This article was originally posted in Green Living magazine.
Bioenergetic medicine is a powerful approach to healing based on physics, not chemistry. If chemistry is about the body's components (oxygen, carbon, etc.), then physics is about how those components interact with each other and with their surroundings.
All living things are surrounded by fields of energy. Living things emit very low levels of visible light. Kirlian photography (used in "aura photography") is able to capture these emissions and transfer them to a photographic plate or other medium so that they can be seen by the naked eye. Other more familiar technologies also capture some of the body's energetic functions:
Our physical body is simply dense energy permeated with the more subtle energies that inform and surround it. Healing medical traditions have understood this premise for thousands of years. This energetic model for health underlies Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic medicine, as well as modalities more familiar in the Western world like botanical medicine and homeopathy.
In 1974, Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp proved the existence of a field of light and energy that surrounds the body. He demonstrated that normal living cells emit a regular stream of photons or quanta (tiny packets) of light. In his book "Biologie des Lichts" (Biology of Light), he showed how living cells pass on biological information via photons through the language of light.
Each of the trillions of cells in the human body undergoes more than 100,000 biochemical reactions per second, all of which are exquisitely timed and sequenced with each other. Our DNA contracts and expands several billion times per second, producing a photon of light with each contraction. These photons send and receive information at a speed faster than any computer mankind has devised. Light is an efficient carrier of biological information.
The meridians are avenues of electrical energy flowing through the body. In the 1950s, Dr. Reinhold Voll verified the existence of meridians and acupuncture points which had been used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine. Dr. Voll created an electronic testing device which passes a tiny electrical current through the human body to measure the amount of resistance encountered at the acupuncture points. He found that the acupuncture points exhibit a different resistance to current than nearby tissues.
For example, he found that patients with lung cancer had abnormal readings on the acupuncture points found on the lung meridian. Dr. Voll made it his life's work to identify and document correlations between disease and changes in the electrical resistance of the various acupuncture points.
To heal with energy is to heal with the body's own essence. Rather than assaulting the body with chemicals to fight disease, we can encourage our body's ability to heal through the inherent natural inclination to set itself right - called homeostasis.
As technology has advanced, we have learned how to measure energetic dysfunctions and departures from the original template. We are now able to treat with substances that can restore the disharmony of the information systems which subtend the body's cellular function, right down to the level of the DNA.
"Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work." - Albert Schweitzer.
Find more health & wellness articles at greenlivingaz.com/health