Although popular interest in ‘Biofield Therapies’, techniques such as Reiki, Bioenergy & EFT, is fairly recent, many of these techniques are actually thousands of years old emerging from age old traditional sources of human understanding and healing.

The US National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has classified energy medicine into two basic categories: biofield therapies & bio-electromagnetic-based therapies.

Biofield therapies are defined by the NCCAM as those therapies that affect the energy fields that surround and interpenetrate the human body. These therapies all involve touch or the placement of hands in or through the biofields.

Usually we associate this kind of approach with ancient Eastern systems of healing and spiritual development.

Traditional Chinese medicine with its vast cultural continuity spreading over the last 4,000 years or more provides a comprehensive analysis of the human subtle energy anatomy (or biofield) in terms of the meridians and acupuncture points, the organs that they affect together with comprehensive approaches to diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

Traditional Indian systems, like Ayurvedic medicine, and personal and spiritual development systems such as Yoga have also evolved an understanding of and powerful techniques for working with the Chakras and subtle energy body.

In 1991 a frozen body found in a melting glacier high in the Italian Alps turned out to be the well preserved body of a Neolithic man some 5,200 years old. Through archaeological and medical analysis of the body it has been possible to determine many things about this man; how he lived, what he ate and what medical problems he suffered from. The body also had many tattoos upon it. Amazingly it was found that for the specific medical problems that the man had been diagnosed as having 80% of the tattoo marks were found to exactly correspond with the standard accupuncture points that would be used in order to treat those problems! The tattoos had also been made with natural vegetable dyes, presumably combining the accupuncture with naturally occurring chemicals as an integrated treatment.

This case indicates that an in-depth working knowledge and understanding of the subtle energy system in order to affect healing and spiritual growth has been a traditional and universally practiced skill of mankind in all parts of the world and in all cultures, for as long as we can tell. It is the power and effectiveness of these traditional approaches that we are only just beginning to rediscover today.

Inevitably their popularity has raised questions concerning the relationship between the so called ‘New Age therapies’ (designated as ‘New Age’ although the systems and techniques are thousands of years old!) and modern western medicine, which is now the dominant medical paradigm in large parts of the world today for those who can afford it. The differences between these two approaches are not just that between ‘natural healing’ versus reliance upon advanced technologies and synthetic chemicals and surgical intervention. The differences are at root a fundamental difference in understanding of what constitutes the human entity and the causation sequence for illness.

The ‘Ancient / New Age’ therapies affirm that there is a subtle energy field underling all life forms and that it is disturbances to and within this field that gives rise to all illness. Intervention is therefore directed to unblocking, improving and otherwise balancing the flow of energy through the subtle energy body. Until there is a widely accepted proof of the subtle energy body, in effect a new consensus about the nature of life and of matter itself, the two approaches will have difficulty in making a theoretical accomodation with each other.

In the interim period it will be necessary to judge by the results. The question that must be answered is, “do these new therapies, like EFT and Reiki, help the patient and do they do so in a risk-free way?” To both of these questions the overwhelming answer of all those who have experienced them is “yes, without a doubt”.

It is for this reason that advanced medical practitioners and institutions have increasingly begun to adopt and otherwise work with selected complementary therapies and approaches as an integral part of their treatment regimes. In the US many of the major hospitals have now begun to incorporate complementary therapies as an integral part of their treatment programs.

There is a great need for information to be made available to allow people to evaluate what kind of complementary therapies might help them in conjunction with modern western medical treatment. There are potentially huge benefits for all concerned in seeing patients both feeling more empowered to help themselves and recovering from their illnesses faster. There are also even bigger benefits in encouraging practices that will help to prevent illnesses from manifesting in the first place.