Double-Blind Trials And Complementary Therapies

Lack Of Double-Blind Trials For Complementary Therapies by Jane Thurnell-Read

Double-blind trials, in which neither the researcher nor the patient know who is receiving the real treatment and who a placebo, are the gold standard for medical research. Many scientists and medical people argue that complementary therapies (alternative medicine or integrative medicine) haven’t stood up to these tests at all well, and so should not be treated with respect.

Many therapists faced with this sort of argument say that there isn’t the same amount of time and money spent on trials of our therapies that is spent on medical trials that are funded lavishly by drug companies and government sponsored research councils. This is, of course, true. Sadly many therapists feel that they are too busy earning a living to have the time or energy to devote to providing viable evidence for the efficacy of their therapy. It is also argues that many therapies treat each person as an individual, and so it is not possible to set up trials in this way. To some extent this is true, although not to the extent that most practitioners imply.  Most therapies do have some routine procedures that are carried out on a lot of their clients in response to particular symptoms.

I believe that there is a much more fundamental reason why these therapies do not, on the whole, respond well to double-blind trials on the few occasions that they have been conducted.

Most therapists believe that they are working with subtle energy in some way, that their work, for example, affects the meridians, chakras and life force. Most also believe that subtle energy can be changed through intent, ritual and similar activities.

Some years ago I tried to teach a friend to use dowsing rods. He was not having any success, and I got rather impatient, and said silently: "Come on rods, move!" I was not really expecting the rods to move, but they did. He was very excited, and I was nonplussed. He continued walking around, and the rods moved in synchronicity – left, right or crossing - with my intention. At no point in all this did my friend know what I was thinking. (I did explain to him later.)

Of course, anything that is this operator sensitive would be immediately ruled out by conventional science and medicine. But is it possible that operator-sensitive technology is precisely what is needed in the subtle energy world? Quantum physics shows that the act of measuring something changes it in some way, but is not able to predict in advance what that way will be. It appears that the intervention is random. It may be that intent, and therefore operator sensitivity, provides the purpose that can make the intervention non-random. In this way the practitioner's intent becomes a
catalyst for a particular positive outcome. (I discuss this in more detail in my book Geopathic Stress & Subtle Energy.)

So, if it is our intent and our consciousness that drive our work (and subtle energy) to its successful conclusion, double blind trials which remove this 'therapeutic enzyme' may be largely unsuccessful. By objectifying what happens, as occurs in double-blind trials, the intent of the practitioner is very deliberately restricted or removed.

Some years ago I was having amazing results in my practice with using leptin (in the Body Biochemicals 2 test kit) to help people lose weight easily.  I told a senior lecturer in nutrition at the University of London about my success, and we agreed to get an M.Sc. student to do a double-blind trial of it as part of her dissertation. I was very excited and optimistic, but the trial was totally inconclusive. As a result of this I was very upset and lost a lot of confidence in what I was doing. But as I now see it, it was destined not to work, because I very consciously set out to exclude intent and my personality from the experiment, so that inevitably the subtle energy changes that happened took on a more random pattern.

There is an extremely interesting article in the Journal Of Alternative And Complementary Medicine (Vol 11, Number 5, 2005) with the title ‘Spooky Action At A Distance: Physics, Psi & Distant Healing’. In this article he looks at four models (energetic transmission, path facilitation, nonlocal entanglement and actualization of potential) as explanations of how phenomena, such as distant healing, work.  Leder’s explanation of ‘actualization’ chimes with what I am saying here.

He writes that in quantum mechanics the measurer is seen as influencing the outcome:

the particle cannot be said to have a definite location before measurement.

The act of measuring gives the particle a definite attribute rather than a range of possibilities. The healer is acting like the measurer. Leder uses the example of someone with a cancer that typically has a survival rate of 20%:

This is analogous to a particle that has a 20% chance of being found here.

The healer through intention/prayer affects whether the event (death from cancer) will be found here (within this client). The healer’s work has shifted the balance so that one outcome is more likely than another. I highly recommend reading Drew Leder's article - you can read a summary of it here.

If my understanding of this is correct, then most therapies will never be amenable to double-blind trials, even if there were enough money and time to perform them. This does not mean that we don’t have to prove in some other way that our therapies work. The MYMOP survey offers a simple possibility that can be used by every practitioner.

Copyright 2007 Jane Thurnell-Read