S2E50: When Frontier Science Enters Mainstream Journals: Energy Healing Cancer Study Update | Talk Tracks
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What is the background and purpose of the MD Anderson energy‑healing cancer study?
Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and welcome to the Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly by TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show, We do just that. In season two, The Consciousness Cassettes, we spent two episodes exploring energy healing, what it is, what people experience during it, is it effective, and maybe most importantly, some of the research beginning to look at whether these practices can create measurable change in the body. If you haven't listened to those two episodes yet, please start there.
They are episode eight and episode nine of season two, the consciousness cassettes, and they'll give you much more context for what we'll be talking about today. In those episodes, we introduced you to a fascinating study taking place at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where researchers tested energy healing, or what some call biofield therapy, on both pancreatic cancer cells in petri dishes and in mice. When we released those episodes, the research hadn't been published yet, but now it has. So I wanted to come back to this story, highlight that milestone, and use it as an opportunity to understand something we really only touched on the first time. around. What does it actually take for research into something like energy healing to move through the scientific process?
For this episode, I spoke with Dr. Santosh Rao, a medical oncologist and integrative oncologist who has followed the MD Anderson research closely, and Meredith Sprungle, the research and program director of the Subtle Energy Funders Collective, which listeners may remember helped support the MD Anderson research we covered last season and is also one of the organizations. behind phenomena healing, which has been documenting the study. We're going to look at why research like this can be so difficult to fund and conduct, what happens during peer review, and why publication can become especially challenging when you're studying something that doesn't yet fit neatly within an accepted scientific framework.
Our team in particular is very interested in this due to a lot of the telepathy and spelling research that has just been done. Will it find a home? Daily we're wondering if there will be a scientific journal brave enough to publish the research. So to start, I wanted an independent clinical perspective on the study, so I asked Dr. Santo Schrau to walk us through the research and explain what stood out to him about the findings now that they've been published.
I'm Santos Schrau. I'm a medical oncologist and I'm also an integrative oncologist. I most recently finished a term as the president of the Society for Integrative Oncology. I've long been interested in biofield therapies and am a practitioner myself. And so I'm very interested in this kind of research that focuses on the science behind biofield therapies and a Allows us to ask more questions.
Okay, great. And then we covered the study in detail last season, but could you briefly just give a recap on what the study looked like and the main takeaways?
Yes, the paper that was published was an overview of research that was conducted over four years at the University of Texas MD Anderson. And there were different experiments that were conducted over what we call preclinical research. So there were pancreatic cancer cell lines that were studied as well as mouse related studies showing the effects of biofilm. field therapy versus control and what they called a sham, which was kind of a fake therapy that was done without any training or intention, just to see what effects it might have. And they did some very rigorous research in these areas looking at a whole bunch of different outcomes.
So just to pause here, preclinical means this research wasn't being done in cancer patients. The researchers were studying pancreatic cancer cells in the lab, patient-derived tumor models, and cancer cells in mice.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background and purpose of the MD Anderson energy‑healing cancer study?
0:03–7:07
2
How did the researchers design the pre‑clinical experiments with pancreatic cancer cells and mice?
7:07–14:13
3
What were the most striking results—slower tumor growth and reduced liver metastases?
14:13–20:06
4
Why is funding and methodological rigor especially challenging for frontier energy‑healing research?
20:06–26:29
5
How does the peer‑review and journal selection process work for unconventional studies?
26:29–34:25
6
What happened when the paper was withdrawn and later accepted by a different journal?
34:25–38:56
7
What steps are needed to move energy‑healing research into higher‑impact mainstream journals?
38:56–44:34
8
What are the hosts’ final thoughts on open‑minded skepticism and the future of this field?
44:34–45:09
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Telepathy Tapes
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