There is certainly a stereotype that natural healers of all sorts, including naturopathic doctors, acupuncturists, homeopaths, massage therapists, and etc are all a bit on the “woo-woo” side. When I first started practicing, friends would ask me (jokingly—mostly) whether they’d have to part a beaded curtain to get into my office, or whether they’d find it adorned with crystals. My husband still calls me a hippie, because I like yoga, and prefer to go barefoot whenever possible.

I’m also a strong Christian, though, and many of my patients choose my practice because they want the non-pharmaceutical, “heal the root cause” focus, without all the New Age or Eastern religious stuff thrown in.

But why are natural healing and alternative spiritual ideas so often entwined, anyway?

The Vital Force, Electromagnetism, and Energy Medicine

I think the reason these things go together has to do with the concept of the vital force—this nebulous concept of the thing that keeps an organism alive, maintains homeostasis, and heals when a disturbance occurs. Because this idea is so nebulous (or at least it has been historically), it’s often conflated with spirituality and the metaphysical. Most of my colleagues in naturopathic school were spiritual in some way or another; I’d say perhaps a third to half were Christian, and the rest identified with some other organized religion, or they had their own hodgepodge collection of spiritual beliefs. Everyone attributed the vital force to their own spiritual ideas, though—indeed, you couldn’t really be a naturopath and not believe in the vital force. It’s kind of fundamental to the whole philosophy (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/why-you-are-susceptible-to-illness/).

I’m now starting to believe, though, that the vital force isn’t spiritual at all; it’s actually electromagnetism (more on this here: https://www.drlaurendeville.com/electromagnetism-vital-force/). I rather suspect the soul is the source of that power, but in much the same way that a piano player plays the keys, and music results. Our souls are the players, our bodies are the keys, and the music is the voltage that then enervates the body. This may seem like semantics—we’ve only removed the spiritual by one extra step—but to me, this changes how I think about energy medicine tremendously.

For instance: acupuncture meridians turn out to be fascia, made of collagen and hydrated with crystalline water, acting as semiconductors of electrons on a tissue-based ‘wiring’ system (more on this here: https://www.drlaurendeville.com/electromagnetism-vital-force/).

Homeopathy turns out to borrow from the near-infinite structural possibilities of liquid crystalline water (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/the-fourth-phase-of-water/), imprinting a structural memory upon it in the form of a fractal (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/homeopathy-but-isnt-there-nothing-in-it/). Since frequencies can be converted into fractals and vice versa (they’re called cymatic images, https://ask.audio/articles/how-sound-affects-you-cymatics-an-emerging-science), it’s not too far-fetched to say that homeopathy contains the imprint of the frequency of the original substance. That frequency can affect the frequency of our own cells via resonance—the same phenomenon that occurs when you strum a guitar string, and the same key on a different guitar will begin to vibrate, without ever being touched. On a piano, when you play a low C, the C notes at higher and lower octaves will resonate as well—but the other notes won’t, because the frequency is wrong. This is why, with homeopathy, you have to get the remedy (the frequency) correct, or nothing will happen: only the right frequency will cause your cells to resonate in harmony, and come into appropriate alignment. (By contrast, this is at least part of the reason why synthetic electromagnetic frequencies (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/emf-how-do-you-know-if-its-too-high/) can be so damaging: they can disrupt the delicate frequencies of our own cells, thus interfering with their function).

Even auras turn out to have an entirely physical basis. Anyone who has ever been to Sedona has probably seen the Kirlian photography studios that offer to photograph your aura. It’s based on the corona discharge phenomenon, in which the photographic film is connected to a high energy power source, creating an electric field. When a person (or any other grounded object) touches it, those excited electrons have a direct route back to the ground, through that object. As they fall, they have to get rid of their extra energy, and they do so via light emission—essentially, this is the same idea as in Einstein’s photoelectric effect. According to Dr Richard Gerber in Vibrational Medicine (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/vibrational-medicine-richard-gerber/), Kirlian photography can offer useful diagnostic information—but only if the frequency used to excite the photographic film resonates with the body’s natural frequencies. Otherwise, it’s pretty, but useless.

Many energy medicine approaches say they work “on the quantum level”, which can be a non-explanation that just sounds impressive—but I do wonder if quantum physics isn’t just the interface between the spirit realm and physical reality. Quantum physics includes concepts like entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein called it—which certainly sounds like it could apply to Jesus speaking a word of healing over the Centurion’s servant (Luke 7:1-10), or the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter (Mark 7:24-30), or the handkerchiefs and aprons imbued with Paul’s healing energy (Acts 19:11-12). It also encompasses concepts like scalar energy, the underlying energy in the universe that holds all things together (which sounds a lot like Hebrews 1:3).

Where Things Go Sideways

I’d venture to speculate that for all forms of energy medicine, there are two possibilities—either they don’t work at all except by placebo (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/placeboeffect/) (which is possible, if they haven’t been rigorously tracked—30% recovery I’d imagine would be more than enough to inspire passionate proselytes), or else they do work, if recovery is higher than that. If they do work, then they must do so via some scientific mechanism that God created (as He is the giver of all good gifts, James 1:17, and health and healing are good gifts, Deuteronomy 28), whether or not we know what that mechanism is yet. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Since technology is the harnessing of scientific principles to do work, and since magic (if believed in at all) is nearly always attributed to spiritual sources, then any medical techniques we cannot explain will likely be attributed to spiritual sources, by default.

As C.S. Lewis famously observed in Mere Christianity, though, Satan cannot create anything new. All he can do is twist or pervert something God meant for good (a good gift in the wrong timing, in the wrong amount, with the wrong motive, attributed to the wrong power, etc), thus deceiving people into following him, instead of God. Any non-falsifiable explanation for a real, physical phenomenon will always contain at least the possibility of deception, and I can’t imagine Satan not exploiting that (John 8:44). For thousands of years, acupuncture (or chakras, or fill in the blank on your favorite ancient energy medicine) weren’t explainable in any scientific way, but they seemed to work, so people kept doing them… and then of course, they tried to come up with explanations for why they worked. Since people at that time didn’t know the scientific explanation, though, their explanations were, invariably, spiritual. Even today, energy medicine practitioners who wish to study their craft usually also study the ancient esoteric religious texts with which they are intwined. And isn’t it only natural for people to think, well, they were right about the healing principles… what if they’re right about the rest? At that point, people don’t know what to believe, or what truth is (John 18:37-38). Once you get into the realm of metaphysics, anything goes, because you can’t prove any of it anyway…

Isn’t this the same question, more or less, as how we can determine which religion (if any) is correct, when it pertains to an invisible world? That too seems non-falsifiable, which is why many people will argue that one religion is as good as another. C.S. Lewis’s is the best philosophical argument I’ve heard on this, also from Mere Christianity: that our own souls and consciences point toward an external morality we did not create, and that, alone, verifies a spiritual world, and the existence of a God who created that moral code. Our experience of attempting to keep the moral code and failing to do so should thus help narrow down the religion we need (one of grace—and there’s only one of those). Then on top of that, there is apologetic (physical) evidence (https://www.drlaurendeville.com/anthropic-fine-tuning/) to corroborate the truth of the Biblical scriptures, the testimonies of skeptics and atheists who set out to disprove the Bible, only to become converts in the end (https://kimolsen.net/2014/05/13/men-who-were-converted-trying-to-disprove-the-bible-way-of-life-literature/), and the miracles that are supposed to follow those who believe (Mark 16:17-18)—evidence of the invisible invading the visible. Most religious assertions cannot be tested, and must be accepted on faith only—and while Christianity also requires faith, it first appeals to reason. We were never expected to believe anything arbitrarily.

Discerning the Truth

So, to the one who diligently seeks truth, concrete insights rule out all religions but one as a foundation. How then does that foundation help us to discern between truth and deception?

Our protection against deception is knowing God’s word, because it is truth (John 17:17, Psa 25:5, Psa 91:4, Psa 96:13, 100:5, 117:2, 119:142, 151, 160; 138:2, Prov 3:3). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and He will guide us into truth (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13, 1 John 5:6). But He can only bring to our remembrance the scriptures we know (John 14:26)… and remember that when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he did so by either misquoting scripture, or by quoting it out of context (Matthew 4:1-11). So our job is to renew our minds with scripture (Romans 12:2) to the point where we’ll recognize a counterfeit when we’re presented with it (1 John 4:1).

The bottom line, as I see it, is that when it comes to energy medicine principles intertwined with other religious teachings that lead us away from God’s truth, we must exercise discernment. Know the truth, so that some impressive and seemingly inexplicable phenomenon doesn’t lead you to question what you do know.

At the same time, though, let’s not “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Every good and perfect gift comes from God (James 1:17), and “greater is He that is in me than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Let’s not give Satan more credit than he deserves.