about FOH...
[history and activities] [language--key to change] [science advisory committee] [board of advisors]
History and Current Activities...
Over the several years of our existence FOH has narrowed its focus into the areas where we bring some unique resources, and where we found that we can be most effective, in impacting the progress of Whole Person Healing (WPH) in the United States and the world.
These areas now include:
Partnering with the Best. and serve the very best (=most effective) groups and individuals in the United States and, increasingly, the world. These friendly relationships and partnerships constitute a unique resource for the whole community.
·
Establishing a State of the Art Research Base.
By
developing a research base in one of the world’s leading Materials Research
Laboratories we make available the resources of modern physics, chemistry and
materials engineering (not biochemical medicine, or any clinical work) to
the WPH community.
Scientific Evaluation of Procedures and Devices.
Most significantly we
provide to all interested parties in the WPH movement the judgment of a unique
friendly collection of world class scientists and physicians, who are both
interested in and informed about WPH on all matters relevant to research And a
resource which should be widely used by the media.
Exposure to Investors.
We
also expose these judgments to small groups of angel-investors who can move the
advancement of the best affordable discoveries to the U.S. and world citizens.
Conferences. We organize and manage the program for biennial conferences on the Science of Whole Person Healing for the entire WPH community and the public.
Friends of Health strongly advocates the use
of accurate terms...starting now!!
“Whole Person Healing (WPH)” not Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
One of the major contributions which the Friends of Health organization can take credit for, is the increasing use of the term “Whole Person Healing.” Most especially it is gratifying to see it being slowly substituted for the wholly inaccurate and misleading term: “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM).
What the community is dearly about, is “healing.” It is not advocating or selling a particular “medicine.” Moreover we deal with whole persons. We are completely and fundamentally committed to the inseparability of spirit (S), mind (M), and body (B). In any healing interaction, that same S+M+B (whole person) may be healed in the spirit (alone), in the mind, or in the body; and they can be healed via the spirit, via the mind, or via the body.
“Expectation Effect” not Placebo
Another enormous error in modern medicine has been fluttering in the literature for decades. This is the concept and use of the term “placebo.” The medical establishment cannot define it adequately. It has no explanation for it. Very few have any realization, from the reams of data, purporting to prove that this or that performs “better than placebo”—that the worm is not inside the apple, it is the apple.
“Belief” or “expectation” is a universal factor in any healing transaction. The patient or the doctor may believe or expect weakly or strangely that particular intervention may work. Extensive research shows that belief or expectation is a major component of the success of the intervention. Expectation is very important in the most expensive knee surgery or cardiac procedure, and no less so in taking an aspirin. It was well-known millennia before the practices of science invaded the healing arts. The founder of the major Western religion, Jesus, was a healer. He routinely tried to exhort the “patient” and/or his/her friends “to believe.” “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” was the response of one patient.
Fatal Flaw in Medical Scientific Research
The backbone of medical research—the Randomly Controlled Trial (RCT) is fundamentally flawed in more than one dimension: the inability to control for emotional or “belief” state. Ever since the RTC procedure was started using placebos as supposedly totally inert, it was shown that in ANY trial, the so-called “sugar pill,” the inactive ingredients, placebo pill (whatever), always did have a substantial effect. But now could it; if it was merely an inert substance. Answer: it carried its own EE value as did the real pills!!!
On the average this was hardly insignificant—always at least 30 or 40%. This also meant that in even the supposedly most highly effective ‘pills,’ about half the effects were due to the expectation effect (EE). Hence the “evidence based medicine” data provide the evidence that the Expectation Effect is not only real, it is substantial, and it is universal.
Early this summer two papers appeared in completely different venues which speak to the universality of the Expectation Effect. EE is found not only in healing but in many other activities. Like: How about sports performance? The Washington Post (06-06-2006) reported a study from the University of Wisconsin that showed that runners who expected to improve their 5k-race running times based on drinking “super oxygenated” water really did so; and by large amounts. The lesson the researchers concluded said “your brain is more capable of boosting your performance than a potion, pill or device.”
Another long report in Alternative Medicine magazine (June 2006) researched several lines of evidence to demonstrate the power of the Expectation Effect. They have all just confirmed our more general axiom in the WPH movement.
Belief is the single most effective “pill” (intervention) in the world.
The most distinctive asset that Friends of Health brings to its mission is its Science Advisory Committee. This group of chemists, engineers, physicists, and physicians - all with international stature and impeccable credentials - share a rare characteristic: they have been immersed in the literature and practices in the field of whole person healing for years.
The Friends of Health Science Advisory Committee seeks to:
Our Science Advisory Committee Includes...
John
O'M. Bockris
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry (Ret.),
Texas A&M University
Prof. Bockris is one of the world's leading electrochemists and author of one of its best-known texts, with a distinguished career at the University of Pennsylvania, Flindens University in Australia, and Texas A&M University. He is recognized by awards and honors worldwide; he is the earliest champion of the "hydrogen economy." His book, The New Paradigm (2005), confronts current physics with data from "paranormal" phenomena.
Juliana
Brooks, M.D.
Senior Managing Director, General Resonance, LLC, Havre de Grace, Maryland
Dr. Brooks is the rare physician who has transferred her research focus on (multiple) wavelength effects from medicine to technology, based on a series of remarkable discoveries, now appearing in a large number of worldwide patents, under the general theory of spectral catalysis.
Hans-Peter
Duerr
Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich, Germany
Prof. Duerr, a colleague of, and successor to, Werner Heisenberg, is one of the world’s leading quantum theoreticians. His insights into the real profundity of quantum mechanics has brought him into an active contact with an openness to phenomena found in CAM-WPH.
B.M. Hegde, M.D.
Visiting Professor of Cardiology, University of London
As an internationally acclaimed cardiologist, medical educator, and former Vice Chancellor he has been fighting a battle against the dangerous wrong concepts in modern medicine for decades. He has innovated a new affordable integrated system of healing art based on Indian Ayurveda and manyother healing systems clubbed with the mandatory modern emergency hi-tech stuff, to make medical care reach the unreached. He has received awards and honors from all over the globe for his refutative research. His latest book What Doctors Don’t Get to Study at the Medical School, with a foreword by Rustum Roy, could set River Thames on fire.
Henry
Heimlich, M.D.
President, The Heimlich Institute, Cincinnati, Ohio
Perhaps one of the world’s best-known physicians, because of his several radical discoveries (the Heimlich Maneuver, and the lesser known, but much more widely used, Heimlich Valve), useful not only for saving choking victims but also for drowning victims with a possible extension to asthma. His newest research on the malariotherapy approach to AIDS continues his tradition of radical approaches to healing.
Wayne
Jonas, M.D.
President, Samueli Institute for Information Biology
Professor of the Uniformed Sciences University, Col. Jonas was the first director of the Office of Alternative Medicine of NIH. An authority on the Expectation Effect, aka "meaning response" or the placebo effect, and on homeopathy, Dr. Jonas assumed the first presidency of the Samueli Institute of Information Biology.
Joie
P. Jones
Professor of Radiology, University of California Irvine
A physicist-radiologist professor at U.C. Irvine, deeply involved in obtaining direct evidence on the most advanced instruments to evaluate traditional (ancestral) medical practices, such as acupuncture and pranic healing. His research of fMRI usage for demonstrating the reality of acupoints and workings of pranic healing has received worldwide attention.
Marc Newkirk
Materials Engineering/Technology
Commercialization
One of the nation’s leading materials engineers and inventors with more than a hundred U.S. patents to his credit, Newkirk co-founded half a dozen businesses with major industrial partners in the electronics, aerospace, mining equipment, automotive and defense industries based on new materials via new processing technologies. He was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has recently been studying the relationships between consciousness, energy and healing, and the surprising evidence from ancient (high technology) civilizations.
Rustum
Roy
Evan Pugh Professor of the Solid State Emeritus, The Pennsylvania State University
Dist. Research Prof. of Materials, Arizona State University; Visiting Prof. of Medicine, University of Arizona
Prof. Roy is of the world’s leading materials scientists, honored by election to the National Academies of the United States, Russia, Japan, Sweden, and India. He is also recognized as the world’s leading champion of interdisciplinarity and integration of knowledge – science, society, technology, and religion. He has been actively involved in the field of CAM-WPH for the last several years, lecturing and writing widely on summarizing the best-known facts and their potential for the future of science. His recent research on the structure of water is a major contribution.
Marilyn
Schlitz
Director of Research, Institute of Noetic Sciences
Dr. Schlitz is the active director of research at the longest-lived institution dedicated to the scientific study of extraordinary phenomena, such as those lying at the heart of WPH-CAM. She serves as a congressionally appointed Advisory Member for the National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and currently serves on the Scientific Program Committee for the Tucson Center for Consciousness Studies.
Gary
Schwartz
Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona
Starting on the faculties of Yale and Harvard, Prof. Schwartz, a rigorous experimental psychologist, has become the best-known social scientist studying the extraordinary manifestations associated with WPH-CAM, especially in the survival of consciousness. He is the director of the very first NCCAM funded Center for Biofield Studies at the University of Arizona.
George
Sudarshan
Professor of Physics, University of Texas
A theoretician who held chairs both at the world-renowned Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas and at the University of Madras, India, Prof. Sudarshan is steeped in the deep traditions of Indian thought, and in the implication of particle physics theory for human needs such as healing.
William
A. Tiller
Professor Emeritus of Materials Science, Stanford University
Prof. Tiller, former chair of the materials science department at Stanford University, has probably done research personally in the field of WPH-CAM longer than any other senior active physical science professor at a major institution. He authored two key books proposing a theoretical framework underlying the phenomena encountered in WPH.
Friends of Health is privileged to have, as friends and allies, many of the pioneers of whole person health who serve on our Advisory Board.
While Western high-tech medicine always should - and will - play a major role in the spectrum of healing vectors, there are many traditional healing paths about which Western society has little or no knowledge. To draw from the widest range of traditions, Friends of Health works with some of the best-known figures in whole person healing worldwide.