Dr Michael Dixon           

Men often stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened                                                                                             Winston Churchill

For the past 18 months healer and doctor have been working alongside each other in our Mid Devon practice.  It has been a profitable experience for doctors, staff and patients alike.

  The practice consists of 7 doctors covering over 100 square miles and largely run from a central surgery in Cullompton.  Since May 1992, Mrs Gill White has been coming each Thursday morning as healer in the practice and seeing an average of 5 patients for 45 minutes each.  It was originally agreed between Gill and the partners that the patients she was seeing should have chronic illnesses which had been present for at least 6 months and which had not been helped by other treatments, conventional or complementary.  During the first year the healing clinic was run as a health promotion clinic under regulations which were terminated in July this year.  Since then the Family Health Service Association (the local governing medical body under the National Health Service) have agreed to fund the clinic for a further year as a research project, and the Department of General Practice in Exeter have been helping us to improve our research protocol.

  In June this year we reviewed the success of the clinic so far.  This review covered the first 25 patients that Gill had seen in the healing clinic.  The most common presenting symptoms among this group were back pain (5), arthritis (3), depression (3), stress (3), abdominal pains (2), M.E. (chronic fatigue syndrome -2) and single cases of headache, repetitive stress injury, colitis, persistent urinary infection, psoriasis (a chronic skin condition) and muscle dystunction (idiopathic dystonia)

  The patients were asked to score their main symptoms both before and after healing on a nine point scale (from 'couldn't be worse' to 'no symptoms any more', and also to assess any changes that they had perceived.  Assessment showed that around 70% had improved.  As far as self rated symptom scores were concerned, 72% showed some improvement, including 32% who reported substantial improvement in their symptom score.  As far as perceived change was concerned, 16% felt slightly better, 20% felt much better and 32% felt very much better.  Doctors' perceptions of change largely agreed with perceptions of their patients.  All 8 patients with stress, joint pains and abdominal pains reported some improvement, while the improvement of the patients with back pain, depression and M.E. was less predictable.

  For the purpose of assessment of change in this study we focused in the questionnaires on the main presenting symptom.  This appeared to miss some of the potential benefits of healing.  Clearly healing is about change in a more holistic sense, and the main presenting problem may be just a symptom.  Many of the patients spontaneously reported improvement in aspects of themselves which were not the subject of the study.  Indeed, all but one of the patients (96%) felt that healing had been a positive, pleasurable and useful experience in some way.  We studied the 8 patients who had shown no improvement under our scoring system and only one of this group had ended up with no effect of healing.  One patient felt that healing had altered his whole outlook on life.  Another had had chronic pains in her arm which went away with healing.  Another noted that his back pain got better (though this was not the presenting symptom and therefore was not included in the scoring for improvement).  Another noted that "It was nice to be given the attention and to be listened to."  One who had had no objective improvement was reported by the doctor as 'being much less draining.'

  In order to give some objectivity to the study, we looked at changes in consultation rates, before and after healing.  Only 10 patients had completed healing more than 6 months prior to this review.  Comparing their average attendance rate at the surgery in the 12 months prior to healing with the rate 6 months after healing showed a decrease in consultation rates from an average of 12 to 8 per patient per year.  This appeared to be statistically significant (p = .0254, meaning that such results could occur randomly, by chance, only two and a half times in 100 trials).

  We also examined changes in prescriptions.  Out of the 25 patients, 8 either reduced or stopped their medication.  The annual saving in prescription costs amounted to a little over �1000 a year, which more than paid for the annual cost of the clinic.  The reductions in costs from fewer consultations has not been calculated but is clearly significant.

  Over the next year we will be able to see if the reduction in consultation rates is confirmed with other patients.  If it is, it not only has important implications as far as workload in the practice is concerned, and for the usefulness of healing for symptoms.  We have the impression that patients have been made better able to look after themselves and now see themselves rather than the doctor as the vehicle for improving their health.  These are only early results.  A more extensive review in a year's time will be needed to confirm these early impressions.  We will also need to look at more objective measures of improvement if we are to satisfy scientific criteria, however important it may be that the patients say and feel that they have improved.  For instance, we may explore the effects of healing upon blood pressure.  We will also have to look at ways of adjusting the medical research model to the full range of healing potential so as to pick up the vast range of improvements that occurred, which do not show up in the limited framework of the present study.

  The project has been an eye opener to the doctors in the practice, even to the sceptics.  Gill's reputation is such that she is now getting referrals from almost all the doctors in the practice, where initially only two participated.  The staff in the practice have been happy and indeed proud to have a healer in their midst, and enjoyed the challenge of accommodating a healer in the conventional medical setting.

  As far as the patients are concerned, the research speaks for itself.  Remember that these were patients with chronic illnesses who had not been helped by either conventional or other complementary therapies.  Gill's 70% success rate seems particularly significant in these circumstances.  If, as doctors, our conventional theories may not explain this success, we should not reject the evidence.  After all, a relatively cheap treatment,  with no negative side effects, which benefits most of our patients is what we have been looking for all along!

Dr Michael Dixon is a GP working at College Surgery, College Road, Cullompton EX15 1TG

Also reported in

Dixon, Michael, Does healing benefit patients with chronic symptoms? A quasi-randomized trial in general practice, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 1998, 91, 183-188.
 

You may quote from or reproduce these editorial clips if you include the following credits and email contact:
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1994 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099 www.WholisticHealingResearch.com   DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com

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