Principles and Opportunities in Energy Based Medicine

"The natural force within each of us is the greatest healer of all."
                                                        Hippocrates.
 
In spite of considerable success with a purely pharmaceutical approach to chronic illnesses, many conventionally treated patients do not fully regain optimal health. Increasingly, medical practitioners are looking beyond the biochemical abnormalities that characterize various illnesses. Something else appears to be missing in many patients seeking medical health.

Psychiatry ascribes a role to impaired mental health but this simply begs the question as to why the brain is not performing well. Early Egyptian, Greek and even modern oriental medicine view diseases as resulting from an imbalance of an “energy force” that resides within each of us.

The nature of this presumed bio-energy has eluded physicists and has remained largely in the realm of irrational conjecture by individuals dismissive of scientific methodology. Energy based medicine is evolving as a scientific discipline that can potentially substantiate many of the fundamental precepts relating to how the body manages to regulate its biochemical activities.

This site reviews the principles of energy based medicines and suggests some of the many clinical opportunities in which biophysics may have enormous therapeutic value.

Introduction

The human body functions in conformity with basic biochemical and biophysical principles. It has been suggested that individual cells may undergo in the order of 105 chemical reactions every second. The overall symmetry that exists among paired organs and limbs would seemingly be difficult to maintain based solely of biochemical feedback regulation.

It has been suggested that various energy fields must exist to maintain an overall harmonization of the body's biochemical processes. Electrical activity of the brain and/or heart could conceivably provide a master coordinating influence.

Yet harmonization is also seen among simple plants and lower animal forms lacking either a nervous or a circulatory system. Photons in the infrared range of energy are either released or absorbed from the environment by living creatures depending upon the temperature differential with their surroundings.

Again it is difficult to envision this type of system acting as a master switch for all living creatures. Photons at other energy levels, including those in the range of visible light are released from living cells but in relatively small quantities. Rather than conventional electromagnetic radiation, some investigators have suggested a unique form of life associated energy.

It has been designated qi (chee) by oriental physicians. The energy is thought to flow throughout the body in set patterns defined as meridians and concentrated in acupuncture points and in larger regions called charkas. Another unique form of energy is postulated to exist throughout all space from the minute sub-atomic spaces separating electrons from the nucleus of atoms, to the far outer reaches of the universe separating the various galaxies.

This hypothetical milieu of energy has been referred to as the ether, subtle energy and zero point energy. It has been likened to a sea of very, very minute string like entities possibly oscillating as vortices.

Others have suggested variably sized spherical particles somewhat analogous to the molecules of a liquid but much smaller. The liquid model presumes there is a flow of this energy and that the flow can be influenced by various objects and especially by living cells. The interaction of this energy with living cells may be relevant to the capacity of sustaining and coordinating (harmonizing) biochemical reactions between subsets of different cells.

Alternative Cellular Energy Pigments (ACE-Pigments).

A major source of cellular energy is from the oxidation of various nutrients. Energy is essentially extracted from sunlight in a process called photosynthesis that is mediated by certain bacteria and by plants. Photosynthesis is achieved by light absorbing chlorophyll. Energy from the blue and red regions of visible light is captured by electrons within the chlorophyll molecule. The activated electrons are more readily passed to other molecules in a chain of electron transfer reactions.

This process eventually leads to the reduction (electron addition) of carbon dioxide to form carbohydrates with the release of oxygen from water. The carbohydrates are subsequently oxidized to provide energy for the addition of a third phosphate bound to adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The mitochondria are the major cell organelle involved in oxidative phosphorylation.

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