NIH and the Harkin Directive: Subtle Energies and Social Policy (Full Text PDF)

ABSTRACT

At a time when the American health care system is in a crisis leaving as many as one out of the three individuals without proper health care coverage, the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), has directed the National Institutes of Health to spend two million dollars in 1992 studying “unconventional medical practices.” To this end an Ad Hoc Committee on Unconventional Medical Practices has held one meeting in June with a second planned for fall 1992. This paper explores two possible lines of research, Therapeutic Intent (TI) and psychophysiologic self-regulation (PSR), including placebo effect, which is seen as an unconscious PSR response resulting from TI. Relevant literature of the last 30 years from many disciplines, covering everything from cell colonies to animal studies to human research is surveyed, demonstrating that these alternative approaches have proven to be reliable and relatively robust, even when studied under conditions of rigorous and double-blind protocols. A possible explanatory model addressing the heretofore unanswered question of mechanism is offered, involving changes in hydrogen bonding in the blood of recipients of TI. The author proposes that, based on these studies, TI and PSR have been shown to be safe and effective, while offering an unusually attractive cost/benefit equation.

An Anomalous Cognition Protocol Employing Fuzzy-Set Theory to Accelerate Breakthroughs in Disease Process Research (Download the PDF)

by Stephan A. Schwartz, S. James P. Spottiswoode, Edwin C. May, Ph.D., and Jessica Utts, Ph.D

ABSTRACT

The primary goal of this protocol is to use an Anomalous Cognition (AC) technology to accelerate research breakthroughs concerning the cause, treatment, and prevention of disease states. The goal of testing whether, and to what extent, AC occurred in the course of the protocol is a secondary objective. Quantitative analysis has shown that the magnitude of this form of subtle human performance meets, or exceeds, the magnitude of many phenomena known to experimental psychology. To understand the structure of this study the reader should conceptualize it as an exercise in creating a collective meta-mind. The Respondents and their AC derived information, are analogous to the intuitive component of the individual mind, while the researchers serve the function of the analytical component. The protocol is an attempt to create on a macro level the same breakthrough process reported by individuals historically acknowledged for their creative genius. It employs a consensual protocol design developed over the course of some 15 years, the premise of which is that successful application of AC is, in many respects, an engineering problem centering on a bad signal-to-noise ratio. Unlike a purely statistical laboratory experiment, where the analysis of the data is the study’s end product, in an applied experiment of this kind the collection and analysis of the data is only a midpoint. Much as an MRI unit guides physicians in their choice of action, so the AC data seeks to help researchers to develop new approaches and hypotheses. The protocol and analysis method described in this paper was designed to sacrifice potential opportunities for statistical power as it pertained to the study’s second objective, the testing of whether, and to what extent, AC occurred in the course of the project, in order to maximize the chance of catching information pertinent to the project’s principal goal of using an AC technology to accelerate research breakthroughs concerning the cause, treatment, and prevention of a disease process is. Given these parameters we felt the best analysis design was to be found in fuzzy-set theory.

Benjamin Franklin: The First Parapsychologist and His Creation of the Blind Protocol (PDF)

This paper describes the first reported blind protocol, which was devised by Croesus, King of the Lydians (BCE 560-547) and reported by Herodotus (~ BCE 484 – ~ 424). It was used in the first Remote Viewing experiment to enter the historical record. The next documented use of a blind protocol occurred in 1784, when it was explicitly employed in the interest of science, and its history as a research technique begins. King Louis the XVIth’s created a commission to evaluate Friedrich Anton Mesmer’s claims concerning healing through “animal magnetism”, administered while people were in a trance. Franklin was asked to be the commission’s head. The paper argues that Mesmer was probably looking for a scientific model to explain what he was observing, and settled on the, then, fashionable alchemical idea of ‘animal magnetism.” Mesmer could not practice medicine, so his claims were represented by his colleague, d’Eslon, a licensed physician. Franklin could not attend the commission’s early efforts, which failed, so he arranged a series of experiments conducted in his house in Passy. To do them, Franklin created the blind protocol to answer the king’s question as to whether or not “animal magnetism” was real. Franklin literally blind-folded recipients of d’Eslon treatments, which is why the protocol came to be called “blind”. These experiments also included a demographic variable in the experiment design. Franklin also conceived an experiment incorporating not only blindness but “treated” and “control” populations, in which d’Eslon attempted to “magnetize” a tree. A blindfolded boy could not distinguish three control trees from a treated tree. The commission concluded “animal magnetism” did not exist, but was at pains to acknowledge that something had occurred. Franklin commented on the psycho-physiological
implications. But only the headline was remembered and the development of hypnotism, and psychosomatic medicine, would be crippled for half a century, an unintended consequence of Mesmer’s linking them to animal magnetism. Although Mesmerism died out in France, the English surgeon John Eliotson (1791-1868) apparently saw through Mesmer’s explanatory model to the psycho-physical self–regulation in the form of hypnosis that was Mesmer’s real discovery. He seems to avoided all attempts at explaining how it worked, but conducted a considerable number of surgeries using hypnosis as the anesthetic, anticipating its usage in this capacity a century later. So great was the disapproval of Mesmer, however, that no one seems to have gotten Eliotson’s point. Franklin’s protocol, however, rapidly became the gold standard of science, and he the first parapsychologist.

Disease of Distinction Full Article (PDF)

by Stephan A. Schwartz

Excerpt:

Diseases have historically significant golden ages. Polio with the 1950s, Malaria with the pening of the Western Hemisphere are two examples. For gout, because effective treatment took so long to develop, there are several peak periods, the last of which is in many ways the most interesting — the 17th and 18th centuries. And the reason is the role the disease played in America’s founding.

John Locke, England’s leading empiricist philosopher and an amateur physician, was in many ways the spiritual father of the American Revolution. His philosophical writings center on human rights, and influenced virtually every major figure involved in our nation’s founding. Locke pursued medicine as avidly as philosophy, and his medical notebooks abound with observations about gout. Like many of his spiritual children in the American Revolution, he suffered gout attacks throughout his adult life.

Franklin, the only person to sign all three founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and the Constitution in 1787 was a severe gout sufferer, and had to be carried in a sedan chair to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia by convicts.