Heaneyland!

The control group was not given any herbal tea, and listened to no Enya

Rose found an article which is sure to make you stare confusedly at your computer screen, slowly shaking your head. It's a transcript of a presentation which recapped an experiment -- an experiment to study "laying on of hands".

On mice.

Oh, and also on seeds. And salt water. Rose pointed out this section as one that simply filled her with confidence in the -- ahem -- scientists conducting the experiments:

The multiblind system was so extensive that one of my worries
was whether I could get all of the pieces of information together again
without having mixed the information up. When the information was decoded,
it was a source of relief that there was no mix-up at all.

Hey, congratulations! My favorite bit, though, is this:

This all started when a Hungarian gentleman (Mr. E.) came to me with the claim to be able to accelerate healing in people according to his experience in Hungary. I told him I was a biologist and therefore I couldn't bring any patients to him, but we could do experiments on animals and on plants.

When I asked him how he worked, he said that all he did was to lay his hands on the people. If they had a headache, he would put his hands on the head. He would hold his hands there for a while, 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, and repeat this as required, perhaps the next day or several times a week, generally not on the same day.

Several times a week? Can I just point out that is a long time to wait for your headache to be cured?

Posted by Francis at 12:40 AM