When people ask about “Zen of Science,”
I usually respond that I’m the token straight doctor
who writes a column for this alternative medicine magazine.
It’s fun playing the straight man for a change because
I’m seen by many of my physician colleagues as sort
of a free-thinking hippie. The truth is that, except for
a little hypnosis here and there, most of the alternative
medicine that I do is delivered to my rural patients in
a plain manila envelope. You’ll have to open the
envelope to see how this allopathic family doctor works
to employ the lessons about compassion, healing and spirituality
he’s learned over the course of his own eclectic
quest for wisdom.
The spiritual portion of that quest has
been more along Buddhist lines than along any other. I
don’t exactly teach meditation as meditation, but
I do encourage my patients to practice what puts them
in touch with their most genuine selves (or non-selves,
to put it in the sort of paradoxical language that Buddhists
developed about two-and-a-half millennia ahead of quantum
physics). In the context of treating their sprained ankles,
diabetes and snotty noses, I quietly practice and teach
prayer, exercise, relaxation and right living in pursuit
of health and happiness.
My main goal for these Nexus pieces is
to examine the complex border between the modern scientific
medicine that I’ve been trained in and the alternative
medicine that Nexus does such a fine job of presenting.
Areas where the line blurs or disappears have held special
interest for me ever since, as an undergraduate philosophy
major, I studied the history of science, with special
emphasis on which questions science was not good at answering
and why.
This spring I learned a lesson about what
happens when you cross the imaginary line between science
and spirit. I have been doing an every-other-week radio
commentary for KUNC radio station for about twice as long
as I’ve been writing for Nexus. One piece, which
aired in March, was about a mind-blowing study published
in 2005 by Dr. Jeanne Achterberg in The Journal of
Alternative and Complimentary Medicine. The report,
entitled “Evidence for Correlations Between Distant
Intentionality and Brain Functions of Recipients,”
describes an experiment that blended spiritual healers
with the highest tech, a functional MRI (f-MRI) machine
which images metabolic activity in body structures from
moment to moment.
Dr. Achterberg chose 11 healers and asked
each of them to pick a partner with whom they had a strong
connection. Subjects placed their heads in an f-MRI scanner
while the healer member of the duo stayed in the control
room, out of sight and out of contact. Sessions lasted
24 minutes, divided into 12 two-minute intervals, in a
randomly assigned sequence of intending to reach the subject
and not intending to.
One pair was disqualified for technical
reasons so, with 12 sets of images taken on each of the
10 remaining subjects, there were 120 three-dimensional
f-MRI images to compare. Analysis of these images with
a sophisticated computer program demonstrated highly significant
differences in the areas of brain activation between the
intention-to-reach and the non-intention-to-reach intervals.
Calculations showed the chances to be 1-in-10,000 of this
being a strictly random result.
I must admit that when I wrote my commentary,
which I entitled “The Science of Woo-Woo,”
I was asking for a fight. It had happened before. When
I’d talked about things spiritual and dared to mingle
them with things scientific, I’d provoked all sorts
of outraged responses from pure scientists in my audience.
So, I threw down the gauntlet when I referred to the “Outraged
critics, self-anointed representatives of pure science”
whom I expected to respond to my piece. And respond they
did. A couple dozen: some damning everything I’d
ever said as specious; many with ad hominem attacks; and
a few even threatening to withdraw their memberships to
the public radio station that sullied the airwaves with
my pieces for four minutes per fortnight. I even found
myself on a couple of blogs as the featured topic of disdain.
In a second commentary I apologized for
my inflammatory rhetoric but went on to examine the level
of emotionality in so many of my critics. I introduced
the term “scientism,” a sort of scientific
fundamentalism, defended with the same judgmental, take-no-prisoners
attitude and rhetoric that religious fundamentalists employ
to uphold their own constricted worldviews.
In a rebuttal aired on KUNC the following
week, delivered by a professor of biochemistry, I was
taken to task for not engaging in a detailed scientific
debate about the merits of Achterberg’s study, instead
of asking my audience to try to open their minds a crack.
If I had to do it all over again, the one thing I’d
change would be to cut out the provocative intro. Then,
I’d go on, as I did before, to describe this study
which, despite criticism, still is mind-blowing. And,
if faced by the same strident critics, I’d again
address the issue of scientism.
I’d strive, though, to maintain a
calmer attitude, similar to how I am with my patients.
After all, fundamentalists, whether religious or scientific,
are just as deserving of compassion as everybody else
is. Still, it’s going to be a while before I am
so enlightened as to be freed of the instinct to sock
anyone in the nose who hostilely insists that theirs is
the only way to the truth.
Marc Ringel has spent the majority of his career as
a family doctor working in rural communities, including
the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has written extensively,
for lay and professional audiences, about rural health,
medical informatics and healing. Marc lives in Greeley
with his wife and many pets.
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JULY/AUGUST 2008 FEATURE ARTICLES
