We were studying healing. Our research was simple in concept. We were asking 14 men and women, seven of them experienced healers using techniques ranging from evangelical Christian laying-on-of-hands, to channeling space people, and seven of them volunteers who had never formally tried to express therapeutic intention-healing-to beneficially affect the well-being of another person. They were being asked to treat 14 men and women suffering from everything from migraines to cancer to whom they had been randomly assigned.1

They could use any technique they wished during their approximately 45-minute session but were asked to try not to touch the recipient’s body. While they were expressing healing, small sealed vials of water were strapped to their hands. In the experiment, these little bottles, the same kind of rubber topped bottle used for the injections we all know from getting ‘shots” in a doctor’s office, were filled with very pure triple-distilled water-to obviate the possibility of getting false results as a product of pollutants in the water.

The bottles were held in place by a tube of white cotton into which the bottle was inserted. Velcro patches took the place of a knot to hold the bottle in place on the palm of the […]