Over the past three decades several scientists and universities have conducted experiments using laying-on of hands healers. Professor Bernard Grad, a Canadian biologist, alone has published thirty-five papers on experiments involving healing. Grad has used barley seeds, animals, plants, and humans to prove something objective and scientifically verifiable happens when a healer goes to work. The results consistently showed the healer’s intervention had a profound positive effect on the rate of healing.

One of the more interesting experiments using humans was conducted by a California doctor, Daniel Worth, president of Healing Sciences International. Worth set out to explore whether there would be a healing effect if the persons to be healed were kept completely unaware of the healer’s presence and unaware that any healing was taking place. He enlisted forty-four male student volunteers who were told they would be part of an experiment to test a new, highly sensitive camera which could photograph the energy flowing around the human body. Under the tightest of secrecy and controls, half of the group came to a rented house at regular intervals in the morning and the other half came in the afternoon. Everyone was told the same story; everyone was treated in exactly the same way. Each volunteer had an eight-millimeter-wide, skin deep wound cut on his forearm. When they went into the house, each volunteer was seated close to the wall of an otherwise empty room and instructed to insert his arm through a small, heavily draped hole— nothing was visible on the other side. Each volunteer sat there for precisely five minutes while the “camera” in the adjoining room was supposedly filming the wound. The purported theory was that there would be extra energy flowing around the wound and the camera would be able to record it. The point, however, was that there was no camera in the next room. The morning group were simply hanging their arms in empty space. In the afternoon a healer, named Laurie Eden, totally concealed from them, sat in the alleged camera room, close to the wall, and carried out a healing session on the wounds, keeping her hands just inches above their arms.

At the end of sixteen days, medical experts, who did not know who had been treated by the healer, examined the arms of the forty-four students. The wounds of thirteen of those treated by the healer had healed entirely, each wound had closed over and had a layer of new tissue sealing it. The rest of the afternoon group were “well on the way to total healing.” By contrast, not a single member of the control group had experienced complete closing of the wound, or anything close to it. The photos showing the differences are striking. Worth’s experiment showed that the healing was effective and that belief or suggestion played no part in the healing.

The documentation for Worth’s findings is contained in a special thirty-minute documentary film by the BBC called “A Way of Healing.” It has also been fully written up by Dr. Worth himself, complete with all the relevant statistics and charts, in Subtle Energies, vol. 1 no. 1, 1990.