The experiment begins

The experiment begins

We started our experiments by having Mr. E. lay hands on healthy adult mice to see if the growth of the mice would be accelerated, but we failed to see any remarkable change.

From that time on, we began to work with animals that were sick in some way and in the first series of experiments we tested the effect of laying on of hands on the development of goiters in mice. We began here because Mr. E. said that he had success with this type of patient during the ten years he had worked in Hungary.

Now, our mice were healthy to start with, but I made them goitrous artificially by giving them a diet which was low in iodine and also by incorporating into their diet a chemical (thiouracil) which prevents almost all of the iodine which may be present in the animal's body from getting into the thyroid gland.

So the combination of both the diet and thiouracil really caused the gland to grow.

This was an artificial kind of goiter, and although it bears a resemblance to the type that you get in the human, in the latter there probably are factors other than just iodine deficiency to account for the appearance of the goiter. However, we didn't know of any goiters spontaneously arising in large numbers of animals and so we had to proceed as follows:

On Day 0 of the experiment, we sacrificed six mice and we found that their normal thyroid weight was around two milligrams. Then I put them all on an iodine deficient diet for about 11 days, during which time the animals were still not separated into control and treated groups.

On the eleventh day we sacrificed five more mice and we noted a slight increase in weight of the thyroid at this point. Then we put thiouracil in the drinking water, and from here on they had both the iodine deficient diet and thiouracil. We found earlier that if we gave both the diet and the chemical at the same time, the animals became ill with diarrhea and so had to gradually adapt them to this dietary treatment, which they were given until Day 39 of the experiment.

On Day 11, the mice were divided into three groups: Two control groups and one group receiving the laying on of hands treatment, with 19 to 20 mice per group. Treatment was conducted in this experiment by Mr. E. between Days 11 and 20 and by Mr. B. thereafter to the end of the experiment. Mr. B. made no claims to being able to heal, but we found out in the course of these studies that laying on of hands by him also had a demonstrable effect on mice.

How they were treated

The mice in the laying on of hands treated group were brought to Messrs. E. or B. in the metal box described previously, and they used to hold it between their hands twice a day for 15 minutes, five times a week.

Now, the mice in the two control groups were also placed in metal boxes and transported to a table where they stood for 15 minutes, twice daily, five times per week, but they were not held between the hands of anybody.

We noticed, of course, that when Messrs. E. or B. held the box of mice between their bands, the temperature inside the box started to go up. Therefore, one of the control groups had heat applied to the mice in the box by means of thermal tapes so as to mimic the temperature changes taking place in the laying on of hands-treated group. The other control group was not heated.

Six to seven mice were sacrificed in each group two, three and four weeks after thiouracil was started, and the thyroids of the laying on of hands treated group were found to weigh less than those of the two control groups. Moreover, statistical analysis showed that the thyroid weights of the two control groups were really not different from each other. In other words, heat by itself did not have any definite effect at all on the development of the goiter, but the thyroids of the laying on of hands group weighed reliably less than those of the other two groups.

Thus, laying on of hands treatment definitely slowed down the development of goiter in mice.

Additional experiments

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