The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative Medicine and the Surprising Power of Belief - Softcover

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Melanie Warner is a freelance writer for various publications, including The New York Times and Fast Company. She has spent the past fifteen years writing about business, first as a writer at Fortune magazine, where among other things, she wrote about the dotcom boom in Silicon Valley. She was also a staff reporter for The New York Times, covering the food industry. The author of The Magic Feather Effect and Pandora’s Lunchbox, she lives in Honolulu.

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The Magic Feather Effect

1

Donna’s Eden

Under the influence of an energy healer

It’s Friday night in Asheville and the banquet hall is nearly full. The room buzzes with a giddy hum as people gather in little communities along a neatly assembled perimeter of chairs. Middle-aged women are the best-represented group, but I spot a few men and some young people, too. A few even look like teenagers. Above us, three chandeliers disperse a warm glow over the room.

I make my way past the tables scattered with paraphernalia about the weekend’s “Introduction to Energy Medicine” and notice that, to everyone’s delight, Donna Eden, the woman we have all come to see, has made an impromptu appearance on the stage. She darts from end to end, seemingly to retrieve something. Then she turns to the crowd, gives an enormous smile, and hoists her arms up over her head in a two-handed wave. The room erupts in applause.

When the program starts for real some fifteen minutes later, there is no introduction. Donna simply marches onto the stage with her husband, David Feinstein, who was once a psychologist on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is now an enthusiastic proponent of “energy psychology.” David takes a seat at the back of the stage. Donna glides to the front, arms outstretched.

“Hello, everyone!” she says, beaming. “I welcome you all sooo much. I’m so glad you came. I’m so glad I came. I feel like there’s a part of Asheville that’s home for me. My mom was born here.

“I love teaching this. The world needs some really good healing tools that we can all use and depend on, and these are simple. They look like magic sometimes, but they work.”

Donna’s head is framed by a halo of blond curls, and as she speaks, her face lights up with a perpetual smile. “Our bodies produce the most profound medicine inside us already. It’s energy. Energy is the oldest medicine there is. It’s the safest and most organic and it’s free. We need a medicine that’s free. We need tools to be able to heal ourselves.”

David gets up from his chair and moves to the front of the stage. “Donna isn’t just talking here,” he chimes in. “She’s living proof of how energy medicine works. Several weeks ago, she celebrated her seventy-second birthday.”

Around me, I watch a few eyes widen at the thought that this spunky, effervescent woman onstage is one of the oldest people in the room.

“What I’m going to share with you this weekend are basic hands-on techniques you can use every day to give you more vitality and joy. These can clear energy blocks, help you feel younger, and relieve pain.”

As Donna talks, shadowy streams of pedestrians glide past the windows, which are dark now apart from the starry blips of light from the chandeliers. Asheville’s streets are like this, never crowded but always busy. Nestled into North Carolina’s ancient Blue Ridge Mountains, the town is populated by a motley assortment of college students, artists, hippies, retirees from the Northeast, and those who want to go to “healing sanctuaries” and open stores selling “gifts for the soul.” It is a fitting place for energy healing.

Energy healing is a nebulous category. It encompasses older practices such as Reiki and newer ones such as Therapeutic Touch, Donna Eden’s Eden Energy Medicine, and many other approaches you may never have heard of, such as polarity therapy, BodyTalk, Matrix Energetics, and Quantum-Touch. The simplest way to think of it is as a practice in which adherents believe the human body possesses a subtle force that can be harnessed for its own rejuvenation and repair. Energy healers say they manipulate this force through some combination of light touch, moving their hands at a distance over their clients’ bodies, and merely holding a thought or intention about how they want someone’s energy to move.

Although this mystical energy has never been validated by science—by which I mean replicated, rigorous, controlled studies—I haven’t come here as a debunker. I’m not interested so much in how Donna Eden and other alternative practitioners are wrong, but in how, against the odds, they may be right. I am trying to stay open to possibilities.

Donna looks out into the audience. “I’m going to need a volunteer. Most people understand all this a lot better if I demonstrate it. Over the course of the weekend, I hope to have a lot of you up here.”

About thirty hands shoot up, and Donna picks a stocky woman named Penny. When Penny arrives onstage, Donna reaches affectionately for her hand.

“I’m going to use a biofeedback tool that’s built into our bodies. It’s called energy testing. Sometimes it’s known as muscle testing, but we’re not testing muscle strength; the strength of a muscle doesn’t change from moment to moment. What changes is the muscle’s ability to resist pressure based on the amount of energy flowing through it. We’re testing energies and how they’re flowing and where they’re stopping.”

Donna looks intently at Penny for a few seconds. “Okay, now put your arm out like this.” She props Penny’s arm up at a ninety-degree angle from her body and puts one hand on Penny’s shoulder and the other on her outstretched arm. “Now I’m going to push down on your arm and you try to resist.”

Donna gives Penny’s wrist a firm downward push. Her arm doesn’t move. “Nice and strong,” Donna notes.

Then she walks backward so she’s about ten feet away from Penny. “I’m going to trace your meridians.”

Donna starts swooping her hands through the air as though she were conducting an experimental orchestra. She traces the invisible outlines of Penny’s body, from her head down to her brown suede boots. Then she walks back to Penny for another test. Just as before, she puts one hand on Penny’s shoulder, the other on her wrist. This time, Penny’s arm falls like a lead balloon, as if she weren’t resisting at all.

A look of surprise streaks across Penny’s face while the crowd exhales in amazement. I’ve watched Donna and others do this online before, but I still don’t have a reasonable explanation of what’s going on. Donna never appears to alter her level of effort, and Penny didn’t look as if she were intentionally caving. Nor does it feel like a cheap setup. Donna radiates such enthusiasm and certitude that it’s hard to conclude she is actively making any of this up or doesn’t believe 1,000 percent in what she is telling us.

“What I did,” Donna says, “is trace a meridian backwards. That takes energy out of the flow. Every single person in here has healing in their hands. I’ve never met anybody in my whole entire life who couldn’t use their hands to move energy.”

I shift about in my seat, suddenly aware of just how distant is the parallel universe I have entered. Meridians, a concept that originally hails from the traditional Chinese practice of acupuncture, are said to be invisible lines within the body along which energy flows. Each meridian is named after an organ—liver meridian, lung meridian, gallbladder meridian, etc. But just like healing energy,...