In October 2006 a Scottish researcher hears of a healer in southern England said to be effecting "spectacular improvements" in physical conditions. She does what is rare enough in this field: she neither believes nor waves it away — she designs a protocol. Five years later, 130 documented cases are on file, with medical contacts, X-rays and video interviews. The "Ostensible Paranormal Healing Study" by Tricia Robertson and Prof. Archie Roy is among the most thorough case documentations of spiritual healing in existence — and its final report is freely available.
Four possibilities — "only through investigation will we know"
Tricia Robertson, a mathematics and physics teacher and long-serving president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, was no beginner: together with the Glasgow astronomy professor Archie Roy she had previously carried out the much-cited Glasgow mediumship experiments, up to triple-blind conditions. When she heard of the healing claims of Nina Knowland of Bradford on Avon, she put four possibilities to her research colleagues: the healer was deluding herself; she was a fraud; she was genuine but overestimating her successes; or she was genuinely effecting "betterment that cannot be accounted for by normally accepted means". Her conclusion: "Only through investigation will we know!" The research group PRISM funded the journeys; Roy came along as second researcher and witness — for researchers, Robertson notes, should always work in pairs.
The protocol
A record sheet was kept for every patient: contact details, treating doctor or hospital, diagnosis — and, where possible, medical evidence from before and after the healing, from GP letters to hospital reports and X-rays. Patients provided written testimonies; many were also interviewed individually on video, and their statements checked against the earlier written accounts. The healers, too, had to give answers: hands on or above the body? An altered state during healing — overshadowing, semi-trance, trance? What did the patient feel meanwhile? Over the years this built a database covering four healers: Nina Knowland, Gary Mannion, Andy Porter and Steve Stone.
First numbers: the Knowland cases
After the first thirty documented treatments with Knowland, Robertson noted drily: "There is no doubt about it — something 'unusual' was going on!" 86 per cent of patients felt heat from the healer's hands, 80 per cent reported a very quick cessation of their pain, 37 per cent a popping, bubbling or fluttering inside the body — and one in five the feeling of "someone" working within them. Remarkably, the patients did not know one another, yet described the same things again and again. Robertson saw Knowland's best results with women's complaints, haemorrhoids and gallstones; one healing of an eye the report calls simply "spectacular".
Glasgow, August 2008: the controlled test
In 2008 further healers joined the study, among them the young Gary Mannion, who works as a psychic surgeon with a spirit helper. For him Robertson organised the study's hardest test: she brought him to Glasgow and provided the subjects herself — fifteen people with clearly diagnosed conditions, each interviewed on video before and after treatment. The result: 46 per cent reported immediate betterment, a further 13 per cent within days to a week; after one month, eight of the fifteen had improved, "some to such an extent that they cannot believe it". Overall the report credits Mannion with "outstanding" results in skeletal complaints — as in the case of a law student with an X-ray-confirmed heel spur whose pain flared fiercely the night after treatment and was gone by morning — permanently, as her later written testimony records.
130 cases
At the end of the study stood 130 documented conditions: 44 skeletal, 23 organic, 4 emotionally based and 59 mixed cases. 101 of the 130 showed improvement after a single session. 78 patients felt heat, 46 some kind of internal movement, 46 almost immediate pain relief, and two described a feeling as of anaesthesia. To the obvious objection that the patients would have recovered anyway, Robertson answers with the timing: how strange, then, that the betterment occurred immediately or soon after the healing.
What the study is — and what it is not
Robertson herself draws the limits of her work more clearly than many a critic: each individual case, she writes, could be "gnawed away at" on its own — only together do they form a database that indicates further controlled research should be carried out. Emotionally based cases are hardly assessable. And she names a problem she knew from mediumship research: those who seek out a healer of their own accord come in great need — study participants not necessarily; one is not comparing like with like. It is a case documentation with medical corroboration, not a randomised clinical trial — what such a trial can look like in the healing field is shown by the Brazilian RCT on the Spiritist passe. The SPR review of the later-published cases added: participants reported great benefit — whether the departed were involved cannot be derived from the data. For the documented improvements themselves, that changes nothing. Robertson published fifteen of the cases in the "Paranormal Healing" chapter of her book "More Things You Can Do When You're Dead" (2015); the full final report is available on her website.
Sources: Tricia J. Robertson, "Ostensible Paranormal Healing Study" (final report, December 2011; all figures and quotations from it); her website triciarobertson.weebly.com; Tricia J. Robertson, More Things You Can Do When You're Dead (2015), with the SPR review.
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