How does it work?
Oschman has an idea for a possible mechanism. In his ‘model of the intelligent body’, he considers that the body’s connective tissue continues within the cell plasma, making a continuum, connecting every cell and vibrating with electro-magnetic energy. Each part connects with the other instantaneously and continuously (20 times faster than the central nervous system) and it is through this that the body functions. (Chemical transmission via synapses is too slow an explanation). He suggests that magnetic flow is best when everything is coherent and the body is healthy, and that this flow of electro-magnetic energy goes beyond the body (the aura) where there is an exchange with the environment. This allows people to receive healing vibrations or intentions. Certainly, many of us can, upon entering an empty room, ‘know’ when there has recently been an argument there. We can sense the negative energy through our aura. Equally, we can sense if someone has good or bad intentions towards us, irrespective of what they are saying or how they are acting to us.

To explain healing, perhaps we need to explore our reality in a new way, one that is increasingly being considered as being of a quantum nature in which everything is interconnected. Thus, two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place (arguably, the initial interaction being at the time of the ‘Big Bang’). Albert Einstein called this connection ‘spooky action at a distance’.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity proposed that energy (photons) and matter (atoms) are different aspects of the same. Following on, Dean Radin has suggested that there is an entangled fabric of reality and that everything is connected: Bioelectromagnetic fields around our bodies are entangled with electromagnetic fields in the local environment and with photons (energy) from the rest of the universe.
Another possible reality is that of a holographic model; that despite its apparent materiality, the universe is actually a 3-D image projecting from a level of reality beyond time and space. This idea was pioneered independently by physicist David Bohm and the neurophysiologist Karl Pribram. Bohm was a protégé of Einstein’s and a respected quantum physicist. Both Bohm and Pribram independently arrived at their conclusions in order to make sense not only of all the phenomena encountered in quantum physics and other neurophysiological quandaries, but also paranormal and mystic experiences.

This model is being used by cosmologists to mathematically model the universe.
Michael Talbot asks: ‘Is it true what the mystics had been saying for centuries – that reality is ‘maya’, an illusion; that reality is really a vast, resonating symphony of wave forms, a ‘frequency domain’ which is transformed into the world as we know it only after it enters our senses?
Henry Stapp and John von Neuman concur. They state that the conscious mind directs a dynamic distribution of parallel virtual states into a single state of focused awareness. This opens the possibility that one person’s mind/brain can cause the probabilistic brain states of another person or object (or other human organs) to preferentially collapse into selected states. This may be how the intention of healing can produce an effect.
At the moment we really do not know the true mechanism of reality, which makes it difficult to explain the mechanism of something as ethereal as healing. However, I like this quote from the English Biologist T. H. Huxley: ‘Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’
He also says ‘I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything’.