Interesting, but for comparison I'd like to see the same things measured in a person who's healthy and a "fake healer" -- in other words, a person who's just going through the motions. And to make it amenable to statistical testing we'd have to do the experiment with several sets of healers and healees.
Yes, perhaps. But as I said, our intention was not to achieve scientific credibility but to understand more about the process. When I do healing it's more useful for me to use the meters as feedback to improve my effectiveness or to let me know that I'm too tired or ill to be doing the work at that time.
I'd also want to know if the measured changes correlate with faster or more complete recovery in the healee.
That would also be interesting. Perhaps one could do a test with the healing of induced (but not harmful) wounds.
For all we know, perhaps people just get a bit sweaty when they're touched and all that's being measured is a reduction in surface skin resistance because of sweatiness.
Generally, skin resistance would
increase as the subject relaxed, although in some cases where the subject's nervous system was stuck in a 'fixed parasympathetic mode' (high skin resistance that generally doesn't change much, often seen in older people) healing would appear to induce a shift downwards, as their nervous systems appeared to 'wake up'..
Actually, the machines are not measuring surface skin resistance but something to do with the ionisation that takes place below the skin. This is easy to demonstrate as electrical resistance between two points on the same palm is more or less the same as resistance between two points on different palms. If the machines were measuring the resistance of the sweat this would not be the case. In fact surprisingly, sweat is coincident to this process, as it so happens that people generally sweat more when their nervous systems become aroused. I should also mention that the experiments were done with the hands over the head or body but generally not touching.
The issue for me is that some of the things reported here clearly are extraordinary, and I agree completely with Sagan that extraordinary claims need to be substantiated by extraordinary evidence.
Not to me they don't. I'll make my judgements without obtaining the permission of the scientific community.
I think that many healers feel this way. If the scientific community have an interest in proving or disproving the efficacy of hands-on healing, let them do so. I'd be happy to help. They shouldn't expect much funding from the drug companies though.
