Additional experiments

Additional experiments

In the next experiment we repeated the first experiment with two instead of' three groups (a non treated control and a treated group) and instead of having the mice treated directly with the hands, we would place material that had been held in the hands of Mr. E. into the cage with the animals for an hour in the morning and again in the afternoon.

When the mice were sacrificed 40 days after the start of the experiment, it was found that this treatment also inhibited but did not stop the development of goiter.

The third experiment tested to see what would happen when the process was reversed; that is, we would make the animals goitrous so that their thyroid weights were about five milligrams at the start of the experiment and then they were put back on a normal diet, containing a normal amount of iodine and drinking water which did not contain thiouracil.

After 20 days the thyroid weight had declined in both the control and treated groups. However, the rate of decline was greater in the laying on of hands-treated group. And the control group, by the way, was treated by heat in the same way as described in the first experiment.

Healing wounds

When we finished this series of studies, we began a new series of experiments involving wound healing in mice.

Mice are not the best animals in the world to study wound hearing, because a skin wound produced on the back of a mouse without aseptic technique will heal perfectly well with no problem of infection. However, it is different, of course, if you're working on a dog or a human. You have to work with aseptic techniques if you don't want the wound to become infected.

But still, we used mice for the reasons mentioned earlier. And so, we put the animals to sleep, shaved the hair off a portion of the back we made a skin wound about the size of a quarter.

The way we would measure the size of the wound was to outline the wound area on a piece of clear plastic placed over it, then outline the area on paper placed over the plastic and then cut out the paper and weigh it, yielding a weight that corresponded to the size of the wound.

By doing the measurements on the day before and after wounding the mice and again on the 11th and 14th day, the rate of wound healing in the various groups was followed.

As in the first experiment on goiters, there were three groups: Two control groups (one of them a "heated" group) and the third laying on of hands treated by Mr. E.

The next slide shows the outline of the wounds in the three groups. One day after wounding there is already some progress toward healing in all the groups, but too little to detect any differences between the groups.

However, by the 11th and 14th day, there were 12 obvious differences that could be seen with the naked eye and which were confirmed by statistical analysis.

Here, as in the first experiment, the wounds of the laying on of hands treated group were very much smaller than those of the two control groups, whose wound areas were not significantly different from one another.

Such studies were conducted both in our lab and in the Department of Physiology of the University of Manitoba. The results of this experiment were published in the International Journal of Parapsychology and in the Journal for the American Society of Psychical Research

Research with plants

Back to beginning of report