Medical Dowsing: Mesmer and Reich

[Guest guest]

http://www.doctoryourself.com/dowsing.html

 

Medical Dowsing: Mesmer and Reich

 

There is more to heaven and earth than ever you dreamt

of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Look, this website is just going to get weirder and

weirder. As if you haven't noticed. Now we're going

to talk about medical dowsing. That's right: like

finding underground water with a forked stick and

such. Wait until you hear who has been into this

stuff.

 

This next concept will be a hard sell, but it is

true: I am not all that easily taken in. In my

pre-quack days, I was trained as a biologist and a

chemistry teacher. I've been a zoology and health

science college professor and a doctoral-level

clinical nutrition instructor. As scientist and

educator, I've been well schooled in the scholarly and

the reproducible. " Scholarly " means that you can find

a pile of powerful people to back up what you want to

say. " Reproducible " means that what you say will

stand up to independent verification, that it works in

real life, again and again.

 

The problem with scholars is that they are too damned

emotional. Not me, the other ones.

 

Progress in the sciences goes like this old

portrayal: When somebody has just proven a really

revolutionary idea, everybody says it's too new. When

finally accepted as fact, it is said that everybody

knows it now; it is no longer news.

 

Acupuncture and accupressure are both old and now

more or less accepted. But here is an aspect that

practically nobody considers to be in the least

scientific, and I saw it with my own eyes.

 

I was attending a weekend seminar back in 1976 on

pure healing, that is, prayer, touch, thoughts, and,

er, dowsing. Rods, pendulums, sticks, wires, the

whole gamut of raving quackery was covered, but

seriously in this instance. As a practical test,

participants were asked to draw their one of their

hands over their other hand and arm, about an inch

above it, and try to " feel " where the points were.

 

" Just what will the point feel like? " was the

universal question. " Doesn't exactly matter, " came

the answer, such as it was. " You will feel something:

a bit of cold or warmth, like a draft; your hand may

draw down or float up a bit; you may merely know by

intuition, in a vague way, that that is the spot. "

 

I for one thought this was a lot of hooey. On the

other hand, I had paid my seminar fee and might as

well learn something. I tried it, with no confidence.

 

Hmm. I " thought " I felt something on my hand there.

Yes, just there. I localized the area by going back

and forth, back and forth. Then, like a pilot locating

a radio beacon, I crossed at a ninety-degree angle to

localize it exactly. All rubbish. of course, but

there was my best guess, right... about... there.

 

I pressed my finger to the spot, got up, and crossed

the room to look at an authoritative thousand-year

old acupuncture chart. There was indeed an

acupuncture point at the precise spot I had located.

 

Oh, bull. Must have been pure coincidence. So I

tried another area, on my arm. Up and down, back and

forth, ranging and homing in to... there. Check and

repeat. Yep, there's the spot.

 

Get up, walk across to the chart, search and see if

.... yes, there was a point there, too. Still not

convinced.

 

Third trial, on the leg. Quickly scan and quickly

search, cross back and forth, and feel for something,

la de da. OK, there. I didn't even half try this

time.

 

Back to the chart, and there was an accupressure

point there as well. I pressed each of the points to

be sure, and wow! Those were real points, all right.

 

Reproducibility is important to a scientist, to me,

to you. Thousands of years of study of acupuncture

and multicultural traditions of dowsing are not to be

discounted without seeing for yourself. I came, I

saw, I dowsed.

 

Months later, a woman and her husband came to my

office. She was about 60, with considerable pain and

stiffness in her wrist. Her doctors had been unable

to chemically relieve this discomfort for more than a

few hours at a time. She was open to alternative

approaches, and I was flushed with newfound enthusiasm

for what I'd learned in charlatan class that weekend.

 

So I showed her how to draw her hands over the wrist,

floating them an inch or two above the skin. I had

her repeat this, back and forth, crossing side to side

as well. Then I had her husband course over her wrist

with his hand.

 

She felt better within minutes. Well enough to flex

and bend. Well enough to smile with surprise and

pleasure. Well enough to successfully and repeatedly

continue the treatment at home. Well enough that I

remember it all so clearly, and it was two decades

ago.

 

Placebo effect? Faith healing? Therapeutic touch?

Here we walk the line bordering the Twilight Zone.

Yet favorable results with so little risk deserve

follow up. Scientific double-blind placebo controlled

studies show that prayer helps people heal more

quickly even if the patient does not know that he is

being prayed for, and the prayer-offerer isn't even

acquainted with who she is praying for. Your personal

religious faith can probably rest comfortably with

that. But wagging your hands over your own wrists is

perhaps another matter.

 

Let's take the argument to its extreme. Carefully

controlled studies show that prayer influences

bacteria. And in one of my favorite bits of research

(reported in Supernature, by Lyall Watson), plants

hooked up to amplified lie-detector apparatus showed

readings not only when their leaves were dipped in hot

liquids, but when the experimenter was thinking of

dipping their leaves in hot liquids.

 

To further stretch this, apparatus was devised (and

you've got to love this) that would mechanically and

randomly drop tiny brine shrimp into boiling water. A

plant remotely gave readings each time a shrimp hit

the water.

 

Run, don't walk, away from this whole arena. Not

because it is fascinating enough for a Fox TV special,

but rather because I ask you to take it seriously, and

further.

 

Not that you'd be the first. Radiesthesia, the

medical and more-or-less scientific study of dowsing

and " personal magnetism " has been under investigation

for generations.

 

My first contact with this pseudoscience was via Bruce

Copen, Ph.D. of Sussex, England. Dr. Copen has the

twin distinctions of being the parent of several

correspondence schools that have reputations as

diploma mills, and of selling radiesthesia equipment.

Not only does he sell pendulums, dowsing rods and

how-to books, he also sells and manufactures radionic

machines. They are expensive, costing hundreds of

pounds each. They are probably illegal in the United

States, as they " cannot " work. Open one up, it is

said, and you will note that the power cord is not

directly connected to any of the potentially

functional parts inside. Radionics machines are

supposedly amplifiers and transmitters of specific

healing vibrations, sort of a short-wave homeopathy.

In a culture that struggles to accept prayer healing,

even with the credentials of Him whose life reset our

very chronology of history, we cannot reasonably

expect any response but skepticism to reinforced

hardboard, simulated leather-covered, costly and

electrically illogical quack devices.

 

Radionics is even too far out for me, but any book on

quackery cannot avoid a mention of the way politicized

science has met with the likes of this.

 

One of the most famous legal cases against blatant

quackery also remains what is arguably the most

infamous case of violation of the United States' Bill

of Rights. And it all started out so reasonably.

 

Wilhelm Reich, MD, was an associate of Sigmund Freud

at Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna,

Austria. He later did research at the University of

Oslo, Norway, and in 1939 became Associate Professor

of Medical Psychology at the New School for Social

Research in New York City. But Dr. Reich also claimed

to have discovered a new form of energy, fundamental

to life and health. Previously unknown and since

ignored, Reich successfully demonstrated his " orgone

energy " to no less than Albert Einstein at Princeton

University, on January 13, 1941. They discussed the

matter for somewhat under five hours.

 

Dr. Reich made devices to collect the stuff, called,

appropriately enough, " orgone accumulators. " He sold

them, referring to their ability to dissolve cancerous

tumors, and thereby ran smack dab into the might of

the FDA. In Appendix C of his very unusual and now

very rare 1972 book Orgone Energy, author Jerome Eden

provides a bibliography of twenty scientists who

verified the existence of orgone energy. Freud and

Einstein are not among them. Perhaps Dr. Reich's

other research on the human orgasm (that is not a

typo) took him just too far out of the scientific

orbit. (Not that Freud should have any scruples about

that subject.) The fact that Mr. Eden's books include

Planet in Trouble: The UFO Assault on Earth does

little to establish his literary reputation. Too bad,

for Eden is the translator of two of Franz Anton

Mesmer's works: Memoir of F. A. Mesmer, 1799 and

Maxims on Animal Magnetism. Eden also authored Animal

Magnetism and the Life Energy, a biography of Mesmer

and his methods. Reich and Mesmer were separated by

time but were probably closely joined in principle.

 

But that was certainly no endorsement worth having.

In 1954, FDA had Dr. Reich charged with fraud in

United States District Court for Maine, Southern

Division, for claiming that orgone existed, could be

collected, and could then prevent and cure disease.

The FDA won. Reich's orgone devices were seized and

destroyed. Closer to any Constitutional issue, all

his written literature, scientific papers and

articles, and books were burned if they had anything

to do with orgone accumulators.

 

" Reich's monumental sociological work, The Mass

Psychology of Fascism, was ordered destroyed in

Hitler's Nazi Germany, and Reich himself was forced to

flee that country. " (Eden, p 65) For a man who fled

from Hitler in 1938, and became an American citizen to

ensure his freedom, the burning of his scientific

works in 1956 by the US Government seems oddly poetic

punishment. Our First Amendment specifically

safeguards freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

 

Unless you sell orgone accumulators, that is. Even

Mein Kampf enjoys the protection of the First

Amendment.

 

And just try to find a copy of Reich's Function of

the Orgasm, for that matter.

 

This scientific soap opera is not over yet.

 

The FDA's prosecuting attorney, Peter Mills, had just

recently been Dr. Reich's own personal lawyer, and had

in fact drawn up the Reich Foundation's incorporation

papers. Mills left the foundation in 1952, and joined

the FDA the very same year. (Eden, p 68) There was

evidence of perjury on the part of the FDA witnesses

and talk of a communist plot. Orgone was said to be

an antidote to nuclear radiation and fluorescent

lights. Reich was brought to court in chains. He

talked of UFO's. A court-ordered psychiatric

examination found him to be perfectly sane. The

Supreme Court refused to review the case. (p 69-72)

 

In contempt of the court's judgment against him, Dr.

Reich refused to allow FDA agents access to his

private notes. In contempt of a court injunction, he

persisted in his promotion of orgone accumulator

technology.

 

This landed him in federal prison, where he died

eight months later. He was 60. " FDA never produced

any evidence to substantiate their contention that the

accumulator was worthless. " (p 89)

 

The canon of science knowledge is a heavily edited

affair. I finished college chemistry and physics and

no one told me that famous scientists were also devout

deists. For example, the great mathematician and

astronomer Johann Kepler first described the

elliptical orbits of the planets, but also said they

stayed in these orbits because of " Holy Spirit Force. "

Convenient how we embrace one of his conclusions, and

disdain the other.

 

And then there is my favorite Sir Issac Newton story.

Sir Issac, it is said, was once demonstrating a brass

mechanical model of the solar system to a friend.

 

" Who built it? " asked the friend, who happened to be

an atheist.

 

" No one, " replied Newton.

 

" What? " responded the man. " Of course someone made

it, Sir Issac. Look at the intricacy, the precision,

the construction. "

 

" But no one made it, " said Newton. " Why do you

assert that someone did? "

 

" It is clear just from observing its complexity, its

perfection of motion, its beautiful operation, that

this machinery obviously had its creator. "

 

" Is it not interesting, " said Newton, " That you

ascribe a creator to this model, and not to the real

solar system itself? "

 

Albert Einstein is said to have stated that God does

not play dice with the universe. Later in his life,

Einstein also said this:

 

" As I grow older, the identification with the here

and now is slowly lost. One feels dissolved, and

merged into Nature. It makes me feel happy. The

greatest experience we can have is the mysterious. "

 

Dr. Reich challenged even Einstein's conception of

mystery and has left us with the eternal question as

to whether there is a discernible, operable link

between our living body and the boundless heavens.

" Animal magnetism, " " orgone energy, " or whatever it be

called, and however muffled it may be, continues to

intrigue original thinkers. Call them alchemists in

search of the Philosopher's Stone, or just quacks in

search of a simple answer. Still, even pirates leave

a map. Is there more to the human body than we wish

to believe?

 

Copyright C 1999 and prior years Andrew W. Saul.

From the books QUACK DOCTOR and PAPERBACK CLINIC,

available from Dr. Andrew Saul, Number 8 Van Buren

Street, Holley, New York 14470.