Ciaran Farrell and Dennis Bury will be your hosts, and our very own Prof. Bernard Carr will be our chairperson for the evening, during which we would like to open up the topic for an open and wide-ranging discussion.
We will hear members' experiences of healing through alternative, psychical and perhaps spiritual means, as well as how to address the question of how these techniques might be researched and tested by scientific means we have compiled a short reading list. Each of the three, peer-reviewed research papers included in the list is designed to highlight a point or issue for discussion.
The first paper is about the ‘Self-reported effects of energy healing’, which broadly shows that patients found that they derived some benefit from a range of healing therapies that come under this umbrella. Therefore, revealing that there is a scientific basis to them on a human level, if nothing else.
The second paper is about ‘Homeopathy in HIV infection’ and is a double-blind trial in which the researchers suggest that although Homeopathic remedies are a wholistic treatment they may work at a cellular level within the body’s immune system to increase the body’s capacity to fight back against the disease.
The third and final research paper is a review of a paper about ‘The effects of Reiki in clinical practice’, and shows that, although there may be value in this healing technique on an individual basis, and also, that different research groups have tested and evaluated the technique in different ways, this has led some research groups to conclude that Reiki is efficacious, while others do not. This provides a mixed picture which it is thought should preclude Reiki from being offered on the NHS, a situation which illustrates the difficulty of conducting standard clinical trials of alternative medical and healing techniques.
We humbly hope all this will help the discussion!
The Forum to be held on 30th January 2024 will be the latest in our series of members’ discussion meetings which be based around the question of “How and why might psychical researchers tackle the subject of healing, and should the SPR pay more attention to this area of research?” even though the SPR’s academic literature on the subject is rather thin. Therefore, instead of choosing research papers from within the SPR’s Journal or Magazine, we have had to search the wider literature, which begs the second question in the title, “Should the SPR pay more attention to this area of research?”
Dennis Bury & Ciaran Farrell
Forum Coordinators
References
United Kingdom