Page 187 - ce_cusco_2019

observing and monitoring our lives in Catholicism. He is there to provide guidance for all. It is because of this

that people of the Catholic faith may try particularly harder to monitor their actions to make sure they are

following the rules set in place by their supreme powers. 2

DISTANT HEALING IN CATHOLICISM:

In Catholicism, prayer may not always be used on the individual. In many cases, people will pray for

each other, and people will often pray for each other’s health. This is known as a form of distant healing.

Distant healing is any way of healing someone or something without physically encountering them. Distant

healing is formally defined as “any form of healing from a distance, effected as [a] conscious act that seeks to

benefit another person”. A group of scientists conducted an investigation on twenty-three separate studies that

involved 2,774 patients. Their goal was to see if distant healing had an actual health benefit or not. The

procedures they used ranged from spiritual healing, prayer, and therapeutic techniques such as Reiki. Reiki is

essentially a massage but the person orchestrating the massage never touches you. Instead, they hover their

hands over your body and transfers energy to the parts of your body that lacks it. Thirteen of these studies,

about fifty-seven percent of the total conducted, showed that the patient showed significant benefits from

using distant healing techniques. Nine of the other studies showed no significant change over the original

control group, and one of the study groups showed that the distant healing techniques were detrimental

towards their health. To further assess their data, a series of studies were looked over and analyzed to see if

past experiments were as successful or not. The scientists examined ninety separate articles published between

the years 1955-2001. These articles spoke of hands-on healing and distant healing, comparing their health

benefits. They found that of these ninety articles, half were taken place in a clinical setting and half were taken

place in a laboratory setting. It was observed that the consensus of both forms of treatment was about seventy-

one percent positive in the laboratory settings and sixty-two percent positive in clinical settings. The distant

healing treatments were said to be seventy-five percent effective in the clinical studies, and eighty-one percent

effective in the laboratory studies. These scientists then acknowledged that the methodology of how these

187