Energy or bioenergetic medicine refers to therapies that use an energy field – electrical, magnetic, sonic or acoustic – to screen for or treat health conditions by detecting imbalances in the body’s energy fields and then correcting them.
ENERGY FIELDS IN MEDICINE
The earliest recorded use of electricity for healing purposes dates from 2750 BC when sick people were exposed to the shocks of electric eels. Magnetite or lodestone was used for healing by the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese and later by the Greeks.
Various healings are described in the Bible and in other spiritual texts from around the world. The laying-on-of-hands method, practised by some prophets and Jesus, is still used today in certain churches and cathedrals. A modern version of this technique known as therapeutic touch has become established in some nursing schools and hospitals, and reiki is well-known.
In 1773 Frans Anton Mesmer began using magnets for healing. His patients frequently noticed unusual currents coursing through their bodies prior to the onset of a healing crisis that led to a cure. Soon Mesmer discovered that he could produce the same phenomena without the magnets, simply by passing his hands above the patient’s body. (He felt a sort of attraction-and-repulsion phenomenon around the body, similar to the sensation felt when handling iron magnets). His method resembled the laying on of hands, mentioned above.
MEDICAL ELECTRICITY
Medical electricity had its golden era between the late 1700s and the early 1900s. During that period a wide variety of healing devices were developed for treating a range of ailments. One discovery made, using a device called the Electric Hand, was that stimulation of specific points of the body surface caused the underlying muscles to contract. In 1864 Ziemssen charted the locations of these points, which are now called muscle points or motor points, and by dissecting cadavers, found that they were the places where the nerves entered the muscles. In 1867 Duchenne published his classical studies of muscle points, which gave rise to the modern field of medical electromyography.
By the turn of the 20th century a wide variety of electromagnetic devices for healing were on the market, providing therapies for every disease and problem. In the USA medical education was completely overhauled following publication of the Flexner report in 1910, which established science as the basis of medical education. Electrotherapy and other therapies such as homeopathy were declared scientifically unsupportable, and were legally excluded from clinical practice.
In the meantime rapid progress began to take place in the field of electrobiology. In 1906 Einthoven discovered that heart electricity could be recorded routinely using a very sensitive galvanometer. Today the electrocardiogram (ECG) is a standard tool for medical diagnosis. In 1929 Berger announced the recording of electric fields from the brain, now known as the electro-encephalograms (EEG).
HAROLD SAXTON BURR
Harold Saxton Burr, a professor of medicine at Yale, began a series of important and controversial studies of the role of electricity in development and disease. He realised that while molecular genetics was revealing how parts of the body are manufactured, there was little understanding of the blueprint directing assembly of the parts into the whole organism.
Burr studied and measured electrical fields around living things, specifically salamanders. He also discovered electrical fields around all sorts of organisms, including moulds, frogs and humans. Changes in the electrical charges appeared to correlate with growth, sleep, regeneration, light, water, storms, cancer development, and even the waxing and waning of the moon.
In 1935 Burr described the detection of ovulation by monitoring the voltage changes during the ovulation cycle. In 1936 he and his colleagues began a series of studies on the relation between electrical fields and cancer, beginning with a study of spontaneous mammary tumours in mice. Large voltage changes were detected using electrodes attached to the chest from 10 days to 2 weeks before the tumours appeared. Burr’s cancer research has been confirmed by several studies in the last 10 years. The latest study by Cuzick et al. in 1998, reported clinical trials of a method for detecting breast cancer using skin electropotential measurements.
Burr’s work on energy fields (1932 – 1956) was out of step with mainstream medicinal biology of the time. It was a period of explosive growth in pharmaceutical medicine, as antibiotics were winning the war against disease, and the thrust of medical research was towards a pill for every problem. Bioenergetics was confined to the study of biochemical reactions.
Modern medicine has been using a form of energy medicine since the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen. Computed tonography (CT) and MRI scanning and ECGs and EEGs are used for diagnostic purposes, and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEFT) and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) devices for pain control.
CELL STRUCTURE AND THE LIVING MATRIX
A few decades ago, as typically illustrated in texts, the living cell was visualised as a membrane-bound bag containing a solution of molecules. Note that the cell is embedded in a fibrous material called the connective tissue, or extra-cellular matrix, which contains large amounts of collagen (a protein). Most of the cell interior appears empty in these drawings.
The picture is changing because of the discovery that the cell is not a bag of solution, it is in fact filled with filaments, tubes, fibres and trabeculae (collectively called the cytoplasmic matrix or cytoskeleton). The cellular matrix is connected across the cell surface with the connective tissue system or extracellular matrix. A whole class of transmembrane-linking molecules or integrins has been discovered. It is now recognised that the cytoplasmic matrix also links to the nuclear envelope, nuclear matrix and genes.
Conceptually these discoveries are profoundly important. It means that the boundaries between the cell environment, cell interior and genetic material are not as sharp or impermeable as once thought. There is therefore a continuous interconnected webwork that extends throughout the body.
We do not intuitively consider biological materials to be crystalline, because when we think of crystals we think of hard materials such as diamonds or quartz crystals. Living crystals are composed of long thin pliable molecules, and are soft and flexible, to be more precise they are liquid crystals. Crystalline arrangements are the rule and not the exception in living systems. Certain kinds of crystals are piezoelectric, i.e. they generate electric fields when compressed or stretched. Virtually all the tissues in the body generate electric fields when they are compressed or stretched, through the piezoelectric and streaming potential effects.
THE BLUEPRINT OF LIFE
Harold Saxon Burr, a professor of medicine at Yale, was convinced that energy fields provide the blueprint of life.
As mentioned in the first part of this article, he studied the shape of the electrical fields surrounding salamanders. He found that salamanders possessed an energy field roughly shaped like the adult animal. He also discovered that this field contained an electrical axis, which was aligned with the brain and spinal cord. As he wanted to find precisely when this electrical axis first originated in the animal’s development, he began mapping the fields in progressively earlier stages of salamander embryogenesis, and discovered that the electrical axis originated in the unfertilised egg.
Burr also experimented with the electrical field around tiny seedlings, and found that the electrical field around a sprout was not the shape of the original seed, but resembled the adult plant. Burr’s data suggested that any developing organism was destined to follow a prescribed growth template, and that such a template was generated by the organism’s individual electromagnetic field.
ELECTROPHOTOGRAPHY
Electrophotography, otherwise known as Kirlian photography is a technique whereby living objects are photographed in the presence of a high frequency, high voltage, low amperage electrical field. This technique was largely pioneered by the Russian researcher Semyon Kirlian in the early 1940s from whom the process has acquired its name.
Electrophotography is based on observations of a phenomenon known as the corona discharge. Electrically grounded objects in high frequency electrical fields characteristically demonstrate spark discharges between the object and the electrode generating the field. The term corona discharge arises from the observation of discharge patterns around circular objects, where the spark pattern along the edge of the object resembles the outer corona of the sun during an eclipse. When a piece of photographic film is interposed between the object and the electrode, the spark discharge is captured on the recording emulsion. The corona is the result of electron discharge trails that represent millions of electrons streaming from the object to the photographic plate upon which the object rests. Corona discharge patterns of human fingertips can reveal diagnostic information pertaining to the body of the individual whose finger is photographed.
The phantom leaf effect is a unique phenomenon recorded by electrophotography that is especially relevant to this discussion of bio-energetic growth templates. This effect can be observed when the upper third of a leaf is cut off and destroyed and the remaining leaf fragment is then photographed by the electrographic process. The resulting electrophotograph shows a picture of an intact, whole leaf, even though part of the leaf has been physically destroyed. The implication of the phantom leaf effect is that some type of organised energy field is interacting with the electrons of the corona discharge of the remaining leaf, as well as retaining the spatial integrity and organisation of the missing leaf portion.
A new twist on the phantom leaf effect was demonstrated by Dumitrescu who cut a circular hole in a leaf and then photographed the leaf using a scanning type of electrophotography. The image revealed was that of a tiny intact leaf, with a smaller hole in it. The smaller leaf appeared inside the area where the circular portion of the leaf had been cut away. This basically resembles a hologram.
HOLOGRAM
A hologram is a special three-dimensional picture created by energy interference patterns. Holograms also demonstrate a unique principle in nature, which shows that every piece can contain the essence of the whole. The hologram provides us with a new and unique model that may help science to understand the energetic structure of the universe, as well as the multi-dimensional nature of human beings.
The fact that every cell within the human body contains a copy of the master DNA blueprint, which contains the information needed to create an entire duplicate body, mirrors the holographic principle whereby every piece contains the information of the whole.
Editor's note: As mentioned, there is concern around electromagnetic field exposure. Please see Dr Emdin's article: Chronic Electromagnetic Field Exposure & Cancer Risk. Another important read is his article Cell Phone Use and Brain Tumours.
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