Danish stuntman and filmmaker Lasse Spang Olsen has a history of fact-finding and is currently shooting a series of programs on the scientific aspects of alternative treatment for Danish National Television, DR.
To do this Lasse Spang Olsen enlisted two senior researchers from DTU Energy, a department of the Technical University of Denmark researching energy technologies, to measure the thermal effects of healing.
"We are scientifically skeptical. Whatever the healer did, it was not measureable using thermal sensors"
Senior researchers Christian Bahl and Kurt Engelbrecht after the experiment
"Last year I made programs about alternative practitioners, where professional scientists and doctors saw and evaluated what happened. They also took part in some of the experiments, but we realized that they were always mentally prepared not to be influenced, so they did not give a 100 per cent correct response”, explained Lasse Spang Olsen, who is now broadening the programs to include the scientific aspects.
“In the new programs we look at the effects. Does alternative treatment work? How does it work? And if there is an effect, can you see and measure the impact?" asks Lasse Spang Olsen, who asked the scientific community, what kind of proofs were acceptable if they were to acknowledge the effect of healing.
The answer was MRI scans and thermal measurements of subjects during healing sessions. This brought Lasse Spang Olsen and the Israeli-born healer Somananda Moses Maimon, a renowned teacher of tantra, yoga and meditation with his own healing schools worldwide, to DTU Energy at DTU Risø Campus.
Healing with orgasmic side effect
Here the two senior researchers Christian Bahl and Kurt Engelbrecht from DTU Energy had agreed to measure if any temperature changes happened during three separate sessions, where the healer would transfer healing tantric energies to first a seasoned spiritual female healer and later two randomly picked women with no prior experience of healing.
"I was originally a lawyer, but some 15 years ago I decided to go to India to study spirituality and healing for six years," said Somananda Moses Maimon, who has since opened healer schools in several countries.
Somananda Moses Maimon told the women and the researchers how he doesn’t consider healing a special gift for the few. With the right amount of training, he said, everybody can learn how to transfer the sacred life energies to another person. It only requires openness and lots of practice.
"I studied yoga as part of kundulini tantra, which develops energy. I learned the methods, and now I share them with others, but it takes practice to learn how to focus, "said the healer, who described the energy as bio- and life energy, a kind of brahma-type energy named after the Indian wise men Brahmins.
"The energies have a healing effect and may have the occasional orgasmic side effect," said the healer.
For the experiment one of DTU Energy’s auditoriums was transformed into a studio with subdued studio lighting and a massage table in the center. The subjects lay on the bed, where they were healed and filmed with cameras by the TV crew, while the researchers monitored for temperature changes.
Expressive physical reaction
The first subject, the Swedish professional healer and therapist Sannasita, reacted very physically to the healing energies, which in her words surged through her body, while the healer with great concentration and finger movements as a violinist got the energies to wander without touching her body.
“How it works? It is difficult to describe. It feels like energy moves and I sense vibrations in my body, it was like beams of radiant energy in my throat and I could feel that I got really red in my face and on my neck. I felt the warmth and the heat very close”, said Sannasita. She has had a broad and open connection to the spiritual world since childhood and by her own accord she still has.
The audience was never in doubt that the healer had great physical impact on Sannasita, who curved her body and came with unambiguous plaudits during the healing without the healer ever touching her body, but the thermal measurements were unclear. No visible energy transfer was measured at all, even though Sannasitas head and neck region visibly got warmer.
Neither of the other two test subjects had physical nor thermal effects.
Life energies without thermal response
"If the theory is that the healer made a local energy transfer, resulting in a temperature increase, it wasn’t measureable at all. We could not measure any thermal response on any of the three test subjects, except a very weak temperature increase that could be due to their movements," said senior researcher Christian Bahl.
Kurt Engelbrecht continued: "The visible heat impact on the first test subject could very well be due to her very physical reaction to the healing. Subject number two had no response at all, neither physically nor thermally; and maybe number three had a very slight temperature increase, but not much."
The two senior researchers grant that healing might have some psychological effects, but nothing measureable.
"We are scientifically skeptical. Whatever the healer did, it was not measureable using the thermal camera", the researchers said after the healing sessions.
Lasse Spang Olsen didn’t mind. The whole idea of his broadcasts is to see if healing can be either measured or otherwise scientifically proven, and even if there was no immediate thermal response, maybe it could be measured with MRI scans at a hospital in Aarhus, scheduled the day after the visit at DTU Energy.
The first of six programs on the scientific aspects of alternative treatment will be broadcasted on DR2 a week after Easter.