By Stephan A. Schwartz
Article Excerpt:
Download PDF of “A Touch of Warmth”
We were studying healing. Bob was 25, sallow, and very sick. Diagnosed as being HIV-positive 18 months earlier, he was now in the final stages of full-blown AIDS, his once handsome features now disfigured by the beginnings of a cancerous lesion of Karposi Syndrome. I don’t know how he had found out about our study, but he had and on that Tuesday morning he presented himself at the clinic. Our research was simple in concept. We were asking 14 men and women, seven of them experienced healers using everything from evangelical Christian laying-on-of-hands, to channeling space people, and seven of them volunteers who had never tried energy healing, to treat 14 men and women suffering from everything from migraines to cancer, while small sealed vials of water were strapped to their hands.
Our focus was to see if the water changed, if something in its structure was altered by being exposed to healing energy, whatever that was, in a way that could be measured. For each of the three little sealed vials of triple distilled water used in a session there was a control; a vial of water exactly the same but one which was unexposed to the healing energy. The difference we were measuring was the difference between the treated vial and its control. Although real healing was going to take place, we hoped, our focus was on the water.
Publication History: Slightly different versions appeared in New Age Journal May/June 1997, and Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul (Plume/Penguin: New York, 1998).
