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recovered faster from hernia operations than patients who did not.
43 Fifty-three patients recovering from hernia operations were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group received verbal suggestions that they would recover rapidly, another group was the focus of distant healing, and the third group served as controls. The healing procedure was determined by the healer herself, who asked only to be informed as to the time of the operation. No other contact between the patients and the healer took place, and neither the experimenters nor physicians knew which group the patients had been assigned to. |
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The "healed" patients did significantly better in four ways than the other patients: their surgical scars, as evaluated by the doctor, healed faster; they had fewer cases of elevated temperature; and they experienced less pain, and more improvement in other attitudinal factors. |
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Distant Healing with AIDS Patients |
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In 1995, Dr. Elisabeth Targ of the California Pacific Medical Center and Fred Sicher of the Sausalito Consciousness Research Laboratory conducted a double-blind pilot study of the effects of distant healing intention with twenty AIDS patients. They wanted to examine whether there would be any difference in outcome from working with "psychic healers" rather than with a prayer group such as Dr. Byrd used in his earlier healing experiment. In this six-month study, the goal was to examine whether the healed group would live longer, feel better, and have improved T-cell concentrations compared with the control group. Results of this pilot study were considered encouraging enough to attract funding for a larger replication study, with forty AIDS patients, completed in 1997. Dr. Targ reports that the results strongly bolster those of the first study.44 |
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It is clear to the authors from more than thirty years of investigations that one's physiological functioning can be affected by the thoughts of another |
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