Biofield Science and Healing: An Emerging Frontier in Health and Medicine.

At the same time, we face major healthcare crises including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental illness. Despite our best efforts and technological advances, we have not yet conquered these and other life and health challenges. In addition, health disparities are increasing and the 100-year rise in life expectancy is flattening. This continuance of human suffering, in the face of all our advancements, is leading to substantial and exponentially growing costs to individuals and to society.

A key ingredient in the recipe for advancing the evolution of human health is self-empowerment, which can only emerge with a clear recognition of one’s own capacity for healing and thriving. Examples from clinical and research areas such as mind-body medicine, placebo, psychoneuroimmunology, and neuroscience, remind us that our capacity to activate our own internal healing response is within our human capabilities.

Just a few decades ago, the concept that the nervous system and the immune system are in constant communication was highly controversial; today, it is mainstream science. The related idea that our mental and emotional states impact our immune and cardiovascular systems in a manner that can influence disease as well as health, has moved from fringe to fact, and has contributed to the currently well-established field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI).

These major scientific advances have emerged through transdisciplinary research, involving specialists from several fields. What we have previously viewed and studied as discrete, siloed systems are now seen in terms of larger holistic networks that regulate an organism’s homeostasis or, more aptly, an organism’s homeodynamics.

Biofield Science: the Missing Link in Understanding Health and Healing
Such an integrated network, emerging from current research findings, appears comprised of what are currently being termed biofields, fields of energy and information that may help guide the physiological regulation of living systems. Biofields, including the electromagnetic patterns from the brain (EEG) and heart (ECG), are generated at all levels of living systems, from whole organism to tissues and organs, cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

While the term “biofield” itself is fairly new (coined in 1992 at a National Institutes of Health meeting), the importance and roles of consciousness, energy and information to create and guide health have been central topics of millennia-old ‘whole systems’ of care that include Chinese, Tibetan, Native American, African, and Ayurvedic medicine. The ongoing use of biofield-based therapies, in terms of both self-practice and practitioner-assisted modalities, has continued to flourish over time, with modern-day evidence to support their benefit for treatment in pain and cancer patients, with minimal adverse effects.

While biofield science is still viewed as too “fringe” by many scientists to merit serious consideration, the growing number of biofield-based technologies now available for therapy or diagnosis illustrates the mainstreaming of the underlying concepts. The FDA has granted clearances for use of pulsed electromagnetic fields for healing bone fractures and for noninvasive brain stimulation devices to treat depression, migraine and other conditions. Biofield-based concepts are also driving the multi-billion dollar global industry of neuromodulation, the use of externally applied electromagnetic signals for treatment of central nervous system-related disorders. Some scientists have heralded “Electroceuticals” as the next wave of “Big Pharma,” with the National Institutes of Health as well as several large pharmaceutical industries investing significant resources in mapping the body’s bioelectromagnetic fields for development of further devices for medical application. Outside of the regulated health care market, over-the counter neuromodulation products are widely marketed, raising new and often perplexing ethical and safety questions.

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