What is psychic healing?

What is psychic healing?

Chris French (Anomalistic Psychologist) gives expert video advice on: What does paranormal mean?; What does psychic mean?; What is psychic healing? and more...

Psychic healing refers to the alleged ability to heal other people or even animals purely by the power of thought. And lots of people believe that they have benefited from psychic healing, but skeptics would point out that there are always other possible explanations for what's going on. In particular, the placebo effect plays an important role. We know in lots of other contexts that if you give people a worthless form of treatment, such as a sugar pill, but you tell them it's going to make them feel better, lots of people will report that they do indeed feel better. So that's one factor, there are all kinds of other factors, and so far the evidence from controlled scientific studies say there's no convincing evidence that psychic healing has any effect over and above a placebo effect.