Future Medicine: Ethical Dilemmas, Regulatory Challenges, and Therapeutic Pathways to Health Care and Healing in Human Transformation

4. Energy Healing and the Biofield

4 Energy Healing and the Biofield Case 4A The Physical Therapist Who Integrated Reiki An attorney telephoned for the following consultation: “I represent a licensed physical therapist. The physical therapist has been treating a client for a sports injury; the client also is seeing a psychiatrist for emotional dysfunction. The physical therapist has taken some weekend workshops in Reiki. While using traditional physical therapy techniques to help the client regain flexibility and range of motion in the arm, the physical therapist, with the client’s consent, ‘ran energy’ using Reiki. The client felt warm, tingling energy and found that it increased the rapidity of her healing. “As the sessions continued, the client grew more relaxed and in fact began experiencing regression into deep trance states where she connected to previous traumas to the arm and the symbolic meaning of her injury. Some of these experiences involved childhood traumas, while others reached into what the physical therapist explained and the client understood as ‘past lives.’ “Simultaneously, the client began experiencing symptoms of multiple personality disorder in her psychiatric sessions. The client has sued the physical therapist for malpractice, alleging that the physical therapist’s use of Reiki—a modality not generally accepted within the profession—caused her unwarranted emotional injury. “The physical therapist had had her client sign a consent form agreeing to the use of Reiki treatment. Now, I don’t know much about Reiki and less about past lives; do you think my client has a defense?”1 127 Case 4B The Healer Whose Intuitive Guidance Contradicted Medical Advice A healer related the following: “I was working with a young woman who had multiple physical disorders. . . . I asked for specific guidance. . . . I heard the following words: ‘Tell her to reduce her thyroid medication by one-third.’ At the time, I was completely unaware that she was taking it. In a rather embarrassed manner, I asked her about it. She confirmed that she was taking it. In the next few weeks, with the consent of her physician, she reduced her intake of the medication according to the guidance channeled and proceeded to regain more health. After five months it was necessary to make another reduction. Shortly thereafter , she left treatment, satisfied with her health, having decided to go to college.” The healer then described a second client: “Before Jennifer arrived in my office for her first appointment, I received information that she should choose the type of chemotherapy that lasted three months and used two drugs, rather than the one that lasted two months and used three drugs. I had never met Jennifer and didn’t know why she was coming to receive healing from me. When Jennifer told me her presenting complaint, she stated that just a week before, she had been given the choice by her oncologist of two different chemotherapies for cancer treatment. One was to use three drugs and last two months, while the other was to use two drugs and last three months. She had come to me to help her make the decision.”2 Case 4C The Father Who Was “Guided by an Angel” Recently, while purchasing a plane ticket at an airport, I produced a photo ID from the hospital where I work. The ticketing agent smiled and began to lavish praise on that institution. “Both my kids were born there,” he said, “and they treated my wife like a queen. . . . In fact, she was in labor for twenty-six hours, and the doctors didn’t give her any medication to induce labor.” He smiled proudly. “And guess who held her hand the whole time?” He went on. “My son was a big guy, ten pounds, twenty-one inches, and my wife, she’s petite. There wasn’t enough room for him to come out, 128 • Future Medicine so the doc said to me, ‘What do you want to do, Manny?’ See, this isn’t the kind of place where they just rush and cut people up, so he asked me. “I was about to say, ‘Gee, doc, I want to do whatever’s safe for my kid, you tell me what I should do,’ when I suddenly felt a presence beside me. I grew calm. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I heard, out of the blue. ‘Give her another half hour.’ Turned out she never even needed the Csection . “Anyway, I’m telling you this because you’re a...