The Telepathy Tapes - S2E50: When Frontier Science Enters Mainstream Journals: Energy Healing Cancer Study Update | Talk Tracks

Starting point is 00:00:03 Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and welcome to the Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly by TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, we do just that. In season two, the consciousness cassettes, we spent two episodes exploring energy healing, what it is, what people experience during it? Is it effective? And maybe most importantly, some of the research beginning to look at whether these practices can create measurable change in the body. If you haven't listened to those two episodes yet, please start there. They are episode eight and episode nine of

Starting point is 00:00:49 season two, the consciousness cassettes. And they'll give you much more context for what we'll be talking about today. In those episodes, we introduced you to a fascinating study taking place at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where researchers tested energy healing, or what some call biofield therapy, on both pancreatic cancer cells in petri dishes and in mice. When we release those episodes, the research hadn't been published yet, but now it has. So I wanted to come back to this story, highlight that milestone, and use it as an opportunity to understand something we really only touched on the first time around. What does it actually take for research into something like energy healing to move through

Starting point is 00:01:24 the scientific process? For this episode, I spoke with Dr. Santosh Rao, a medical oncologist and integrative oncologist who has followed the MD Anderson research closely. And Meredith Sprungle, the research and program director of the Settle Energy Funders Collective, which listeners may remember help support the MD Anderson research we covered last season and is also one of the organizations behind phenomena healing, which has been documenting the study. We're going to look at why research like this can be so difficult to fund and conduct what happens during peer review and why publication can become especially challenging when you're studying something that doesn't yet fit neatly within an accepted

Starting point is 00:01:59 scientific framework. Our team in particular is very interested in this due to a lot of the telepathy and spelling research that has just been done. Will it find a home? Daily, we're wondering if there'll be a scientific journal brave enough to publish the research. So to start, I wanted an independent clinical perspective on the study, so I asked Dr. Santos-Row to walk us through the research and explain what stood out to him about the findings now that they've been published. I'm Sancho-Row. I'm a medical oncologists, and I'm also an integrative oncologist. I most recently finished a term as the president of the Society for Integrative Oncology. I have long been interested in biofield therapies and am a practitioner myself, and so I'm very interested in this kind of research that focuses on the science behind

Starting point is 00:02:45 biofield therapies and allows us to ask more questions. Okay, great. And then we covered the study in detail last season, but could you briefly just give a recap on what the study looked like, and the main takeaways. Yes, the paper that was published was an overview of research that was conducted over four years at the University of Texas MD Anderson. And there were different experiments that were conducted over what we call preclinical research. So there were pancreatic cancer cell lines that were studied, as well as mouse-related studies showing the effects of biofield therapy versus control and what they called a sham, which was kind of a fake therapy that was done without any training or intention, just to see what effects it might have. And they did some very

Starting point is 00:03:34 rigorous research in these areas looking at a whole bunch of different outcomes. So just to pause here, preclinical means this research wasn't being done in cancer patients. The researchers were studying pancreatic cancer cells in the lab, patient-derived tumor models, and cancer cells in mice. and the sham or control condition was another important part of the design. Someone who wasn't trained in the healing method would sit with the cells or mice and mimic the practitioners' movements, the distance from the cells, but without actually performing an energy healing technique. And so just to paint this picture, an energy healer who's been trained in this and knows how to

Starting point is 00:04:08 heal is waving their hands over a petri dish or mice. And then there was a sham person who's never been trained in energy healing or anything like that. They would stand at the same distance away from the cells as the actual healer. they would wave their hands in the same way. So they were doing the same thing as the energy healer was to try to figure out, does just a human standing there do something? Or is energy healing actually working? Yeah, there were three therapists who, you know, all repeated experiments. And for the cell lines, they would do 15 to 30 minute sessions. There were single sessions.

Starting point is 00:04:40 And for the mouse studies, the mice received 30 minute sessions three times a week for three weeks. Okay, great. And then what were the main findings? There were numerous effects on the cell lines, including showing that biofield therapy reduced growth, and it showed decrease invasiveness of the pancreatic cancer cell models. And then they did some cell culture studies, which also showed decreased growth. And the interesting thing about some of those studies is that some of the changes were seen only in cancer cells and not in normal pancreatic cells. So in simpler terms, the cancer cells that received the biofield treatment or energy healing were growing more slowly and were less able to behave in the invasive way cancer cells typically do. And one of the more interesting findings was that in some of these experiments,

Starting point is 00:05:33 those changes showed up in the cancer cells but not in the normal pancreatic cells the researchers tested. So the effect wasn't simply that all of the cells were being slowed down in the same way. It was just the cancer cells. And there's some specific changes that they were able to demonstrate. For example, the cancer cells were more often stuck in what we call cell cycle arrest, where they were not in their growth phase. And that was more often seen with the biofield therapy. And there was a significant reduction in the ability for these cancer cells to show spread or invasion.

Starting point is 00:06:11 And then in the mouse studies, the fascinating thing is that the mice were less often found to have cancer to the liver. So we call that liver metastases. And it was comparable to another control arm where they gave a chemotherapy called gem cytobine. So that was fascinating that they were able to compare it like that and had a similar effect to this one popular chemotherapy drug, at least in this particular outcome. And this is actually where some of the strongest findings showed up. Across the mouse experiments, biofield therapy or energy healing had a more moderate effect on the growth of the primary pancreatic tumor, but a stronger and more consistent effect on the botasicist of the spread of cancer to the liver.

Starting point is 00:06:55 In one of the experiments, for example, the mice receiving the energy healing or biofield therapy had about 70 to 75 percent fewer visible liver nodules than the untreated and sham groups. And again, this is all pre-clinical research. These findings don't necessarily tell us that biofield therapy can treat pancreatic cancer in people, but they do give researchers a valid case for studying biofield therapy further. And that's significant, partly because, as Dr. Rao explained, biofield therapies have existed for a long time and are even offered in some healthcare settings, while the scientific evidence behind them has remained much less developed. So I've been interested in biofield therapies for a long time. And I think,

Starting point is 00:07:36 that first of all, biofield therapies are a group of therapies that focus on the idea of a biofield, kind of an energy body, that can be interacted upon. And there are various different methods, such as Reiki or Healing Touch, Cheong, and others. And for a long time, these methods have been present in cultures around the world and sometimes from long ago. But even though they're becoming more popular in modern healthcare, they've done so without a lot of rigorous scientific support. And so it's an odd kind of relationship because you'll see more and more often things like Reiki being offered at cancer centers, but either it's described in a way that's not true to the actual method of healing, or it's not promoted or emphasized sometimes.

Starting point is 00:08:36 but it's popular. And generally, it's kind of operated on that level where people feel better, but there's not a lot of good research to support it. And so, you know, I think we are all highly evidence-based, and we would prefer to have scientific mechanism and merit to what we're offering. So I found that has been the case for a long time that this exists, but it's not really clear what's happening and where it's best used. There are other studies that have looked at some of the physics behind healing that are interesting, and there are certainly other studies that have led to the questioning here and the research that's been done here on inflammation and immune system function and things like that. So there has been some research. There's been some research on

Starting point is 00:09:24 the effects on people from a symptom standpoint. So it's not like there's no research, but not enough where it's clear enough for people to not be skeptical, and there's a lot of skepticism, you know, rightfully so for people who may not believe in the merits of biofield therapy or understand it. It's a little bit different than the way we think of physiology in how we're trained as doctors and nurses and healthcare practitioners. This is not something that's taught at all, or even discussed, really, and if anything, it's suppressed. And I think this gets to the bigger question I wanted to understand this episode. Dr. Rao isn't saying that there hasn't been research on energy healing. There has.

Starting point is 00:10:06 But historically, it has not built the kind of large, rigorous, and reproducible evidence that would make something like biofield therapy or energy healing easy to evaluate within mainstream medicine. And there's another problem he touches on here, mechanism. We can observe that something changed in these cells, right? Researchers can measure differences in their growth, their mitochondria, even their electrical properties. But we still don't understand what mechanism, if any, connects some. the biofield intervention to those changes. What is it? How exactly does energy healing work? We dive into that in season two, but there's still no clear, solid answer. And the issue is when you don't have an accepted mechanism for how it works and you're working in a field where the existing research base is

Starting point is 00:10:48 still small, how do you build the kind of science that people will take seriously? And again, we're very interested in this at the telepathy tapes because telepathy research has been done and is currently being submitted as mainstream journals and sometimes being rejected without even being looked at. So anyway, that's what we want to ask Meredith Sprungle about. My name is Meredith Sprangle. I am a PhD student at Leiden University, and I am the research and program director of the Settle Energy Funders Collective. Our approach is to validate or invalidate hypotheses around both how energy healing works and what it works for. So you always take a very rigorous approach. It's always done in a way that can be communicated in a rigorous and scientific manner, but that also means exploring

Starting point is 00:11:31 on the edges, right? We learn a lot from the frontiers. We learn for people who live in the frontier, who've done a lot of the research that maybe has not necessarily been heard about, but also might give us clues about how energy healing is working and what it works for. We're all trying to take better care of ourselves, whether that means drinking more water, getting more movement, or being thoughtful about what we put into our bodies. But one thing we probably don't think about enough is liver health. Your liver is doing more than 500 functions every day, supporting everything from digestion and energy production to metabolism and vitamin storage. So giving it a little daily support just makes sense. That's where dose for your liver comes in. It's a clinically backed

Starting point is 00:12:14 liquid liver health supplement that comes in an easy two-ounce daily shot and tastes like fresh squeezed orange juice. It has zero sugar, zero junk, and zero calories. And it's designed to support daily liver function and help with things like sluggishness, midday crashes, metabolism, and digestion. And I love there's research behind it with two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showing a positive impact on liver enzyme levels. Ready to give your liver the support it deserves, head to dose daily.com slash tapes or enter tapes to get 35% off your first subscription.

Starting point is 00:12:45 Your body does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot co-slash tapes for 35% off your first month subscription. There are so many people sitting on an idea for a business because actually getting it off the ground feels overwhelming. You might know exactly what you want to create, But then comes the website, payments, inventory, and all the technical stuff that can make you wonder where to even begin.

Starting point is 00:13:10 One thing I learned after starting the telepathy tapes is that when an idea really takes off, you suddenly need a real home for all of it. And for us, it's not just the podcast, but the community, the resources, and even our merchandise sales where 100% of the profits go to support nonprofits. That's where Shopify makes so much sense. If you had an idea, a product, or a community that you're building around, Shopify gives you the tools to actually launch it. without needing to know how to code or piece together a million different platforms. Shopify gives you everything you need to start and run your business in one place. Their templates and AI tools can help you build a beautiful storefront quickly without needing to know how to code.

Starting point is 00:13:48 And once customers are there, Shopify checkout makes it incredibly easy for them to actually complete their purchase. Plus, if you get stuck along the way, Shopify's built-in AI assistant, sidekick, is there to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep moving. So instead of juggling a bunch of different systems, you can spend more of your time actually growing the business you set out to create. If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com to start your free trial. That's right. Start your free trial at Shopify.com today. That's Shopify.com. So this is a field you work in now, but what was your own relationship to energy healing before you started studying it?

Starting point is 00:14:40 Was this something you, you know, already believed in or were open to? Or did you come into it, you know, more skeptical? I'm a straight and narrow person. I think I've always been evidence-based. I remember the first meeting I was at at the Samuel Institute and someone said, oh, I do Reiki on my baby. And I was like, what's Reiki? And then they explained it. And I was like, oh, yeah, that doesn't sound real. Okay. So what changed that for you? What kind of broke me open and my interest in it is there's actually someone you guys have interviewed, her name is Shamni Jan. I was running a meeting with her, and I had broken my foot. And someone accidentally tripped me in the meeting. And she knew healing touch. And so she just came over and laid her hands on my leg, and I just started buzzing. And, you know, I had no expectations. I didn't know what was happening. And I'm in the middle of a meeting with a bunch of people studying resilience in the military. And Shomani has her hands on my leg healing me. And so that is when my mind was over.

Starting point is 00:15:39 I was always more of you do the research, you use the paradigm that is to help explain the results. And that's how you understand the world. But in these small moments where there were these new understandings brought by experience, I started to think differently about what we can learn from science based on how this didn't really fit into any model that I knew about. And then when you first started working in integrative health, what did the scientific landscape around these kind of practices look like? When I started, integrative health was kind of just getting on the on-ramp. I think at that time, it was still called complementary and alternative medicine. So obviously it was seen as part of something that could be possibly part of your care,

Starting point is 00:16:19 but not hospitals weren't carrying it. It was still seen in a particular light, which didn't necessarily fit within, integrating it into an alopathic or mainstream medical health care, which now we see things like acupuncture and meditation and yoga, very much being part of mainstream medical clinics. and even within hospitals. But on the underground, there was a lot of research being done on these practices. And then over time, as more and more people got interested in them, you saw more and more people

Starting point is 00:16:47 researching them. So when I got into the field, the biggest success case was chiropractic care, because actually originally chiropractic care was based on an energetic model of the body, although, especially in the United States, it's gone very structural and bone oriented, although parts of Europe and Asia do consider this energetic component. and then also acupuncture was starting to increase both in the number of researchers and in its rigor. So in acupuncture, it has an energetic, the chi that runs to your body. So it also has this analogous energetic system.

Starting point is 00:17:19 And before we go any further, I think it's important to understand how scientific publishing actually works, especially because research into something like energy healing can face some unique hurdles in that process. So, you know, can you give us just a quick lay of the land? Like, what happens once a study is submitted? What is peer review? and why does it matter which journal it gets published in? So the way that science is communicated to a scientific audience is by publishing in what are called peer-reviewed journals.

Starting point is 00:17:45 And peer-reviewed journals are journals where you submit the paper and then it first goes through an editorial office and they decide, is this paper a good fit for my journal? Because journals are usually going to have a particular discipline. So it could be medicine, it could be psychology, it could be education. And so first it'll go through an editor who will say, okay, does this fit the journal? and then after the words, the editor assigns it to two to three peer reviewers. And what that means is a peer in your discipline who should know something about your research assesses it for its methodological rigor, for its outcomes, and also just the quality of the

Starting point is 00:18:23 journal article. So is this written well enough? Is it explained well enough? Are the results meaningful enough to be published? And you can go back and forth. And usually the peer reviewers will look at it once and they'll make a decision and they'll send back comments, and sometimes you'll go back and forth with the peer reviewers. Sometimes they just say no. Sometimes the editor gets involved. But the whole idea is that you have a process by which

Starting point is 00:18:43 the scientific merit is assessed by your peers. And there are different levels of journals. So not all journals are created equal. Some journals have impact factors of 50 and above, and some have one to five. And there's some mainstream journals that people are going to know about or things in the research community are nature and it's nature subsidiary. So they have the brand nature and then you have nature medicine or nature communications or scientific reports. There's the Lancet, which is a very old medical journal. There is the New England Journal of Medicine. These are some of the top-sighted journals and the most rigorous journals. And that means when something gets in that journal, it can substantially impact the community because then it's recognized as, well, this really

Starting point is 00:19:26 incredible journal has assessed my paper as meaningful and worthy. And the peer reviewers also have agreed that it should be published in this journal that's going to have a large outreach. And when you say higher impact factor, you know, what does that mean? So a journal's impact factor measures how often the average article in the journal is cited. And so the higher the impact factor, the higher it is cited. And therefore, usually the more people and more eyes will see these publications. Then when something is considered a low impact journal, it means that it gets cited less and therefore read less. and it means it has less impact on the field.

Starting point is 00:20:02 Some nature publications have these things called impact factor 50, and then these complementary and integrative health journals who have an impact of like one to three. Okay, so something like acupuncture started out largely being published in these smaller, low-impact journals. And lower impact factor doesn't necessarily mean the research itself is less rigorous. It's more a measure of how often work from that journal tends to be cited,

Starting point is 00:20:23 and therefore, you know, how much reach and influence that journal may have. But as the research base grew, and these studies became more rigorous, research on acupuncture started appearing in more mainstream, higher-impact publications. So do you think energy healing is following that same trajectory? When I started, you never really saw a lot of these studies in top-tier journals. If you look now, you will have seen acupuncture studies in journals like science and nature. But at that time, it was very much these, what we would call low-impact journals. So you have seen some of these, especially with psychedelic cystic therapy, you see this in nature all the time. You see some

Starting point is 00:20:59 acupuncture studies. You see some meditation studies. But with energy healing, we still haven't seen really any studies get into these mainstream journals. And that's because there isn't really a paradigm to fit them into. Right. If with psychedelics, you can take a pill and it's an exogenous stimuli that can change your brain chemistry. And so then we can fit that very much into something that we understand. If you change the way the brain is functioning, then you might have these peak experiences or it can change the way that you're perceiving the world. meditation. It acts on your autonomics nervous systems. So you start to calm down and your heart rate decreases and your heart availability increases. Then if you practice it a long time, you see

Starting point is 00:21:37 genomic changes. So you have this idea that, oh, it's a relaxation technique. And therefore, there are all these downstream effects that can be explainable by mainstream medicine. And then there's definitely a plausible theory of mechanism. With energy healing, it gets thrown into the bucket of placebo. And we can talk about what is placebo and what's not placebo. And that is because really historically speaking, we have thrown out in these medical trials anything that isn't the active ingredient and called a placebo. And therefore, a lot of the things that energy healers are acting on mindset, like expectations and belief, they have been relegated as placebo as opposed to active ingredients in a treatment. So there's this long history of when a lot of

Starting point is 00:22:19 these integrative health modalities start to gain traction, both within science and with mainstream interest, they are fit within the paradigm. And there are ways to explain it. And plausible theories of mechanism that currently meet that biogenic, genetic, DNA-based understanding of how these changes can have long-term impacts on your health and wellness. So in other words, part of the challenge is that science needs some way to define what the active ingredient actually is. With energy healing, even if researchers observe an effect, there's still debate over what is producing it. And whether that fits within an existing biological framework or gets categorized as placebo. And that can make it especially difficult.

Starting point is 00:22:58 to build the evidence base for a field that doesn't yet fit neatly into an established scientific model. And we've talked about this a lot on our show, right? Materialism. This idea that things are real if they can be measured and observed. But what about the things that we don't know how to measure yet or can't see yet? How hard it is for an article to get published is very much based on not only the impact factor of the journal, but also the stage at which a lot of times these research fields are at, which is kind of catch-22, right? If you don't have a large evidence base, then it's hard to justify

Starting point is 00:23:32 a lot of times in the article that it is meaningful results, right? And also, anomalies happen all the time in research. And a lot of these top-tier journals aren't going to be like, oh, let me publish this anomaly, or we have the justification to publish this anomaly when there is no research that kind of has the on-ramp to justify its publication. Unfortunately, there are no like guidelines and set standards. It's kind of based on the journal editor and who's running the journal and also the peer reviewers you get. Whether or not something gets accepted doesn't always have a clear justification. So I want to understand the other side of that. If the evidence based for energy healing is still relatively small, how much of that comes from the barriers that you're describing and how much

Starting point is 00:24:14 has to do with limitations in the research itself? Like, what has the history of energy healing research actually look like? So we performed a rigorous scoping review of all the research ever done on energy healing. And I think the first publication dates back to 1967. And a lot of times at that point, it was seen as laying on of hands or spiritual healing. But it continues to be published. It's not that it's a new phenomenon. People have been publishing an energy healing for the last, I guess, 80 years. But there's a number of problems, is what I'll say. One, the funding isn't always there, right? A lot of times you need a funding mechanism to properly design a study and collect the right data. So a lot of times what you see in the literature historically was

Starting point is 00:24:54 people using limited resources and using observational data to collect information about the impact of energy healing on a certain disease group or outcome like anxiety or depression. Second, I would like to name, though, that there weren't any clinical reporting guidelines, and that means how to report a study in any discipline and even in pharmaceuticals until the late 90s. So when people talk about the rigor of research, even in mainstream science, they didn't necessarily have standards to report on. So historically speaking, the literature has not been well reported or something that you could replicate in a meaningful way. And that also is because, and I say this was so much love and gratitude for those who love energy healing, a lot of times even in the premise of

Starting point is 00:25:38 their articles, they use non-naturalistic explanations. So energy healers channel universal energy to heal your cancer. I cannot be proven or disproven. And in research, you need to have hypotheses that you either prove or disprove, and I can't prove God, and I can't prove or disprove universal energy. So no one's going to look at that study and say, okay, the assumptions by which these researchers are studying energy healing are meaningful. Again, I understand where it's coming from. Energy healing has such a profound impact on people that there's this great desire to prove something about it. But in science, we have to have hypotheses that we can either validate or invalidate. And so you are seeing increased rigor in the research because what you're

Starting point is 00:26:21 seeing is a lot more people interested in energy healing. And also, there are a lot of researchers who have looked at interesting potential biological mechanisms or informational mechanisms by which maybe energy healing could possibly be working in the body. So there are some really good articles, and we have categorized them on our phenomena healing website. So as a place to go to, you can see all the best research that's done to date on different parts of the energy healing experience all the way from biological-based mechanisms to physics to the actual efficacy. But historically speaking, that's a very small group of research studies. And that brings us back to the M.D. Anderson study, led by Dr. Lorenzo Cohen, because in a lot of ways, it seems

Starting point is 00:27:06 to address some of the exact problems you're describing. So what made this study different? How did researchers get the funding, institutional support, and scientific oversight to study something like energy healing at this level of rigor. So MD Anderson Cancer Center is the number one ranked cancer hospital in the United States. Lorenzo Cohen is a psychologist by training, but particularly he is a psycho-neuroimmunologist. So Lorenzo has been in the integrative health moment for a long time, studying things like yoga and meditation, and he has been working at Anderson Cancer Center for, I believe, years, Lorenzo had already done some small but very fascinating pilot studies with a healer named Sean Haribance. And he approaches from a place of true methodological rigor. And then

Starting point is 00:27:52 they very rigorously worked with MD Anderson Cancer Center to get the protocol and the oversight mechanisms in place by which the institution would feel comfortable. Because this is quite frontier research and bringing in energy healers into the mainstream cancer hospital meant that they had to have a lot of different mechanisms in place by which not only the executive staff, but also the other doctors and research scientists felt comfortable. And how they did that is creating rigorous assessment mechanisms. So the protocol was assessed and looked at by an independent board at MD Anderson Cancer Center. The results were looked at an independent board at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Every step of the way, Lorenzo had these controls in place that would double check his work and make sure that it was

Starting point is 00:28:38 abiding by standard methodological approaches in science. And that is understandable given that this is a very new approach and that it was particularly using healers with cancer cells. So this study has something a lot of the earlier research didn't. The funding, the institutional support, controls, and oversight to investigate the question at a much higher level of rigor. But even with all of that in place, the study still had to make it through the publication process. So what happened when the team actually tried to get those results published?

Starting point is 00:29:12 I love clothes, and I have a closet full of them, but I find myself reaching for the same things over and over again. The sweater that somehow works with everything, the T-shirt that hits just right, those are the pieces that have earned their keep. And that permanence is exactly what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like organic cotton and washable silk. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again. again and again. Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at just $50, give you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. Quince also has premium stretched denim, leather bags, and footwear, and beautiful 14-carat gold jewelry that can

Starting point is 00:29:59 be the finishing touch that pulls together an entire look. I've basically been living in Quince's 100% European linen short-sleeved shirt and shorts. They're breathable, they're easy to dress up and down. I have them in like six colors, and they also have an adorable 100% European linen tank mini dress. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash tapes. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's QI-N-C-E.com slash tapes. It was a bit of a challenge to get this published. And again, I think at first, when they submitted it for publication, if I remember correctly, the reaction was from this particular journal, well, there's no other research on this. Like I just said, there was no background that could support that this type of research was meaningfully being conducted and based on previous experiments. And so we put together a spreadsheet of all the research has been done that demonstrated that there's been tons of studies on energy healing for cancer cells. And they're

Starting point is 00:31:12 have been in the past. None this rigorous, none this controlled, none that ran so many experiments, but ones that would demonstrate potentially there were effects happening on the cells. So that was first, demonstrate that there's evidence. So they did it, okay, we'll review the journal article. And then they sent it out to peer reviewers. And over time, you know, the team is answering questions. One of the things the team made available was all the data, all the analytics that they did, which is really important. So that basically the idea is if those people wanted to run the analysis themselves, they could. meaning that it's very transparent, everything that was done. So the article got accepted. And then I believe 48 hours before it was supposed to be published, it got pulled. And that is because we don't know exactly who, but there was people that were raising concerns about this article being published in this journal. So it was not published in that journal. And then the interesting part is after that it got sent to, I think, two or three more journals. So you can't send a journal article out to more than one journal at a time. That's a commitment that you make to the journal because the journal is spending time to assess.

Starting point is 00:32:12 your article. So I believe it was sent to two or three more journals, and at that point, it didn't even get past the editor. So the editor said, this isn't for my journal, which is something that happens all the time. So a lot of times, the editor themselves can make this decision that this doesn't fit the journal topic. This isn't an article that we're interested in including in our journal, or this isn't relevant research or it's not meaningful enough for us to take the time to assess it. They don't have to really give you an explanation, but it's called desk review. So I believe that they were, it was deaths rejected two or three more times, and then the last journal accepted it for peer review, and then after a few rounds of peer review, it was published.

Starting point is 00:32:50 And in terms of impact from that first journal you submitted to versus the journal ultimately was published in, what was that difference? It was a few degrees of difference. It wasn't a huge difference, but the one journal had a bigger name. So had a larger recognition across disciplines. The journal was published in is Cancer Medicine is a very good journal. It's very rigorous. It has a lot of good research in it. It's more specific to cancer. So now that the paper has made it through peer review and been published in a respected cancer journal, does that change some of the barriers you were describing earlier? Like, will the landscape be forever different? Or do you think there's still fundamental hurdles for this kind of research? I will say that overwhelmingly, we have not

Starting point is 00:33:32 seen the backlash that previous articles have. And I do think it has to do with the rigor. You know, if you buy into that this article is peer-reviewed and they did multiple controls, they ran the experiment multiple times with the cell dishes and the tumors, it really is a high level of methodological rigor. So we didn't see the criticism that I have seen with other studies. Also, it should be worth noting that every time we post a video about MD Anderson, it has a very large social media impact. So clearly it's speaking to people. And I think that's all meaningful. I think there's still hurdles. There's two things that we're going to happen. People are going to continue. to call it placebo. And I would say that term is liability because placebo, we don't really

Starting point is 00:34:15 understand what placebo is. Or it is going to be rallied against because we have no transpersonal mechanism. When I say transpersonal mechanism, what I mean is what is happening between the healer and the healy that is causing these downstream biological effects. And a lot of people call it energy because this is the term that's taken over in our era of modernity. But before it was term things like God and spirit, prana and she. So we don't have currently a plausible theory of that mechanism. What is that energy? We can't measure it, not right now. And we don't necessarily have a plausible theory of what is that transpersonal mechanism between the healer and the cell dish, the tumor, the person. And it tends to be that for anything to gain considerable traction,

Starting point is 00:35:03 there has to be some sort of plausible theory of mechanism. And although we will be able to probably identify, if energy healing does indeed work for humans, what you will be able to probably identify are biologically based mechanisms. So things like effects on your nervous system, on your immune health, on your autonomic regulation. Those are probably things that'll be able to be captured, but it's going to continue to hit a wall until there's probably some sort of transpersonal theory of mechanism. So what would need to happen next for research like this to move beyond that wall and begin building the kind of, you know, evidence-based that could reach larger and more mainstream journals. I think that matters because how cool if insurance paid for this type of thing

Starting point is 00:35:43 in every hospital, right? To get all these journals on board, there's a few things that need to happen. Replication across labs. That is very important to demonstrate that there is no even unintended effects based on just location or investigators. And so if this is something you can demonstrate over time, cancer tumors, it becomes more meaningful as an intervention for people with cancer. I think there's going to have to be a lot of different types of research because if you believe that there is some transpersonal healing mechanism or something is current healer and healie that is undefined within the current scientific paradigm, that's going to take a lot of other types of work. You're going to have to understand, is there something about physics we don't

Starting point is 00:36:24 understand? There's a lot more research that needs to be done on what is happening physiologically to the person during the healing. And then again, what happens over time after they've had a healing? what are the dosage of the healing? Do you need one healing? Do you need 10 healings? What is a good healer? So we just don't know a lot. But I think what is driving this movement is that a lot of people have had these profound

Starting point is 00:36:45 healing experiences that can't be explained by the current paradigm, the materialist paradigm, that doesn't create room for your consciousness affecting my consciousness and my well-being. So publication isn't the endpoint here. It gives other researchers something they can now cite, question, replicate, and build on. And if the findings hold up across different labs, different practitioners, and eventually in human studies, that's how a much larger evidence base begins to form. And I was curious whether Meredith feels the scientific culture itself is becoming more open to asking these kinds of questions that have often been considered pretty woo. I mean, science is a culture, right? And currently there are norms about what we study and what we don't study and what is meaningful to study and what is not meaningful to study.

Starting point is 00:37:31 I think in general, it's shifting. I do think ever since the integrative health movement has taken hold and that people are very interested in these alternative or now integrative therapies to heal. I think just the experience of them has shifted kind of people's understanding of what health is and what is health promoting. So meditation, yoga, psychedelics, totally okay to study now. It wasn't always, it wasn't 10, 15 years ago for a lot of PhD students and master's students. There's no problem studying that there are so many people studying psychedelics. I can't even name them all. So there is a shift in what can be studied and what is meaningful to study as a health intervention.

Starting point is 00:38:09 And I think that is paving the way for people to get more curious. And I think a lot of times they get more curious because people report they experience an energy sensation during these modalities or they feel deeply connected to other people in these psychedelic circles in a way that is inexplainable by mainstream science. So I do think the more and more that we create a science around. what we refer to as consciousness-based healing modalities, ones that are very much based on these shifts of consciousness doing a lot of the work to promote health and healing. You will see an opening, and you are seeing an opening. And the integrative and complementary health journals do accept

Starting point is 00:38:44 these papers. They're being published all the time. Last year, over 30 clinical research studies were published on energy healing. But there's still a ceiling. And I just think that to crack that ceiling, you really need to kind of do the boring work of starting to categorize what happens during a healing, and also to do some of the leg work to start to grow more of the clinical research base. There's been one really good study that we supported of Reiki for knee osteoarthritis pain. So you're seeing more rigorous work being done. But before I think it can really still elevate into the higher tier journals, you will need to see a higher quality evidence base. And I think that's really the larger question that this study leaves us with.

Starting point is 00:39:22 Science is constantly exploring the boundaries of what we know. But somebody has to be willing to investigate the questions that sit beyond those boundaries before there's an accepted framework to explain them. And that's particularly difficult with something like energy healing. Researchers can design rigorous experiments. They can measure biological changes. They can repeat the work and subject it to peer review. But if they're doing all of that while the larger question of how is happening, right? Like how can one person potentially affect another person or even a cell culture? Because that remains outside the way our current scientific paradigm generally understands the world, it makes it much harder.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And so that doesn't mean that the answer is to lower the scientific bar, not at all. If anything, research at the frontier has to be especially rigorous. Findings need to be replicated, challenged, tested by different labs, and ultimately studied in people before we can begin to understand what they mean. But scientific paradigms don't expand unless we're willing to rigorously pursue questions that don't yet fit inside the paradigm. And I want to call out the telepathy research right here because we know for a fact that a humongous telepathy study has just been completed, in addition to a study that really validates non-speakers are in there, they're spelling their own thoughts, and that study is out to journals, and will anyone take the chance on it? We're holding our breath.

Starting point is 00:40:37 So with all that in mind, the researchers at these frontiers are amazing people. The funders at these frontiers are amazing people, and no one would move the world forward without them. And that's what feels so significant about this study being published. It isn't the final word on energy healing. It's one more carefully invested. question entering the scientific record, where other researchers can now test it, challenge it, build on it, and perhaps push the boundary of what we understand a little further. And so let this be a call to action for everyone out there. It is much more exciting and we will progress so much further as a culture, as a people, and as a world. If we are open-minded skeptics, don't dismiss something just because it sounds impossible or because you've looked at one study that makes it

Starting point is 00:41:23 seem like it might not be possible. Test it, research it, investigate it, talk to people, and keep going. I find that to be a much more fulfilling place to be than being a close-minded believer, believing so adamantly that you have the answers, you know the truth, that you won't even look at a question that challenges your framework or paradigm. So it's on all of us, but thank you for everyone who participated in this research, who funded the research, and had the bravery to publish the research. Let that spirit keep going. We'll see. see you next week. That's it for this episode of the talk tracks. But new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that

Starting point is 00:42:03 knit together are reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. To dive in deeper, subscribe to our backstage pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content like telepathy tests, ask me anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free, connect with other members on our telepathy tribe discord and hear and see exclusive content from the telepathy tapes vault visit our website at the telepathy tapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our backstage pass. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Catherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy, technical directing audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole, opening and closing music by

Starting point is 00:42:43 Elizabeth P.W. and original logo and cover art by Ben Condora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

The Telepathy Tapes - S2E50: When Frontier Science Enters Mainstream Journals: Energy Healing Cancer Study Update | Talk Tracks

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.