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Spiritual Healing: If the spirit moves you
Could spiritual healing be the key to alleviating the suffering of patients who have long-term disorders or are in extreme pain? Clare Rudebeck meets the people who believe it could
Independent (England), July 31, 2002
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=320078
As Martin Turner lay on the couch, the spiritual healer’s hands hovered a few inches above his body. He was in constant pain from a back injury and, although sceptical, felt he had nothing to lose.
Physiotherapy and osteopathy hadn’t helped. Surgery seemed the only other option. Suddenly, he felt something move in his spine like two bones clunking together. “I haven’t got an explanation for why it worked,” says Turner, a maintenance engineer from Uffculme in Devon. “But after 10 sessions with my healer, the pain had gone and I was playing football again.”
He was referred to the healer by his GP, Dr Michael Dixon. “A lot of my patients were seeing healers privately and said they were getting better, so I decided we should work with them,” says Dixon.
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Turner’s healer, Therese Seward, has been working at the surgery one morning a week for five years. Patients are referred to her by the GPs, often when conventional medicine has failed to improve their condition. She says spiritual healing can help any illness.
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Seward is one of a growing number of spiritual healers who now work in National Health Service surgeries and hospitals. Angie Buxton is employed by a cancer unit at University College Hospital, London. She has treated hundreds of patients during her three years there and says that her sessions help to relieve pain, lessen the side-effects of cancer drugs and ease depression.
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There are now more than 6,000 registered spiritual healers in the UK, of which a handful works in NHS surgeries and hospitals. Their work is regulated by a code of conduct set down by the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. Accordingly, healers never touch a patient without permission, or encourage them to stop using conventional medicine. NFSH is not associated with any religion, believing that every healer has the right to “his or her own interpretation of the source [of the healing]“.
“My remit is to channel energy,” explains Buxton. Like other spiritual healers, she does this by lightly touching a patient or holding her hands just above him or her. She is not religious and says she is simply tapping into “energy that’s all around us”. Seward, on the other hand, believes that the energy does come from “a higher source”.
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Predictably, there is still much scepticism about spiritual healing. Dr Dixon, while convinced of the therapy’s health benefits, does not believe that a specific energy transfer from healer to patient is involved during treatment. “I believe it is a means of the brain producing its own chemicals to heal the body, rather than the patient being given them in a tablet,” he says.
A study carried out at his surgery showed that 22 out of 27 patients reported an improvement in their symptoms after a 10-week course of healing. But this may have been simply due to the placebo effect – the patients’ condition may have improved because of the psychological effect of having someone willing them to get better. Dr Dixon says it doesn’t matter if that is the case. “As a pragmatist, I don’t care what makes my patients feel more positive and lessens their symptoms,” he says.
But if spiritual healers are to become more widely accepted in mainstream medicine, they need the weight of clinical studies behind them. Aberdeen University is currently carrying out an NHS-funded study into the effect of spiritual healing on asthma sufferers. In an attempt to separate the human and spiritual effects of the treatment, one group of patients is seeing healers, while the other is being treated by actors posing as healers. Results are expected early next year, but the study’s lead researcher Stan Gerard – who is also a healer – says current indications are encouraging. “Volunteers say they feel ‘very relaxed’ and that their breathing is ‘much better’,” he says. He claims that healing has already had a positive effect on asthma sufferers whom he has treated privately.
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