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.
