Energy Healing Information portal

A friend forwarded to me an alarmist-sounding letter about the Codex Alimentarius. I've heard about this as a looming threat, but hadn't read anything about it. Until now. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has published a draft guidance document, Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. I don't yet understand the significance of publishing and approving a Guideline, but at Health Freedom USA they are highly alarmed. Rima E. Laibow, M.D., the organizer of Health Freedom USA, and the author of the letter my friend forwarded, has studied the Codex in great depth and finds a lot to be alarmed over.

There is a petition drive, http://tinyurl.com/2u7ghc, organized to inspire people to send in their comments to the FDA.

What I see right now on a brief reading is the FDA guidance deals with practices that can be described as "Drug", "New Drug", "Device", "Food", "Food Additive", "Dietary Supplement", "Cosmetic", or "Biological Product".

The discussion covers the wide range of complementary and alternative practices which have become popular. These practices either date back through the centuries, or are more recent in origin. The guidance document does a very nice job of describing the field of complementary and alternative practices. They have done one subtle bit of reframing which stands to bring the full weight of the law down upon practitioners of those complementary and alternative practices.

By calling them "medicine" the next obvious step is to invoke the existing body of laws governing medical practice. The practitioners of complementary and alternative methods have always been skirting this law, with some people being caught straying across the boundary into activities or statements that can be labeled as practicing medicine without a license. Pretending to be a Medical Doctor is clearly a significant crime, and people can clearly receive bad medical treatment, and people can clearly die from bad medical treatment offered by fake doctors.

For example under "Manipulative Practices" such as Massage or Chiropractic they offer guidance about which aspects can or should be regulated, and which should not. A practitioner who manipulates the body soley with their own effort, without the use of machines or tools, should not be regulated, they say. But when a practitioner starts using a machine or tool, including lotions and creams, those tools should fall under regulation. Following that guidance would say that massage oils, especially massage oils containing herbal additives, should be regulated by the FDA. Hmm...

The guidance does not offer clear recommendations about energy healing practices. The guidance has a fairly decent description of energy healing, dividing the field into two broad categories. One category are those practices using "putative energy fields" (biofields) "that have defied measurement to date by reproducible methods". The other category are those practices using mechanical or electrical vibrations that can be measured by regular instruments. The guidance then goes on to discuss only the regulatory considerations on the second category, and not discussing the regulatory considerations of the first.

At the surface this threat appears to have passed by energy healers and is not affecting "us". But it may be only a matter of time, and it may be a situation like that story from the rise of Fascism in Germany. "First they came for X, and I am an X, so therefore I didn't speak up, then they came for a Y, and I am not a Y, so I didn't speak up, ..." which ends with "... then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak up for me".

Troubling is this statement on Health Freedom USA: Based on Tyrannical Napoleonic Legal Code Codex is based on the Napoleonic Code, dating back to Bonaparte. Under this code, anything not explicitly permitted is automatically forbidden. Under Common Law (our system), something does not have to be explicitly permitted to be legal. The tyrannical Napoleonic Code allows the banning of natural health options by default.

If they are correct, that this is a Napoleonic Code, it may not matter that the guidance document does not discuss the regulatory concerns about "energy healing". If the default is to ban any practice that isn't explicitly allowed, then energy healing will, by default, be banned. Hmm...

Many of us in Energy Healing use a variety of complementary and alternative practices, eat organic foods, use herbs, see acupuncturists or chiropractors or massagers, etc. This Guidance would have the effect to limit our ability to access these practices.

I have a final thought about energy healing practices which some may think are controversial. As unlicensed practitioners the recommendation we have for practicing legally in the U.S. is to avoid using words like diagnose, prescribe, heal, cure, etc. By the law those words are limited to licensed medical practitioners, and to claim to do those things will likely land the practitioner in jail. But, I wonder, how can energy healers truly not diagnose and prescribe?

In giving energy healing most energy healing practices ask the practitioner to intuitively guide their hands to the places which need the energy. Further most energy healing practices asks the practitioner to intuitively transmit energy or perform energy manipulations based on the same intuitive guidance. The question is, what is driving that intuitive guidance?

The intuitive guidance is clearly looking at the client, determining the condition of the client, analyzing the best treatment in "putative" energetic terms, and transmitting energies, or manipulating energies, or extracting energies, depending on the skill of the practitioner and the needs of the client. This sure sounds like "diagnose" and "prescribe". But the analysis and treatment choice is happening at the level of intuitive guidance, a level scientists are unwilling to admit exists in the first place, and is utilizing energies which scientists are labeling as "putative".

This raises a question in my mind about regulation of energy healing. In allopathic medical practice limiting diagnosis and prescription to licensed medical practitioners is meant to assure the practitioners are competent. How would this apply to energy healing? I think medical doctor training is inappropriate to energy healers and that to a large degree the training at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing is excellently appropriate. What form could the regulation of energy healing take?