Faith, Hands and Auras

Even before he died last year in an automobile accident at the age of 49, the peasant known as Arigo had become a legend in his native Brazil. Claiming to be guided by the wise voice of a long-deceased physician whom he had never known personally, the uneducated healer saw as many as 300 patients a day, diagnosing and treating them in minutes. For some he suggested minor surgery, frequently performing the operations himself with a pocketknife. For others he recommended drugs, writing prescriptions for unorthodox pharmacological combinations that somehow worked. He treated almost every known ailment, and most of his patients not only survived but actually improved or recovered.

A few years ago, reports on the exploits of such miracle workers would have drawn little more than derision from the scientifically trained. Now, however, many medical researchers are showing a new open-mindedness toward so-called psychic healing and other methods not taught in medical schools. Of the more than 400 doctors, engineers and biophysicists attending a four-day conference on parapsychological medicine at Stanford University last week, few were ready to endorse Arigo's methods. But they were willing to listen as Dr. Henry Puharich, formerly on the faculty of New York University Medical Center, confirmed some of the Brazilian's cures.

Puharich told the conference that his research team had studied firsthand 1,000 of Arigo's cases without learning how the healer made his diagnoses or effected his cures. "But," said Puharich, "our nice modern equipment proved that genuine healing took place under bizarre conditions and unbelievable circumstances. Clearly we have a lot of research ahead of us."

The Stanford conference was full of other tantalizing phenomena that seem to merit thorough investigation. Olga Worrall, director of the New Life Clinic at the Mount Vernon Methodist Church in Baltimore, told how she had cured warts and emotional disorders, and even helped cancer patients by the laying on of hands. Dr. Robert Bradley, a Denver obstetrician who is also president of the American Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, reported on the use of hypnotherapy, long ago proven effective in relieving pain and easing childbirth, to speed healing from surgical wounds.

Elmer Green, director of the Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Menninger Foundation, described new findings about the effectiveness of "biofeed-back." In this technique, the patient is taught to achieve some degree of control over such normally involuntary functions as heart rate and blood flow. Using electronic sensors that tell the patient when he has succeeded in altering some internal function, Green and others have been able to train patients to avoid or relieve migraine headaches, control the body processes that may cause ulcers, and raise and lower their body temperature.

Fingertips. None of the doctors or healers were able to offer any scientifically satisfactory explanations for the cures they had witnessed. But research is presently under way to find them. Thelma Moss of U.C.L.A.'s Neuropsychiatric Institute is using Kirlian photography, a supersensitive technique developed by Russian scientists to record the electrical field, or "aura," that surrounds humans, animals and even plants. In a study of the influences of healers on patients with terminal kidney disease, she found that the practitioner's aura decreased immediately 'after treatment, while that of the patient was intensified. E. Douglas Dean of the Newark College of Engineering displayed photographs showing that a healer's fingertips produced less electrical radiation when she was at rest than while she was healing.

Most of the doctors at the conference agreed that such therapy, which relies heavily on the patient's faith, provides the unscrupulous with unlimited opportunities for abuse. People must exercise the utmost caution to avoid being victimized by quacks. Few at the conference, however, felt that unorthodox healers could be effectively regulated without also limiting research into what the experts all agree is a fertile area for study. Said one doctor after listening to reports of various psychic healing techniques: "Clearly it does work in some circumstances. If we could harness it, it would be beneficial to many patients."

Four Gates. Probably the best example of how methods inexplicable in purely scientific terms can win acceptance is acupuncture. Until recently, the ancient Chinese art of curing illness and relieving pain by inserting pins into the patient was dismissed as folk medicine. Now Western medical men are seriously studying it and trying to discover scientific explanations for its effects. One new theory has been provided by the Chinese themselves. Working with microelectrodes, physiologists at Shanghai's Academy of Sciences have shown that there are at least four "gates" that control and channel pain impulses--in the spinal cord, the thalamus, the brain stem and the cerebral cortex. Inserted along strategic pathways, their studies show, acupuncture needles can suppress pain messages by somehow closing one or more of the gates.

Whatever the explanation, doctors at several U.S. hospitals, some of them aided by Chinese-trained practitioners, are using acupuncture experimentally to induce anesthesia during surgery or to relieve the pain of arthritis and other ailments. Some French air force physicians have found a novel way to apply acupuncture. Noting that the points on the body that register the greatest electrical activity coincide with those outlined in traditional acupuncture texts, they have written a computer program to correlate the two patterns and quickly identify the acupuncture points appropriate for treatment of certain symptoms. Dr. Jean Borsarello, who helped develop the program and has treated more than 3,500 patients with needles over the past 15 years, still cannot completely explain--in physiological terms, at least--how acupuncture works. He feels that the fact that it does work is reason enough to use it.

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