Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies
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Focus Alternat Complement Ther©2005 Pharmaceutical Press
Focus Altern Complement Ther 2002; 7:
Dear Editor,
Seeing that the author of the study titled ‘Dowsing does not help if homoeopathy is blind’1 did not reply to your review, perhaps I might be allowed to comment.
It might help orthodox researchers into intuitive detection systems such as dowsing to learn that the British Society of Dowsers specifically warns members against becoming involved in formal trials, since the great majority of tests result in failure of the faculty to do better than chance, exactly as reported here.
It will be natural for researchers unfamiliar with the field to assume that, through rigorously conducted trials, they are viewing the reality of any situation and that dowsing (or as in other trials, psychic or intuitive diagnosis) is essentially a hermetic discipline of self-delusion.
For practitioners of dowsing, however, events regularly occur which conflict with such a conclusion, since external parties known as ‘clients’ are involved who can scarcely all share such a delusion.
About 12 years before the British Complementary Medicine Association (BCMA) disbarred member therapists from diagnosing in medical terms, when I was anyway in a pre-professional stage in medical dowsing, a couple – two friends of mine – asked if I would like to tell them which conventionally defined ailments I thought they were most prone to.
After some thought I took a home medical encyclopaedia and selected from it 11 listed ailments for each of them, 22 in all. The strength of the responses petered out after that, suggesting both that I had selected the strongest tendencies first and that further search would be unfruitful.
My friends then unexpectedly emigrated to Australia and we were in vestigial contact for 13 years, after which they returned to the UK. On the telephone, Mrs said: ‘Oh, and you remember those two lists of ailments you did for us? We had all those illnesses – and in the order you wrote them down!’
Now in professional practice, I am subject to a Code of Conduct descended from the BCMA’s, and intuitive diagnosis in medical terms is outlawed; but as a sideline to helping livery stables with animal problems, I am often asked by telephone to pronounce on the severity of injuries sustained by thrown riders, as an aid to their best management before an ambulance arrives. To judge from those riders’ later reports, my conclusion has never differed materially from that of the A&E department to which they were then taken – indeed, I would not still be doing it otherwise. In one instance where the injury was in a neighbouring yard, to someone unknown to me until that moment, I said it would prove fatal within a few minutes – and was sadly correct.
What is different about trials, then? Dowsers always impute failure to interference in the presumed unconscious mental realm in which dowsing operates by unconscious hostility on the part of investigators. However, while the outcomes of isolated cases where supposed measures of ‘protection’ were taken before the trial appear to support this idea, the intuitive faculty can be used to arrive at a less emotive conclusion.
This is that intuitive ‘mindstuff’ operations such as dowsing and mental healing are conducted in, and require, a spirit of calm acceptance that the faculty works. Trials are conducted for the express purpose of finding out if it works, and the neutrality of the intent conflicts with the positive spirit the exercise might otherwise have. Experienced dowsers are very happy to have tests conducted on them in terms of audits of their normal work, where they are mentally geared to providing a service for a client and the exercise is conducted under their implicit control.
In the particular instance of this study, the homoeopaths were engaged in an academic exercise of identifying bottles whose purpose was neutral enquiry. Without taking dynamic and proactive precautions to maintain positive project ‘ownership’ – or in esoteric language, ‘protect’ themselves – they were fated to fail.
This effect can be detected as extending also to many, many orthodox, ‘owned’ trials of CAM reported in FACT. Allopathic medicine operates under a belief system in which it is generally supposed that chemicals alone perform the healing. I was recently astonished to discover one doctor at least who had never heard of the term vis medicatrix naturae (natural healing energy) and when introduced to it, even mocked it. This mechanistic outlook unwittingly insulates allopathy from mental interference. In contrast, CAM explicitly acknowledges a mental or psychological dimension to its power; and for any activity where the predominating group expectation can influence the outcome, experimenter effect can become its Achilles heel. CAM proponents beware!
