Faith healing for injury, not illness

My answer may not be scientific or credible (maybe not even valuable) to some, but here goes: I hope you don't mind if this is slightly off-topic. It's NOT faith healing at all but could explain some part of this.As far as the human body goes, IMHO 'natural' healing is not that far fetched to me. My ex-wife was interested in holistic healing and, incidentally, she was also a pediatric homecare nurse. I found the subject is compelling. Some felt it is a placebo effect. I don't try to understand it, but for some type of injuries, healing is what matters.

Injury and the human body...the human body generates energy fields. Neurons transmit information by electrochemical signalling, reaching down the network of the spine. They can be interrupted, or perhaps influenced by, magnetic or external energy fields. Now, the part I don't get (amongst many) is how people can harness their brain power to affect and assist healing; however, I don't deny it can't be done...I just can't say for sure it CAN.

If you're interested in the subject (a former NASA scientist who teaches energy healing), here's a link to website. There is info about healing in there that may interest you:

http://www.barbarabrennan.com/welcome/introduction.html

I do know that when John Travolta's son died recently, because he and his wife were Scientologists (a cult calling itself a religion to avoid taxes), there was concern in some circles the travoltas refused medical help for the chronic illness their son had.

Christian Science religion does have such beliefs. I do not endorse this at all, but all -- just passing info along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science

"While there is no formal compulsion on Christian Scientists either to use Christian Science healing or to eschew medical means,[2] Christian Scientists avoid using the two systems simultaneously in the belief that they tend to counteract or contradict each other as material medicine and Christian Science treatment proceed from diametrically opposite assumptions. According to Christian Scientists, medicine asserts that something is physically broken and needs to be fixed while Christian Science asserts that the spiritual reality is harmonious and perfect and that any belief to the contrary needs to be corrected."

Not really. At least no more than any other object with capacitance. People say "energy field" so casually that it often gets glossed over as though it were true when in fact there is no scientific evidence of any unusual "energy" fields associated with the human body (or any other biological organism). Modern science is very good with electromagnetism, so we would detect electromagnetic fields in humans easily, but we don't (despite some extremely sensitive testing). And if the "energy" field isn't electromagnetic, then someone needs to say what type of energy it is, otherwise we're back to poofism. And I'm not comfortable with poofism in medicine.

Yes.

Probably not. Certainly not without extremely powerful electromagnetic fields. Even MRI's and PET scans don't interfere with (or change in any way) neurochemical signaling.

It seems likely that people are able to affect normally autonomic processes under certain conditions. But I see no reason to think that these changes in autonomic process are coming about from any external "energy fields", they are simply instructions being given internally and carried out by neurochemicals.

Rosborne said what I was thinking more clearly than I was thinking it...