Bio-psychokinesis, or bio-PK, is essentially psychokinesis on living systems, and encompasses such phenomena as psychic healing.

Psychic healing, however, is an extremely diverse topic, as its methods vary greatly. Some healers say that they place their hands above the person's body and move them in healing patterns, others may need to touch the person's body (though not necessarily the diseased portion), and still others claim the ability to heal from a distance. While in the process of healing, some healers say they experience their hands becoming extremely heavy, some say that they sense a white light around their themselves, and still others claim to have sensations of heat in their fingers or hands. ⁴

A common counter-claim to psychic healing is what is termed the placebo effect. This states that that the healer is simply giving the patient a psychological boost, and the belief of that patient that he is being healed causes a psychological healing effect upon the body. However, this is extremely unlikely considering that in many cases the person being healed was not even aware of the healer's efforts.

An example of an extreme case of psychic healing was documented in France in 1970. A man was suffering from an extreme case of thrombosis and his doctors expected him to die shortly. The man had even made his own funeral arrangements. However, in a last desperate attempt to save his life, the man went to Loudres to attend a ceremony of anointing the extremely ill. After he had been anointed by the priest, the man recovered dramatically. The complete recovery baffled the French medical profession. Even the doctor who had been treating him stated that the case had been hopeless, and that there was no way his recovery could have been attributed to medical intervention. ⁴

Today, such mind-body interaction is studied under the term biofeedback, or the Direct Mental Interactions with Living Systems (DMILS ), and is used to teach people how to exert conscious control over their bodies. Experiments into biofeedback are numerous, and many of the more significant experiments are highlighted below.

William Braud of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, has conducted several experiments into biofeedback. One such experiment involves one person trying to influence the emotional state of another.

In this experiment, subjects are placed in a room and told to do nothing. They are hooked up to a polygraph to record their current state of anxiety. Some subjects are typically calm, while others are typically nervous. The agent, or influencer, is placed in another room and told to try and influence the subject's state through psychic means. At regular intervals, the influencer would lift a card from a shuffled deck, and the card would either read "control" or "influence." If the card read control, the person would do nothing, and the polygraph would record the subject's normal state. If the card read influence, the person would actively try and calm the other person down, or excite them, depending on the requirements of the experiment.

The results of all but one of the experiments have been highly significant, with the odds against chance of the results being approximately 43,000-to-one. ²

Braud has also conducted several experiments testing the effects of psychokinesis (PK) on the body's biochemical processes. In one experiment, the subject would have blood removed and placed in test tubes containing a saline solution which induces hemolysis, or the slow destruction of the blood cells. The subject's task is to try and slow down the rate of hemolysis, effectively retarding red-cell destruction. The rate of hemolysis is automatically monitored via a spectrophotometer connected to a computer, and the statistical evaluation compares the rates for the influence periods with those of the interspersed control periods. The subjects are very successful. The rate of hemolysis is significantly retarted, with odds against chance of nearly 200,000-to-one. ²

In 1974, at a conference of the British Society for Psychosomatic Research, researcher Dr. Chandra Patel presented her findings in a series of experiments done on the use of biofeedback to lower blood pressure. In one study, twenty patients being treated were able to reduce their blood pressure on average from 160/100 to 140/85, while the control group in that same experiment only experienced an on average reduction from 163/99 to 162/97. ⁴

At the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory, researchers attempted to determine if psychic influence affected anesthetized mice. For this experiment, a large number of mice which were from the same litter, comparable in size and of the same sex, were randomly divided into two groups: control and influence. Subjects were asked to focus on the influence group and try and wake them up as quickly as possible. "The results were statistically significant, with influence mice waking up much more quickly than control [mice]." ⁶

"Bernard Grad at McGill university also conducted a number of experiments with mice. He surgically introduced small wounds in about 300 mice, and randomly divided them in three groups. One group of mice was treated by the Hungarian healer Oskar Estebany [who] was asked to try to accelerate [the] healing of the wounds...A second group of mice [were] similarly treated by skeptical medical students, while a third group remained untreated. After a predefined time-period, the wounds of the mice of all three groups were measured and compared. The wounded mice treated by Estebany had healed significantly more quickly than the other two groups." ⁶

Perhaps one of the most dramatic demonstrations of psychic healing, which involved a single blade of grass, was conducted Dr. Robert Miller. Using an extremely sensitive instrument capable of measuring the growth rate of grass to an accuracy within thousandths of an inch per hour, Miller was able to measure a relatively constant growth rate in the plant of about .006 inches per hour. ⁶

Afterwards, Miller instructed two well-known psychic healers to try and boost the growth rate of the grass from a distance of over 500 miles. The two healers stated that at the time set for their influence period to begin (which was 9:00 p.m.), they "prayed for the plant, visualizing a white light around it which would help it [to grow] vigorously." ⁶

When Dr. Miller went to measure the plant's growth, he recorded these findings: "All through the evening and up until 9:00 pm the trace was a straight line with a slope which represented a growth rate of .00625 inches per hour. At exactly 9:00 pm the trace began deviating upward and by 8:00 am the next morning the growth rate was .0525 inches per hour, a growth rate increase of 830%" ⁶

One explanation for psychic healing, as well as PK, is that the human body has an unknown source of energy in it that can be "released in a controlled manner by a psychic healer at a beneficial level." The over-use of this energy, it is believed, would also explain such phenomena as psychic burns or stigmata, or in extreme cases, spontaneous human combustion. ⁴

Attempts to detect this energy have led to Kirlian photography, developed by Russian Semyon Kirlian in 1939, which is supposedly able to photograph auras or psychic energy. One method of using Kirlian photography involves putting film atop a flat metal plate. "An object is placed on the film and photographed while a high-voltage electrical charge pulses through the plate. No camera is involved. Animate objects [are said to] produce auras that vary in color, size, and shape in sequential photographs, [while] inanimate objects display more regular, unvarying halos." ⁵

One of the more famous examples of the use of Kirlian photography arose when the top of a leaf was torn off, and the remainder of the leaf was subsequently photographed: in the photograph, the missing piece was still visible. This led to the speculation of a "bioplasma body" or "etheric body" around living organisms. ⁴ Indeed, many people claimed that this confirmed the existence of auras, which psychics are supposedly able to see and interpret to read a person's emotions and character. Skeptics, on the other hand, argued that Kirlian photography was merely corona discharge, or that it was created by the photographing of electrically ionized air. ^{4, 5}