Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance / James L
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B UTTERWORTH H EINEMANN An Imprint of Elsevier Science The Curtis Center Independence Square West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19106 ENERGY MEDICINE IN THERAPEUTICS AND ISBN 0-7506-5400-7 HUMAN PERFOMANCE Copyright © 2003, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Health Sciences Rights Department in Philadelphia, PA, USA: phone: (+1) 215 238 7869, fax: (+1) 215 238 2239, e-mail: [email protected]. You may also complete your request on-line via the Elsevier Science homepage (http://www.elsevier.com), by selecting ‘Customer Support’ and then ‘Obtaining Permissions.’ NOTICE Complementary and alternative medicine is an ever-changing field. Standard safety precautions must be followed, but as new research and clinical experience broaden our knowledge, changes in treatment and drug therapy may become necessary or appropriate. Readers are advised to check the most current product information provided by the manufacturer of each drug to be administered to verify the rec- ommended dose, the method and duration of administration, and contraindications. It is the respon- sibility of the licensed prescriber, relying on experience and knowledge of the patient, to determine dosages and the best treatment for each individual patient. Neither the publisher nor the editors assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from this publication. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oschman, James L. Energy medicine in therapeutics and human performance / James L. Oschman; foreword by Karl Maret. p.; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7506-5400-7 1. Energy—Therapeutic use. 2. Bioenergetics. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Energy Transfer. 2. Complementary Therapies. 3. Energy Metabolism. QU 34 O81 2003] RZ999.O836 2003 615.8′9—dc21 2002043687 Acquisitions Editor: Inta Ozols Developmental Editor: Karen Morley Project Manager: Peggy Fagen Designer: Mark Bernard Printed in the United States of America Last digit is the print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Dedication This book is dedicated to the living spirit of the great pioneers in science and medicine, especially John McDearmon Moore (1916-2000) and Albert Szent- Györgyi (1893-1986). Our present and future science, medicine, and evolution as a species depend upon the pioneers who look beyond the way things seem to be, to the way things can become. The distinguished individuals to whom this book is dedicated are from opposite ends of the biomedical spectrum: an osteopathic clinician and a basic scientist. What they had in common, in addition to their dedication to life, was not what they knew but what they knew they did not know. John McDearmon (Mack) Moore, DO, Kirksville College John McDearmon Moore of Osteopathic Medicine, became a country doctor, a loving witness and an aid to countless births, suffer- ings, and passings. Albert von Szent-Györgyi Nagyrapolt, MD (Budapest), PhD (Cambridge), Nobel Laureate, known to his colleagues as Prof or Albi, was one of the great scientific pioneers of the twentieth century. One of our continuing challenges is to connect advances in basic science with day-to- day clinical practice The way of the pioneer is seldom easy, and we will always wonder what our world would be like if we could learn to embrace new ideas for the opportuni- ties they offer. Albert Szent-Gÿorgi Foreword by Karl Maret, MD Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions made us keenly aware of the principle of a “paradigm shift.” Paradigm, literally “an example that serves as a pattern or model,” is an existing belief system that anchors consensual reality. “Normal science” is predi- cated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Scientists take great pains to defend that assumption and to this end often suppress fundamental novel- ties because they may be seen as subversive to the existing set of beliefs. The scientific commu- nity cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs that forms the continuity of modern Western scientific thought. In turn, the scientific educational system is founded on a process of rigorous, sometimes rigid, preparation that ensures that the transmitted beliefs exert a “deep hold” on the students’ minds. One existing paradigm in contemporary medicine is that we are primarily biochemical beings. Consequently, the use of pharmaceutical agents, or alternatively herbs and vitamins, ought to be the most effective and widely used method to bring healing to an ailing organism. The paradigm shift that is beginning to occur, and to which this book so eloquently speaks, is that we are not only biochemical beings, but even more fundamentally, energetic and informa- tional beings with sophisticated, high-speed communications systems mediating a complex information flow within our bodies. No biochemist or physicist will deny that all chemical interactions fundamentally depend on energetic, informational, or structural conformational interactions in molecules. But just because molecules such as ATP are mediators of energy exchange, we should not assert that these mediators are the cause of these energetic interactions. For almost a century, physics has lived with an emerging new vision of energetic interactions within matter by invoking such strange concepts as quantum mechanics, soliton waves, particle entanglements, non-locality, and action-at-a-distance, to name only a few. This new physics describes a world that is increasingly paradoxical and often counterintuitive and confusing to our fundamental sense perceptions. In that context, the modern biological sciences and medi- cine utilize concepts that are more analogous to the more traditional ideas of Newtonian physics. Nearly 100 years ago, when this revolution in physics was occurring, American medical prac- tice and education were also being fundamentally altered. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act declared that electrotherapy was scientifically unsupportable and should be legally excluded from clinical practice. This was followed in 1910 by the Flexner report sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation that reformed American medical education. The standardization of med- ical education resulted from Flexner’s recommendation when he stated, “The curse of medical education is the excessive number of schools. The situation can improve only as weaker and superfluous schools are extinguished.” From these beginnings came a growing emphasis on a surgical and drug-oriented therapeu- tics, while effectively discouraging the use of the widespread electrical and magnetic treatment modalities that had found favor with many American consumers up to that time. Robert Becker and Andrew Marino estimated that by 1884, 10,000 physicians in the United States were using electricity every day for therapeutic purposes. Some of these ubiquitous “energy medicine” devices were sold by American retailers such as Sears through their catalog. Although historians may one day determine whether the Carnegie Foundation–sponsored Foreword Flexner report had a self-seeking economic and political agenda to reform American medicine, one thing is for certain: the potential value of energy medicine treatments was effectively viii removed from American medical practitioners’ consciousness. Over the ensuing years, research and education in electromagnetic medical approaches was actively discouraged if not outright shunned or ridiculed by the academic establishment. Only in the waning years of the 20th century was there a renewed interest in this field, driven in part by consumer demand in complementary and alternative medicine that is facilitating a paradigm shift in health care. With U.S. levels of health care spending (or, truthfully, should we call it disease-care spending?) in 2000 reaching $1.3 trillion, and showing no signs of abating, we are now spending over $4500 annually for every American man, woman, and child to pro- vide health/disease care. Only a minuscule percentage of this spending is for energy medicine diagnostic and treatment modalities, even though these have demonstrated many beneficial effects. Diagnostic modalities such as the key EKG, EEG, and MRI, even though relegated to sub- specialties of medicine such as cardiology, neurology and radiology, are essentially energy med- icine modalities. Great promise also lies with newly emerging energy medicine therapeutic devices ranging from microcurrent stimulators, low level lasers, bone growth stimulators to broad-spectrum multiple frequency Tesla coil devices used for healing and performance enhancement. Although the genie is barely out of the bottle in the emerging field of energy med- icine, yet already health-care benefits with lower delivery costs look very promising. What Jim Oschman invites us to do is to journey together into the mysterious world of energy inside living systems. He pursues this path like Sherlock Holmes looking for clues, and we, the reader, collectively become the amazed Dr. Watson being led into the “heart of the mat- ter.” The reference to heart mentioned here is not without forethought. One of the 11 definitions of heart in the American Heritage Dictionary is the “most import- ant or essential part,” as in “to get to the heart of the matter.” To get to the heart of the current paradigm shift, we are invited to reexamine our current Newtonian medicine in the light of energy medicine involving the principles that belong to the quantum physics and information theory. A useful starting point might be to examine the actual heart in our bodies and discover what new revolutionary findings have emerged here over the last quarter-century. The heart is not simply a muscular organ that pumps blood around the body and lungs of vertebrates. It has always been seen as a vital center and source of one’s being, emotions and sen- sibilities. New research has shown how the heart is in intimate dialogue with our brain, body and the world at large.