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Hands of Life: An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery, and Transformation

This alternative health practice inspired by Julie Motz has been used in hospitals and even in cancer wards. It relies on “energy healing” of unresolved traumas at birth. It is even proposed as a way for which less anesthesia to be needed during surgery (Danby, 2000). Julie, the author of the book holds a public health degree from Columbia University (Danby, 2000) but this itself is troubling; the risk is an appeal to authority effect in which her treatments may be believed due to her status alone.

Furthermore, the credibility of this treatment is discredited almost completely when it is described as “little understood in academic psychology or medicine” (Danby, 2000). This treatment, having not been subject to academic scrutiny and the scientific method is therefore not viable and may cause unintended harm. In another book review, it is describes “clear case studies” (Smith, 1998). This of course is problematic because anecdotal evidence is not a good way in which concepts are proven because it relies on confirmation bias.

This treatment is described to be used in some of the most “prestigious” hospitals (Danby, 2000) and that she has a place “in the operating team” (Danby, 2000). Personally I would be impressed by a healer in my team but because I would expect a positive effect from this that it would be akin to the placebo effect. In summary, the Hands of Life Effect appears to be a pseudoscience that relies on magical thinking.�

References

Dansby, B. (2000). Hands of Life: An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body's

Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery, and Transformation. Journal of Prenatal &

Perinatal Psychology & Health, 14(3/4), 345-346.

Smith, C. (1998). Hands of life: An energy healer reveals the secrets of using your body's own

energy medicine for healing, recovery, and transformation. Library Journal, 123(15), 104