Some of the best reviews of distant healing (from both the practitioner's and the scientist's perspective) are found in Daniel Benor's book Spiritual Healing: scientific validation of a healing revolution (Vision Publications, 2001). Following are some examples from this collection:

Oskar Estebany (p39) was one of the most studied early healers in North America. He practiced a very common technique ("laying-on of hands"); he could treat 20-40 patients daily "without feeling tired or exhausted, and the last patient under my hands felt the same sensation as the first one". For distant healing, he concentrated on the patient and imagined performing the laying-on-of-hands over the patients' visualized body. He claimed that for distant healing to work, the patient must have been treated in person by him before, or had to possess an object treated by him. For this, he used cotton, drinking water, or pieces of paper on which he had written his name. In later, controlled studies, he convinced Bernard Grad to let him employ similarly treated pieces of cotton which were placed in the cages of mice with iodine-deficient thyroid goiter, and obtained significant healing results. He claimed that any material had the property of being imprintable by intent, but that some were more responsive (i.e water, fibrous material, wood); the reported that duration for which the object was held by the healer made a great difference on the effect it produced (he found approximately seventy minutes to be the required time), and that the energy transmitted was detectable as heat; finally, he found that the energy imprinted in the object decayed over time, and had to be reactivated by both the healer's reapplied intent, and the patient's effort to reconnect mentally with the healer.

Vladimir Safonov (p45) reports that distant diagnosis and healing: require good visualization of the person (face, clothes, voice), which is enhanced by a photograph; a laying-on-of-hands-type diagnosis is done mentally over the parts of the visualized body - with the sensations being identical to those one would feel on a real body, only fainter. A similar technique is reported by Yefim Shubentsov (p60)

 

Edgar Chase ( p55) worked as a healer for two decades, successfully treating relatively challenging cases such as cancer, MS and post-traumatic coma. He also discovered that pebbles he held for a while held curative powers for his patients. In distant healing, he found that placing a patient's photograph and a lock of hair either under his direct attention, or over a pebble that he had held extensively prior to the session, could transmit healing intent very effectively.

Marcel Vogel (p114), a top researcher at IBM for over 25 years, also did pioneering research into the therapeutic applications of specially-cut quartz crystals and their effect on water (3). He claimed that these crystals could amplify the user's mental vibrations like a laser, creating a coherent field of energy that could act as a "carrier wave of information". He used mental intent coupled with powerful exhalations (like qigong masters - LS) to induce vibrations in the crystal while holding it beside the patient's sternum. He also demonstrated that by circulating water around an intent-charged Vogel-cut crystal he could generate measurable changes in the water, such as a decrease in surface tension, increased conductivity, a significant drop in the freezing point (as low as -30 degrees), bi-directional alterations in the pH up to 3 points, the appearance of two new bands in the IR and UV absorption spectrum, and structural effects which could be transmitted to solutes (ie formation of needle-like silica crystals, as opposed to the amorphous silica observed in untreated water). "Boiling of water after structuring shows no changes in the UV spectrum, so one can conclude that a permanent chemical change has taken place", he noted. (This later point was also echoed by Dean, who found that the effects of healer-treated water are sometimes "carried over to a distillate" suggesting that more than altered hydrogen bonding must be involved - Benor, p. 161). In one of the more whimsical "applications" of his technique, Vogel used a radionic device in conjunction with a crystal to transfer information from an award-winning wine to one of lesser quality, and managed to "convert" the latter to a perfect duplicate of the original by circulating it around the crystal. (3).

Anomalous crystallization results and changes in surface tension and IR spectrum were also noted by the following healer: Olga Worrall (p. 152) worked with Robert Miller on a series of experiments, including one involving a cloud chamber. Worrall managed to produce a pattern in this cloud chamber by holding her hands around the unit, then the same pattern was repeated from a distance of many miles.

 

Douglas Dean and Edward G Brame found that healer treated water demonstrated changes with both IR spectrophotometry (indicating altered hydrogen bonding) and specific peaks with UV spectrophotometry. The half-life for these effects lasted from tree days to as long as three years, in partially emptied bottles. Similar results were confirmed by independent protocols conducted by Stephan Schwartz and Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty at the HeartMath institute (p153).

Finally, electronic devices have also been imprinted with intent and shown to alter the pH of water and enhance the growth and energy metabolism of larvae (Tiller, 1997)