If you can accept, or even entertain, the possibility that everything is connected because everything is one, you are immediately presented with alternatives that may significantly affect your life and health. In the early 1970s, neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, MD, began documenting cases in which psychic healing methods succeeded in both diagnosis and treatment where traditional medical practice had failed. While the terms psychic healing or occult healing - as Shealy first called it - were objectionable to many then, the activities associated with these methods have become strongly legitimized in the past twenty years. Shealy's work was dynamically augmented in the 1980s and 1990s with the collaboration of Carolyn Myss, a medical intuitive, who began to share her expertise with him - with a 95 percent rate of accuracy. A medical intuitive is a person who sees" or "knows," by some inner sense, what the psychophysical condition of another is. In the moment of "sensing," the intuitive recognizes that he or she is not separate from the one being examined. The intuitive can then speak from what she sees and feels within herself and can translate that sensing into precise diagnostic terminology that relates to the condition of the other. Together, Shealy and Myss presented their work in the groundbreaking book The Creation of Health, which articulated their energy model of health and disease. They found a particular pattern of energy loss associated with every illness they examined, and they described how various stresses led to these diseases. Myss has gone on to publish many other books, including The Anatomy of Illness, all of which have been New York Times bestsellers.

There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open? —Woody Allen

The age-old understanding that all forms of life are different expressions of the same energy is the basis of the whole field of energy "medicine" that distinguishes the work of many alternative practitioners today. In the past thirty years, physicians Brugh Joy, MD, Richard Moss, MD, and others, have trained thousands of health professionals to sense body energy fields, and to use a variety of methods (some of which are like a "laying on of hands"), to alter these energy fields, and thus effect healing. Nursing teacher Dolores Krieger, PhD, inaugurated a program called Therapeutic Touch, whereby caregivers learn to massage the energy field of the patient, to relieve pain and discomfort as well as the emotional disconnection that causes so much suffering to those who are ill. These and other touch and massage methods have become standard procedure in hospice programs and are currently taught in nursing schools throughout the country.

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