Steeped in white-coat
science since she earned her Ph.D. in cell biology at
Columbia University 20 years ago, Gloria Gronowicz is about
the last person you'd expect to put stock in the touchy-feely
discipline of energy medicine.But then the University of
Connecticut researcher saw it with her own eyes, under a
high-power microscope in her own laboratory, where, once, only
well-accepted biological building blocks — proteins,
mitochondria, DNA and the like — got respect.
Therapeutic
Touch performed by trained energy healers significantly
stimulated the growth of bone and tendon cells in lab dishes.
Her results, recently published in two scientific journals,
provide novel evidence that there may be a powerful energy field
that, when channeled through human hands, can influence the
course of events at a cellular level.
"What she's showing
is an association that defies explanation with what we currently
know," said Margaret A. Chesney, a professor of medicine at the
University of Maryland and former deputy director of the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at
the
National Institutes of Health. "She's Daniel Boone."
Gronowicz and others said more studies are needed to figure out
how and why Therapeutic Touch seems to stimulate cell growth —
and if the findings can be applied to patient care.
"Should somebody with osteoporosis or a broken leg go to their
Reiki practitioner?" Gronowicz said. "We don't know."
Through history and across cultures, spiritual healers have long
believed that the laying on of hands could cure disease and
relieve pain. In the last 30 years or so, many forms of energy
healing — sometimes called Reiki, Qigong, Therapeutic Touch, or
Healing Touch — have found their way into hospitals and other
clinical settings.
Still, it is often derided as
hocus-pocus, although some medical practitioners have come to
accept it as a harmless diversion that, if nothing else, might
relieve stress.
Even when early studies showed some
evidence of healing in patients treated with energy therapies,
it was impossible to say whether the improvement was a result of
the touch. More likely, critics suggested, the nurturing therapy
simply improved the patient's frame of mind, promoting a healing
response.
Gronowicz was in the doubting camp. She had
spent her career studying the biology of bone cells. Her work
with hormones, growth factors and tissue engineering has shed
light on the very elements of bone — a slow, sometimes tedious
effort she hopes might someday help doctors find treatments for
crippling diseases.
But when a colleague asked her to
collaborate on an experiment looking into the power of
Therapeutic Touch, she was curious. As a full professor in the
department of surgery, with tenure and respect, Gronowicz had
the stature to dabble in an endeavor that some of her scientific
colleagues might criticize as a fool's errand.
"If I was
just starting out, it would be the end of my career," Gronowicz
said.
She applied for a National Institutes of Health
grant to fund an experiment designed to isolate the mind/body
conundrum from the question of energy healing by applying
Therapeutic Touch techniques to presumably inanimate bone cells
cultured in an incubator.
At first, even the NIH's branch
that funds research in alternative and complementary medicine
turned her down. Eventually, she received $250,000 for her
study.
Then, over
the course of three years, Therapeutic Touch practitioners
arrived at the lab twice a week, cleared their minds and, for 10
minutes at a time, held their hands a few inches from
cell-filled plastic lab dishes that were clamped in a metal
stand.
"I remember going in and thinking, 'How am I going
to direct compassion and healing to a petri dish?'" said Holly
Major, a nurse and Therapeutic Touch practitioner at Griffin
Hospital in Derby, who worked on the
UConn study.
The laboratory environment was foreign
to Therapeutic Touch practitioner Libbe W. Clarke, who usually
practices in her
Rocky Hill living room, where clients rest on a massage
table surrounded by Native American artifacts in the dim glow of
lightly scented candles.
"I said, 'I've got no body
that's at least 5 feet long, I've got this little dish,'" Clarke
said. "But my mind said to me [that] this is a living thing. It
was almost like I was working on a patient. It felt the same."
To put Therapeutic Touch to the test, cell cultures were
divided into three groups.
One dish of cells was treated
by a trained healer. A second set of cells was treated by
untrained students who were instructed to hold their hands over
a petri dish for 10 minutes twice a week. A third dish of cells
stood ignored in its metal stand.
After the treatment,
the dishes were returned to an incubator. Scientists who later
examined the cells under the microscope didn't know which group
each dish had been in.
To Gronowicz's
astonishment, the cells treated by trained Therapeutic Touch
practitioners grew faster and stronger than those that received
the sham treatment, or none at all.
"Therapeutic Touch
stimulated growth in bone, tendon and skin cells at
statistically significant rates," Gronowicz said.
She
tested the cells using several different biological markers for
growth, and each test confirmed her finding. In one test,
Gronowicz found that cells treated with Therapeutic Touch grew
at double the rate of untreated cells.
In addition to
seeing increased cell division under the microscope, the bone
cell cultures treated with Therapeutic Touch also absorbed more
calcium, the essential mineral for growing strong bones. Her
findings were published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research
and The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Gronowicz also looked at bone cancer cells. Cancer occurs
when cells grow out of control, so a treatment that stimulates
growth could be detrimental to people with cancer. But unlike
healthy cells, bone cancer cells did not appear to be stimulated
by the touch therapy — an interesting, though not fully
explained, finding, Gronowicz said.
Beyond growing bones,
the findings may begin to explain why people with strong social
support systems appear to be healthier and recover from disease
better than those who are isolated. Maybe it's not all in their
heads.
"In this case, the bones didn't know, that's why
what she did is so intriguing," Chesney said. "To our knowledge,
those cells didn't know who was a healer and who wasn't."
Contact Hilary Waldman at
hwaldman@courant.com.