It's good to know: How treatment knowledge and belief affect the outcome of distant healing intentionality for arthritis sufferers

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Abstract

Objective

This small-scale study explores the role of expectancy in response to distant healing by testing two hypotheses: 1) Participants aware of placement in the healing condition will report greater relief than those aware they are not receiving distant healing; 2) Participants who express belief in distant healing will report greater relief than those expressing disbelief.

Methods

Sixty patients were recruited from a rheumatology outpatient clinic, and through online support networks and blogs. Participants were randomly allocated to one of four conditions, those in the healing condition received distant healing from self-reported healers, while participants in the control condition received no intervention. Half of the participants knew their treatment allocation and half were blinded. The primary outcome measures were the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and the Short-form McGill Pain Questionnaire. The Paranormal Belief Scale and a measure designed to assess belief in distant healing were given to determine if belief was correlated with healing outcomes.

Results

Awareness of being a recipient of distant healing appeared to be associated with improved outcomes for those in the healing group. Medium to large improvements in GHQ scores (d=.76) and McGill Pain scores (d=.45) were calculated for the groups aware of their condition. Participants unaware that they were receiving healing showed no evidence of improved outcomes. Belief in healing did not have an effect on self-reported outcomes.

Conclusions

Improvements in reported pain and well-being appear to have been caused by knowledge of allocation in the distant healing condition rather than distant healing alone.

Introduction

There are many factors that could be involved in anecdotal claims of distant healing, including placebo effects, individual expectations and the strength of faith in a specific healer. At a time when there is a broad, growing interest in alternative medicine [1], [2], these factors and their role in the healing process demand investigation. This study aims to identify the role of belief and expectancy in response to distant healing intentionality with arthritis sufferers.

A number of healing techniques have been tested in research settings [3]. A major review of randomized trials [4] identified three categories of distant healing methods: Therapeutic Touch, Prayer and Other. The present study falls in the category of Other distant healing methods, defining distant healing as the healer's intentions, wishes or prayers for improvement of the healee's physical and mental well-being.

Very few studies have examined the role of healing belief in healing efficacy. According to the literature and research on psychoneuroimmunology and psychophysiology [5], [6], belief is an undeniably important aspect of the healing process. In a 2008 study with a similar design to the present one, Walach et al. [7] found a significant healing effect (p=.027) on self-reported mental and physical health outcomes for blinded participants with chronic fatigue syndrome. More relevant to the present study was the post hoc finding that participants' beliefs as to whether or not they were receiving healing appeared to be related to mental and physical improvements: those who believed that they were receiving healing had more positive outcomes. Additionally, Lyvers and colleagues [8], who conducted a double-blind study with twenty volunteers, found that pre-treatment questionnaires of belief in psychic healing and paranormal phenomena significantly correlated with positive outcomes irrespective of participants' treatment condition. The present study uses a partially blinded design: half of the participants were informed whether or not they would be receiving healing (not masked) and half were not (masked). This design was employed with the aim of clarifying the role of knowledge of treatment in participants' responses to distant healing.

The current study also accounts for participants' self-reported beliefs about distant healing, as perhaps the most common skeptical explanation of how distant healing works would be to assert that it is a placebo response due to faith in the treatment [9]. Thus, this study investigates the effect both of specific knowledge that one is receiving distant healing, and general belief in healing.

Healers in this study are given names, ages and photographs of participants to work with, but do not have any contact with participants. Using questionnaire measures that are administered and returned by post or email, participants indicate their subjective well-being as the primary dependent variable.

Section snippets

Design

Participants were randomly allocated to distant healing treatment versus control (no healing) conditions. In order to test for the effects of belief and expectancy, half of the participants were unaware of their treatment allocation. Therefore there were four treatment groups, as shown in Fig. 1.

The four groups were measured at three points (baseline, post-treatment, one month follow-up). The one month follow-up measurement point was exploratory, to assess possible persistence of any immediate

Results

Eighteen participants were assigned to the masked/healing group; 15 to the not-masked/healing group; 15 to the masked/no-healing group; and 12 to the not-masked/no-healing group.

Discussion

This study investigated the effects of specific knowledge that one is receiving distant healing, and of general healing belief, on self-reported physical and psychological well-being. There was no significant effect of knowledge of healing on the planned analysis, thus, Hypothesis 1 was not formally supported. However, medium to large effect sizes were found for both GHQ and McGill Pain scores for those participants who were aware of their healing condition placement, in the direction

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to all of those involved in the study, particularly healers who offered to participate free of charge, and research participants. Additional thanks are extended to Dr Anne Langston of the Edinburgh Clinical Trials Unit and Professor Stuart Ralston. We are grateful that the study was supported by grant 126/06 from the Bial Foundation.

References (14)

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    A usual care [37] or resting [43] crossover control group or a waitlist control group [30,35,45] was used in four studies allowing all participants to eventually receive the intervention. The remaining studies used a variety of control and/or comparison groups including expectancy [39,46,52]; a sham healing group using an actor to mimic movements of the healer (n = 11) [12,13,28,31,32,34,38,40,41,47,51], relaxation [36], progressive muscle relaxation and deep breathing [12]; massage therapy [37], yoga [48], meditation (n = 2) [48,53], presence (n = 2) [37,54], friendly visit [49], education [48], distance healing (n = 2) [13,39] or multiple distance healing comparison groups (including contact, no contact and a group that wore an amulet given healing) [35]. A further study compared a self-selected healing, self-selected control group and randomised control group to a randomised healing intervention [50].

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