This week: What is spiritual healing?
Spiritual healing can lay claim to being the oldest form of medicine. As a modern, complementary form of medicine, it encompasses practices as varied as Japanese reiki, Tibetan pranic healing and Chinese chi medicine.

What do its practitioners do?
They take a tripartite view of the human whole, believing it is composed of mind, body and soul, and say that physical or mental illnesses can best be healed through an approach that is spiritual as well as physical. In essence, spiritual healing is the application of ”healing energy” to a patient.

What kind of illnesses do healers believe they can treat?
According to Ian Scott of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, ”almost everything” can be treated using spiritual healing. ”The human body has tremendous powers of self-healing”, he says, ”and the job of the spiritual healer is to unblock things like emotional problems or stress in order to allow the body’s own healing energy to flow.” While the laying on of hands is often associated with this kind of treatment, Ian says that nowadays it is generally believed that physical contact is unnecessary - although the comfort of human touch can act as an aid to stress relief.

Do you have to be religious?
Spiritual healing differs from faith healing in that you don’t need to follow a religion to undergo treatment. But a study by researchers at the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind suggests faith can also alleviate pain. They gave electric shocks to a dozen atheists and a dozen Roman Catholics as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary; the Catholics were able to block out much of the pain.

While both faith and spiritual healers claim to help the body by treating the spirit, the majority of spiritual healers regard what they do as a complementary therapy. This is in contrast to the views of some faith healers, who believe that prayer alone is enough.

Does spiritual healing really work?
There is still a tendency for spiritual healers to cite anecdotal evidence in support of the technique’s validity, which tends to widen the gulf between their philosophy and that of scientists. Even so, the University of Colorado’s Dr John Zimmerman claimed to have measured magnetic fields several hundred times stronger than expected around the hands of operating healers.

But that doesn’t prove anything. What other evidence is there?
In their book Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst discuss an experiment where 110 patients were treated by a healer, unaware that, in half the cases, the healer in question was an actor employed by the researchers. Ernst, the UK’s first professor of complementary medicine, calls the results ”staggering”: in many cases patients displayed remarkable signs of recovery.

However, the control group - the one treated by the actor - actually fared better than the group that underwent treatment from genuine healers, prompting Singh and Ernst to suggest that the most powerful aspect of spiritual healing is in fact down to the placebo effect.

Is spiritual healing regulated?
While the 15,000 practitioners of spiritual healing in the UK are at present self-regulating, organisations such as UK Healers hold consultations with medical professionals to encourage the legitimisation of healers. The NHS has a growing number of healers on its books and works closely with the NFSH to ensure good working practice.

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