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Page 110
From 1957 to 1965, Dr. Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal had been investigating the ability of healer Oscar Estebany to affect distilled water in sealed containers (ampoules). 32 Sealed ampoules are the gold standard of sterile hygienic practice in hospital settings. If a doctor is about to give an injection of material drawn from a sealed ampoule, he does not want to have to ask if anyone has directed bad thoughts toward the solution. The implications of experiments on nonliving systems pose just such a question. In an early set of experiments, Dr. Grad grew some pots of barley seeds which he stressed by watering them with salty water (I percent saline). Estebany agreed to treat some of the saline-filled ampoules before they were used for watering. The seeds that were watered with the psychically treated water grew significantly faster than the plants with the untreated water. To attempt to explain the outcome of this experiment, researchers went on to look at the physical changes in water that could be caused by a healer.
The results of this study led to experiments by Dr. Douglas Dean and Stephan Schwartz.33 These experiments offer strong evidence that a healer can actually change some physical property of water that affects its spectroscopic absorption of infrared light. These studies concerned a healer's effect on distilled water, again, a target that is thought to have no consciousness, and is not even a living system. It is still undetermined whether the observed changes in the water were the result of an interaction between the mind of the healer and the water sample, or due to a change in the water's absorption of infrared light. Since the healer held his hands close to the water container, electrical polarization effects from the healer can't be ruled out.
Mind-to-Mammals
After Estebany's successful experiments with water and plants, Dr. Grad went on to investigate the healer's ability with animals, using the practice known as ''laying on of hands." In these trials, Estebany was able to significantly accelerate the healing of wounded mice.34
The protocol involved creating surgical wounds of about one-half inch in diameter on the backs of forty-eight mice. (The practice of creating

 
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