Journal of Traditional Medicine & Clinical Naturopathy
Open Access

Abstract

Reviews of empirical work on the efficacy of noncontact healing have found that adopting various practices that incorporate an intention to heal can have some positive effect upon the recipient�s wellbeing. However, such reviews focus on �whole� human participants who might be susceptible to expectancy effects or benefit from the healing intentions of friends, family or their own religious groups. We proposed to address this by reviewing healing studies that involved biological systems other than �whole� humans (e.g., studies of plants or cell cultures) that were less susceptible to placebo-like effects. Secondly, doubts have been cast concerning the legitimacy of some of the work included in previous reviews, so we planned to conduct an updated review that excluded that work. 49 non-whole human studies from 34 papers and 57 whole human studies across 56 papers from both bio-medical and psychological databases conformed to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Independent measures of study quality were conducted and the results correlated with the effect sizes. Results suggested that subjects in the active condition exhibit a significant improvement in wellbeing compared to control subjects under circumstances that do not seem to be susceptible to placebo and expectancy effects. Findings with the whole human database suggested that the effect is not dependent upon the previous inclusion of suspect studies and was robust enough to accommodate some high profile failures to replicate. Both databases showed problems with heterogeneity and with study quality, recommendations are made for necessary standards for future replication attempts.

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