the Philosopher's Stone, or just

quacks in search of a simple answer. Still, even pirates leave a map.

Is there more to the human body than we wish to believe?

 

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul. From the books QUACK

DOCTOR and PAPERBACK CLINIC, available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8

Van Buren Street, Holley, New York 14470. "

 

--

Mindy

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" ...that they may be one... "

- Jesus, John 17:22