CONTINUED FROM PAGE "MAGNETIC INFORMATION"
Two important foci of the Center were alternative/complementary medicine and the
matter-mind-spirit interrelationship. The Center was the first of its kind in the world linked to
a major university and spawned sister centers at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico and
the University of Milano, Italy. A journal, Frontier Perspectives, was founded in 1990 by
Rubik and was published and distributed semi-annually to over 3,500 affiliates of the
Center in 58 countries.
From 1992 to 1994, Dr. Rubik served as a member of the Advisory Panel to the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Alternative Medicine and was Panel Chair on
Bioelectromagnetics. She presently serves on the editorial board of several journals,
including the Alternative Health Practitioner; Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine;
and the Journal of Complementary Therapies in Medicine (UK). She is a member of the
advisory board of the Journal of Subtle Energies and the European Journal of Classical
Homeopathy. She also serves as an advisory board member to the John Templeton
Foundation and the Society for Scientific Exploration, and has served the MacArthur
Foundation as a nominator of fellows.
In late 1995 Dr. Rubik left Temple University to continue her work as an independent
scholar and consultant and founded the Institute for Frontier Science, a nonprofit
corporation. She is presently writing a book on the frontiers of science and medicine. An
anthology of her writings, Life at the Edge of Science, was published in 1996. Rubik is also
an advisor for HealthWorld Online, a consultant for corporations involved in the nutrition
and bioelectromagnetic industries, lectures widely at universities and conferences in the
United States and abroad, and has a new appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of
Medicine at the University of Arizona at Tucson, in the integrative medicine program under
Dr. Andrew Weil, and is an adjunct faculty member at Union Institute, California Institute for
Human Science, and the University of Creation Spirituality.
In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Rubik discusses the limitations of the
mechanistic worldview underlying conventional medicine and the emerging research that
may constitute the basis of a more inclusive paradigm. In particular, she feels it essential
that health researchers and practitioners consider the role of energy flows in living systems
rather than limiting their purview to molecular biochemistry. Moreover, she believes the
new paradigm must take into account recent research on the role of the mind in healing
(including healing at a distance).
DANIEL REDWOOD: You are trained as a biophysicist, but are best known as a
proponent of "frontier science." What is frontier science, and what led you in this direction?
BEVERLY RUBIK: It's a term used to differentiate it from mainstream science, which is
most academic science, and also to differentiate it from fringe science, which is very
unconventional stuff. Frontier science is science that is outside of the mainstream but has
a significant number of scholars asking questions within its domain. Topics such as
consciousness studies and the science underlying alternative medicine are examples of
what I call frontier science.
REDWOOD: What do you see as the primary features of the dominant scientific
paradigm, and how does frontier science challenge it?
RUBIK: The dominant biomedical or biological paradigm is where life is viewed mainly as
a bag of biomolecules, and a human being is a collection of organs, tissues, and other
things that it can be reduced to. In that paradigm, the whole is considered the sum of its
parts. It's also a mechanistic or materialistic worldview. For example, in the dominant
paradigm consciousness is nothing but brain processes or the results of brain processes.
Some of its chief features are materialism, reductionism, and fragmentation.
REDWOOD: What are the problems with that paradigm?
RUBIK: I don't think that a molecular view of life is sufficient for understanding holistic
medicine or the whole human being.
REDWOOD: What other factors need to be included to create a larger or more applicable
paradigm?
RUBIK: We need to consider energy flows in biology, the subtle energies that can't really
be reduced to molecules. A good example is acupuncture. I'm aware that some features of
acupuncture have been reduced to molecules, such as the analgesic effects that have
purportedly been explained in terms of endorphin release. But the non-locality of
acupuncture, and why stimulating at the crown of the head might cure hemorrhoids, is
beyond anybody's comprehension from a molecular view. The specificity of that point for
hemorrhoids and other points on the body for other internal organs certainly challenge it.
REDWOOD: Why do you think conventional medicine became so focused on the
biochemical, molecular level as opposed to the other possibilities?
RUBIK: I think it's pretty obvious. We have a pharmaceutical industry that has grown up in
the last 50 years that has been highly profitable and somewhat successful in dealing with
acute diseases. So the approach has been to look for magic bullets in medicine. That
approach works well with acute diseases, but it does not work for chronic degenerative
disease. So we see the failure of that approach. Also, conventional medicine has failed to
treat the whole person. It tends to reduce the person to their diagnosis, to the disease. In
hospitals, people are even referred to as their disease [i.e. the pancreatic cancer in room
205]. Increasingly, people are upset at this. Patients want to be treated as whole persons,
whose minds and spirits have something to do with their healing.
There's a body of evidence from frontier science that leads us to believe that mind is more
than brain function, because conscious intention and prayer operating over even long
distances can have beneficial effects on people. There have been experiments on distant
healing and prayer, showing that people can have effects on other people as well as on
microorganisms. I myself have conducted some of these experiments.
REDWOOD: Is the electromagnetic field of the body involved in human health? Can there
be external influences that impact upon it negatively and thereby cause disease?
RUBIK: I think that both are true. We have some epidemiological evidence that humans,
especially children, placed in schools or homes around power lines, have higher
incidences of leukemia, lymphoma, and brain tumors. There were also reports about ten
years ago that pregnant women sleeping under electric blankets (at least the older ones)
had higher rates of miscarriages and birth defects in their offspring. It's not so clear for
adults, however. The electro-pollution from our environment poses yet another stressor on
our lives. The way stressors act upon us is that one plus one plus one may equal nine, and
then you snap and get sick.
So it's very hard to point the finger to say bioelectromagnetics directly causes a particular
tumor. It's not so simple, unfortunately. Our bodily systems don't work linearly; they're more
like chaotic systems. They can absorb stress, they're somewhat resilient, but they get to
the point where there's only so much stress they can take, and then they break. So the
causal relationship is not clear. It's not like classical mechanics and physics, because once
again, I'm considering these things from a new paradigm perspective, not from naive,
simple causality. Everybody would like simple causal relations in medicine, but
unfortunately, it's not so clear-cut. For chronic degeneration, it's impossible to point to a
single cause. This is also true of electromagnetic influences "causing" disease.
I'm certain, however, that the evidence for the other side of the coin -- electromagnetic
medicine -- is clearer. There are many devices on the market, some of them FDA
approved and most of them not, that can enhance or accelerate healing, lift mood, and can
help broken bones heal faster.
REDWOOD: Why do you think they are not more widely used?
RUBIK: That's a puzzling question, especially when they're FDA approved. For example,
the bone healing device has been on the market for about 20 years is FDA approved and
is used in only about 20 percent of the cases for which its use is indicated. It's probably
because doctors don't learn about the possibilities of using them. They're focusing mainly
on chemistry, biochemistry, and drugs, and very little on physics, electro-magnetics, and
other ways of healing. So it's simply not within the scope of the dominant biomedical
paradigm. And I don't think doctors have teams of salesmen pushing electromagnetic
medical devices like they have drug salesmen knocking on their doors.
REDWOOD: Do you have an opinion on the therapeutic use of magnets?
RUBIK: I do. I've seen some studies and I'm impressed that the anecdotal reports I've
heard all over the place are bearing true in clinical trials in terms of pain relief and
reduction of inflammation. I once sprained an ankle and used some magnets obtained
from an Oriental health shop in San Francisco. I had some amazing results with the
swelling going down quickly and the pain disappearing. It's hard to say how the magnets
work on the body. From physics, there's the Hall Effect, whereby if you have charged
particles in a stream moving near a magnet, they will be altered in their flow because of the
magnetic field. This might explain changes in the flow of blood and lymph, which contain a
lot of charged proteins, ions, etc., and that may explain why swelling, pain, and
inflammation are reduced.
REDWOOD: What questions is complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) posing
that conventional medicine may have the most difficulty answering?
RUBIK: Most people are using multiple modalities of CAM for a chronic condition. That is,
they may be taking dietary supplements, doing biofeedback, going for acupuncture
treatments, and practicing relaxation techniques. These may be acting synergistically, and
they may also be tailored for the individuality of the patient. Conventional medicine uses
more standardized procedures, largely ignoring patient individuality. So, here we see one
major clash between conventional medicine and CAM: standardized scientific approach
vs. individualized treatment.
Secondly, in CAM, optimization of self-healing is the goal; whereas conventional medicine
throws out any self-healing response and maintains that the cure is something contributed
by the drug or other medical intervention. What this means is that the gold-standard of
conventional medicine, the controlled clinical trial, is much less meaningful as a test for
CAM, since it does not address individuality of patients, nor does it respect self-healing.
Daniel Redwood is a chiropractor, writer and musician who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is
the author of A Time to Heal: How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health (A.R.E. Press), and is a
member of the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Two important foci of the Center were alternative/complementary medicine and the
matter-mind-spirit interrelationship. The Center was the first of its kind in the world linked to
a major university and spawned sister centers at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico and
the University of Milano, Italy. A journal, Frontier Perspectives, was founded in 1990 by
Rubik and was published and distributed semi-annually to over 3,500 affiliates of the
Center in 58 countries.
From 1992 to 1994, Dr. Rubik served as a member of the Advisory Panel to the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Alternative Medicine and was Panel Chair on
Bioelectromagnetics. She presently serves on the editorial board of several journals,
including the Alternative Health Practitioner; Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine;
and the Journal of Complementary Therapies in Medicine (UK). She is a member of the
advisory board of the Journal of Subtle Energies and the European Journal of Classical
Homeopathy. She also serves as an advisory board member to the John Templeton
Foundation and the Society for Scientific Exploration, and has served the MacArthur
Foundation as a nominator of fellows.
In late 1995 Dr. Rubik left Temple University to continue her work as an independent
scholar and consultant and founded the Institute for Frontier Science, a nonprofit
corporation. She is presently writing a book on the frontiers of science and medicine. An
anthology of her writings, Life at the Edge of Science, was published in 1996. Rubik is also
an advisor for HealthWorld Online, a consultant for corporations involved in the nutrition
and bioelectromagnetic industries, lectures widely at universities and conferences in the
United States and abroad, and has a new appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of
Medicine at the University of Arizona at Tucson, in the integrative medicine program under
Dr. Andrew Weil, and is an adjunct faculty member at Union Institute, California Institute for
Human Science, and the University of Creation Spirituality.
In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Rubik discusses the limitations of the
mechanistic worldview underlying conventional medicine and the emerging research that
may constitute the basis of a more inclusive paradigm. In particular, she feels it essential
that health researchers and practitioners consider the role of energy flows in living systems
rather than limiting their purview to molecular biochemistry. Moreover, she believes the
new paradigm must take into account recent research on the role of the mind in healing
(including healing at a distance).
DANIEL REDWOOD: You are trained as a biophysicist, but are best known as a
proponent of "frontier science." What is frontier science, and what led you in this direction?
BEVERLY RUBIK: It's a term used to differentiate it from mainstream science, which is
most academic science, and also to differentiate it from fringe science, which is very
unconventional stuff. Frontier science is science that is outside of the mainstream but has
a significant number of scholars asking questions within its domain. Topics such as
consciousness studies and the science underlying alternative medicine are examples of
what I call frontier science.
REDWOOD: What do you see as the primary features of the dominant scientific
paradigm, and how does frontier science challenge it?
RUBIK: The dominant biomedical or biological paradigm is where life is viewed mainly as
a bag of biomolecules, and a human being is a collection of organs, tissues, and other
things that it can be reduced to. In that paradigm, the whole is considered the sum of its
parts. It's also a mechanistic or materialistic worldview. For example, in the dominant
paradigm consciousness is nothing but brain processes or the results of brain processes.
Some of its chief features are materialism, reductionism, and fragmentation.
REDWOOD: What are the problems with that paradigm?
RUBIK: I don't think that a molecular view of life is sufficient for understanding holistic
medicine or the whole human being.
REDWOOD: What other factors need to be included to create a larger or more applicable
paradigm?
RUBIK: We need to consider energy flows in biology, the subtle energies that can't really
be reduced to molecules. A good example is acupuncture. I'm aware that some features of
acupuncture have been reduced to molecules, such as the analgesic effects that have
purportedly been explained in terms of endorphin release. But the non-locality of
acupuncture, and why stimulating at the crown of the head might cure hemorrhoids, is
beyond anybody's comprehension from a molecular view. The specificity of that point for
hemorrhoids and other points on the body for other internal organs certainly challenge it.
REDWOOD: Why do you think conventional medicine became so focused on the
biochemical, molecular level as opposed to the other possibilities?
RUBIK: I think it's pretty obvious. We have a pharmaceutical industry that has grown up in
the last 50 years that has been highly profitable and somewhat successful in dealing with
acute diseases. So the approach has been to look for magic bullets in medicine. That
approach works well with acute diseases, but it does not work for chronic degenerative
disease. So we see the failure of that approach. Also, conventional medicine has failed to
treat the whole person. It tends to reduce the person to their diagnosis, to the disease. In
hospitals, people are even referred to as their disease [i.e. the pancreatic cancer in room
205]. Increasingly, people are upset at this. Patients want to be treated as whole persons,
whose minds and spirits have something to do with their healing.
There's a body of evidence from frontier science that leads us to believe that mind is more
than brain function, because conscious intention and prayer operating over even long
distances can have beneficial effects on people. There have been experiments on distant
healing and prayer, showing that people can have effects on other people as well as on
microorganisms. I myself have conducted some of these experiments.
REDWOOD: Is the electromagnetic field of the body involved in human health? Can there
be external influences that impact upon it negatively and thereby cause disease?
RUBIK: I think that both are true. We have some epidemiological evidence that humans,
especially children, placed in schools or homes around power lines, have higher
incidences of leukemia, lymphoma, and brain tumors. There were also reports about ten
years ago that pregnant women sleeping under electric blankets (at least the older ones)
had higher rates of miscarriages and birth defects in their offspring. It's not so clear for
adults, however. The electro-pollution from our environment poses yet another stressor on
our lives. The way stressors act upon us is that one plus one plus one may equal nine, and
then you snap and get sick.
So it's very hard to point the finger to say bioelectromagnetics directly causes a particular
tumor. It's not so simple, unfortunately. Our bodily systems don't work linearly; they're more
like chaotic systems. They can absorb stress, they're somewhat resilient, but they get to
the point where there's only so much stress they can take, and then they break. So the
causal relationship is not clear. It's not like classical mechanics and physics, because once
again, I'm considering these things from a new paradigm perspective, not from naive,
simple causality. Everybody would like simple causal relations in medicine, but
unfortunately, it's not so clear-cut. For chronic degeneration, it's impossible to point to a
single cause. This is also true of electromagnetic influences "causing" disease.
I'm certain, however, that the evidence for the other side of the coin -- electromagnetic
medicine -- is clearer. There are many devices on the market, some of them FDA
approved and most of them not, that can enhance or accelerate healing, lift mood, and can
help broken bones heal faster.
REDWOOD: Why do you think they are not more widely used?
RUBIK: That's a puzzling question, especially when they're FDA approved. For example,
the bone healing device has been on the market for about 20 years is FDA approved and
is used in only about 20 percent of the cases for which its use is indicated. It's probably
because doctors don't learn about the possibilities of using them. They're focusing mainly
on chemistry, biochemistry, and drugs, and very little on physics, electro-magnetics, and
other ways of healing. So it's simply not within the scope of the dominant biomedical
paradigm. And I don't think doctors have teams of salesmen pushing electromagnetic
medical devices like they have drug salesmen knocking on their doors.
REDWOOD: Do you have an opinion on the therapeutic use of magnets?
RUBIK: I do. I've seen some studies and I'm impressed that the anecdotal reports I've
heard all over the place are bearing true in clinical trials in terms of pain relief and
reduction of inflammation. I once sprained an ankle and used some magnets obtained
from an Oriental health shop in San Francisco. I had some amazing results with the
swelling going down quickly and the pain disappearing. It's hard to say how the magnets
work on the body. From physics, there's the Hall Effect, whereby if you have charged
particles in a stream moving near a magnet, they will be altered in their flow because of the
magnetic field. This might explain changes in the flow of blood and lymph, which contain a
lot of charged proteins, ions, etc., and that may explain why swelling, pain, and
inflammation are reduced.
REDWOOD: What questions is complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) posing
that conventional medicine may have the most difficulty answering?
RUBIK: Most people are using multiple modalities of CAM for a chronic condition. That is,
they may be taking dietary supplements, doing biofeedback, going for acupuncture
treatments, and practicing relaxation techniques. These may be acting synergistically, and
they may also be tailored for the individuality of the patient. Conventional medicine uses
more standardized procedures, largely ignoring patient individuality. So, here we see one
major clash between conventional medicine and CAM: standardized scientific approach
vs. individualized treatment.
Secondly, in CAM, optimization of self-healing is the goal; whereas conventional medicine
throws out any self-healing response and maintains that the cure is something contributed
by the drug or other medical intervention. What this means is that the gold-standard of
conventional medicine, the controlled clinical trial, is much less meaningful as a test for
CAM, since it does not address individuality of patients, nor does it respect self-healing.
Daniel Redwood is a chiropractor, writer and musician who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is
the author of A Time to Heal: How to Reap the Benefits of Holistic Health (A.R.E. Press), and is a
member of the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
| FRONTIER SCIENCE (HOLISTIC MEDICINE) Interview With Beverly Rubik Ph.D. Interviewed By Daniel Redwood D.C. |
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