Phenomena Podcast: The Science & Stories of Energy Healing

What role could energy healing play in cancer care? Oncologist Dr. Santosh Rao shares his firsthand experiences with energy healing and what they’ve taught him about its potential role in cancer care. From surprising patient experiences to the science still waiting to be uncovered, Dr. Rao explores what it could take to bring biofield therapies further into mainstream medicine.

What is the “energy” in energy healing? Every healer in this series uses the word. Every patient reaches for it. Ancient traditions built entire systems around it. But what is it — biologically, physically, measurably — and how does it move through the body to heal? Three renowned scientists begin to offer answers: Columbia University's Martin Picard on the mitochondria that may link consciousness to biological health, Richard Hammerschlag on the biofields that run all the way in and all the way out of our bodies, and NYU's Neil Theise on the interstitium, a newly discovered hidden network coursing through us. Together they reveal an eye-opening vision of the body not as a machine, but as a dynamic energetic ecosystem. Original music composed by Dan Baboulene. Additional music by Starluxe.

What actually happens between a healer and the person they're healing? It starts at a dinner table — energy healer Laurie Nealon and her old friend Alan Brown, visiting from Brisbane. A 20-minute kitchen table session leaves him changed: heat through his head, a jolt through his chest, and a connection he says he'd never truly felt before. That moment leads us to two researchers taking the question seriously. Tor Wager (Dartmouth) argues that trust and connection aren't noise in healing — they're the data. Vitaly Napadow (Harvard) proved it by scanning clinician and patient brains simultaneously during treatment: the more their brains synced up, the more pain relief the patient felt. Science has found the instrument. It hasn't found everything that plays through it.

What happens when traditional medicine leaves veterans behind? In this episode of Phenomena, host Ivy Ross dives into the intersection of PTSD, military research, and energy healing. We share the moving story of Ron, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who spent seven years battling debilitating trauma following ICU delirium—until a single session with intuitive healer Maggie McIlvaine changed everything.

What if healing isn't something that happens to you — but something you're always doing for yourself? That question sits at the heart of Qigong, and this episode. Anne Hering has practiced every day for over twenty-five years. Her doctor told her at 22 she'd spend the rest of her life in pain. But he was wrong, and she'll tell you it wasn't a treatment that changed things. It was a practice. At Harvard, researchers Andrew Ahn and Peter Wayne have spent years trying to understand what Qi actually is — and whether the body's energy pathways, called meridians, have any physical basis. When Dr. Ahn injected fluorescent dye at an acupuncture point on the wrist, it traveled up the arm through no known vessel and arrived exactly where the ancient maps said it would. Two Harvard scientists and a Qigong teacher in the Netherlands arrived at nearly the same definition of Qi from completely different directions. What they found might change how you think about your own health.

Rick Axelson spent his career teaching research methods at medical colleges. He also spent decades suffering from debilitating migraines that even his team at the Mayo Clinic couldn't resolve. Then he tried one session of Reiki with a practitioner named Natalie Dyer. Forty-five minutes. And his migraines have never come back. That story on its own might be easy for some to dismiss. But new research from the University of Utah and Harvard—the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted—sheds new light on the possibilities of Reiki for chronic pain. What they found in patients with chronic knee pain matched the effectiveness of treatments medicine already accepts, like opioids. Lead researcher Dr. Adam Hanley puts it simply: he didn't expect to see anything. Now he's scrambling to understand what happened. And there's one more thing about Natalie Dyer that changes this story in a way that is fascinating. She’s not just a healer, she’s also a neuroscientist. Produced by Sounds True Studios. Music…

In Episode 1, we explore the work at MD Anderson Cancer Center—one of the largest and most respected cancer research institutions in the world—where something remarkable is happening in the laboratory. Scientists are bringing energy healers into controlled experiments to measure what happens to pancreatic cancer cells when a biofield therapist (another term for energy healer) goes to work. What they’re finding is measurable, repeatable, and difficult to explain: biofield therapy slows the ability of cancer to spread. Not in one study. In multiple, with multiple healers, multiple cell lines, and rigorous controls.

Phenomena: The Science & Stories of Energy Healing is a documentary-style podcast series, hosted by artist and business innovator Ivy Ross, that investigates this and other quietly urgent questions at the intersection of modern medicine and ancient healing. Join Ivy as she shares the latest research findings and the incredible, inspirational stories of energy healers and those who have found relief with them from conditions ranging from chronic pain, PTSD, even cancer. Together, we’ll explore answers to questions like what is energy healing? How does it work? And how do we separate hard facts from hopeful fictions? Because if the answers are what the research suggests, the next frontier of medicine may turn out to be something we've known in our bodies all along.