Can mystical energies really be felt?
Actual energy, like gravity and the energy contained in food, is studied by scientists and its properties can be discovered, leading to predictions. But to come back to the “spiritual universal energy” of our local Reiki practitioner, the word “energy” can be mangled and appropriated. Many alternative medicine practitioners believe in a form of energy—alternatively called qi, prana or universal energy—that our body has and that they can manipulate, with no evidence of its existence. That doesn’t stop them from claiming they can feel it, unblock it, or balance it. But there is no evidence for the existence of this form of energy, and actual evidence that its believers can’t even feel it.
A nine-year-old girl, Emily Rosa, working with her parents and Dr. Stephen Barrett (who runs
Quackwatch),
designed an experiment in the late 1990s to test whether practitioners of therapeutic touch could actually detect the mysterious energy field they claimed surrounded the human body and which they said they could “repattern”. Fine, Rosa said: if that’s the case, you should be able to do it blind. So the practitioners were each sat in front of a large screen with cutouts at the bottom so they could slide their hands underneath it. Rosa hovered her hand over either the left or right hand of the practitioner. Said practitioner had to feel the little girl’s energy and say over which of their hand was Rosa’s own hand. This was repeated several times with a total of 21 practitioners, and the end result was that they might as well have flipped a coin. They simply could not feel Rosa’s energy over their open hand, despite their claims.
There is real energy all around us, potential and kinetic energy scientists can measure, harness, and manipulate. But because of energy’s slippery nature—it’s a mathematical property of stuff, not a glowing orb—and because of our intuitions and wishful thinking, it’s a concept that lends itself well to pseudoscience. Trying to manipulate this non-scientific, mystical energy turns out to be, well, a waste of energy.
Take-home message:
- Energy cannot be easily defined, as it is not a thing so much as a number, a property that objects have in our universe
- Because of the abstract nature of energy, it has been used by many believers in alternative therapies but we should be skeptical of claims of the existence of “non-scientific” energies.
A local Reiki practitioner claims on her website that her clients receive “spiritual universal energy” during one of her therapeutic sessions. Indeed, one of the published testimonials is from a client who claims the practitioner could “connect to [her] energy almost instantaneously” and she...
www.mcgill.ca
