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who transfuse believers with the power of the Holy Spirit. Until a reliable "chi-meter" becomes available to document the actual transfer of this unusual energy, an alternative explanation may be that part of the healing effects of these processes is the result of a dynamic mind-to-mind interaction process.
The scorn and violent opposition that Mesmer encountered from the medical establishment of his time kept most doctors from experimenting with Mesmerism, despite its apparent efficacy. In the 1840s, the British doctor James Braid discovered that the hand passing over the body, the use of magnets, and Mesmer's magnetic fluid theory weren't necessary for healing. Braid found the process, which he named "hypnosis," to be a mind-to-mind phenomenon, and he was able to use mental suggestion to successfully anesthetize his patients for amputations and surgeries. 12
Dr. James Esdaile also performed hundreds of surgical operations in India in the 1800s, using what he termed "magnetic sleep" to anesthetize his patients.13 However, the British Royal Society continued to fervently reject ideas concerning the reality of either hypnosis or mind-to-mind communication in the field of medicine. Today, thousands of members of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis help obstetricians and dentists perform painless operations without drugs, but it took over two hundred years for the utilization of these mind-to-mind therapies to be incorporated into medical treatment.
Franz Mesmer was the first physician to understand the remarkable healing potential of mental suggestion. He recognized that mesmeric-hypnotic phenomena were genuine and important, that they were essentially psychological in nature, and that they were valid subjects of scientific research.14 Hypnosis as a face-to-face interaction has been studied for more than two centuries, demonstrating that a practitioner can affect a profound influence over his or her subject's health and physical functioning. These studies place hypnosis on a continuum with contemporary laboratory demonstrations of mind-to-mind interactions that are important analogs to psychic healing. It appears that the kind of mind-to-mind healing connections that we study today come to us with a two-hundred-year-old heritage

 
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