Distance Spiritual Healing
Professionalism, Legitimacy and the Concept Of A Gifted Spiritual Healer
Distance Spiritual Healing is a branch of Spiritual Healing, which in turn is a branch of Complementary Medicine. Although there are numerous types of Spiritual Healing, this thesis is a medical, anthropological and sociological study of the professionalisation of Distance Spiritual Healing and its problems. Distance Healers claim to operate through intelligences variously known as God, Cosmos, Godhead, Christ, Holy Spirit, or Angels Gods, Unknown Spirit Entities and Discarnate Spirits. Because of their lack of science based knowledge, these unscientific ideologies are reasons for the marginalisation of Distance Healing first by Biomedicine and also by much of British society. Society has to protect itself by demanding safety and acountability, in return for legitimacy; whereas biomedicine has to protect its monopoly of the conventional health care system. This stance of the established medical profession hardens when some of these healers claim that they also have a special “gift” of healing which enables them to heal people at long distances and on higher levels of human existence. This type of healing knowledge is mostly subjective and submits with difficulty to objective analysis.
This PhD Thesis is available at the British Library, London.