Phenomena Podcast: The Science & Stories of Energy Healing

Martin Picard, PhD, is Head of the Mitochondrial PsychoBiology Lab at Columbia University, where his research explores the connection between the mind, mitochondria, and the energy that sustains life.

He joined us for a conversation about what first inspired him to investigate why some people heal while others don't, and why he believes mitochondria may serve as a bridge between the immaterial experience of the mind and its physical expression through biochemistry. Drawing on years of research into the mind-body connection, Dr. Picard explores how our life experiences can shape our biology, what science is revealing about the role of energy in human health, and his vision for a new science of healing that brings together biology, energy, and the human experience.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

Dr. Santosh Rao is an oncologist, professor, researcher, and former President of the Society for Integrative Oncology.

He joined us for a conversation about his unique perspective as an oncologist, integrative medicine specialist, and longtime practitioner of energy healing. Drawing on decades of personal and clinical experience with practices including meditation, Reiki, and Healing Touch, Dr. Rao explores what we know about biofield therapies, what science has yet to uncover, and how rigorous research could help bring these approaches further into mainstream cancer care.

Visithttps://www.phenomenahealing.com/ to explore our curation of the latest research, stories, and resources on energy healing and biofield science.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

What is “energy” in energy healing? Every healer in this series uses the word. Every patient reaches for it. Ancient healing traditions built entire systems around it. And modern researchers are striving to study it.

But what is energy — biologically, physically, measurably — and how does it move through the body to influence health and healing? In this episode, three renowned scientists offer remarkable visions that, taken together, start to answer this question.

Martin Picard, PhD, of Columbia University has spent his career studying mitochondria, the body's cellular power sources, and has found them far more connected to our inner experiences, our consciousness, than biomedicine ever assumed, and likely far more central to how we heal.

Richard Hammerschlag, PhD, co-authored the paper that helped define the modern science of the biofield: the organizing fields of energy and information that operate within the body and extend outward from it. Like the nested Qi fields of older traditions, these are dynamic interrelating layers — energy running all the way in and likely all the way out.

Neil Theise, MD, of NYU helped identify the interstitium, a remarkable recent major discovery of a fluid-filled network running throughout the body. Consistent with the intuitions of ancient healing systems, it may help explain how signals fundamental to health and healing actually travel, a new communication network in the body previously overlooked by modern medicine.

Together, these three voices present a compelling, eye-opening, and deeply human vision of the body and mind not as a machine, but as a dynamic energetic ecosystem.

And to close out the season, we also welcome Jonathan Cohen, Co-Creator and Executive Producer of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, who joins Ivy and Meredith to help land these big ideas of energy, healing, and life.

Original music composed by Dan Baboulene.

Additional music by Starluxe.

Martin Picard: The Science & Experience of Energy

Richard Hammerschlag: Biofield Physiology: A Framework for an emerging discipline

Structure and Distribution of an Unrecognized Interstitium in Human Tissues

Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown Podcast: Overcome the Illusion of Separation, with Neil Theise

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

What happens in the space between a healer and the person they're healing? Is it technique? Trust? Belief? Or something science is only beginning to measure?

We begin with Laurie Nealon, an energy healer in Massachusetts, and Alan Brown, from Brisbane — lifelong friends who hadn't seen each other in years when Alan's family came to visit. Over dinner, Laurie saw something in Alan she recognized immediately. What followed was a 20-minute kitchen table healing session that Alan describes as the most paradigm-shifting experience of his life: fire through the top of his head, a thousand volts releasing through his heart, and the sudden sense of something he hadn't felt before. Connection. Love. The coping mechanisms he'd relied on for years fell away. His practice transformed.

Their story opens a question that takes us to two of the most rigorous researchers in the field. At Dartmouth, neuroscientist Tor Wager argues that the relationship, the belief, and the felt sense of being truly seen are not noise in the data — they are the data. At Harvard, Vitaly Napadow built a study to prove it: simultaneous brain imaging of clinician and patient in separate MRI machines, connected by live video, at the exact moment of treatment. His team found that the pairs whose brains showed the strongest synchrony achieved the greatest pain relief. The connection itself was part of what was healing them.

Science has found the instrument. It just hasn't found everything that plays through it.

Music composed by Dan Baboulene. Learn more and find resources at phenomenahealing.com.

Resources:

• Laurie Nealon Energy Healer
• Napadow Lab
• Find a Healer
• Brain-to-brain mechanisms underlying pain empathy
• Dynamic brain-to-brain concordance and behavioral mirroring as a mechanism

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

Ron served in Vietnam and witnessed many harrowing scenes in his Air Force career, both at home and abroad. Later in life, he found himself in need of a bilateral lung transplant. And while the surgery itself was a success, Ron fell victim to a surprisingly common post-op issue: ICU delirium. Most cases resolve fairly quickly, but for Ron and his memories of war and death, his delirium transformed into a monstrous form of PTSD—reality-shaking nightmares, every night, that lasted for years.

Ron was ready to give up when he was introduced to an energy healer named Maggie. What happened next is an inspirational story of healing and well-earned peace.

PTSD affects an estimated 13 million Americans and is notoriously hard to treat. Even among those who seek help, dropout rates can be as high as 54%. In an effort to treat this mental health crisis—as well as the incredibly common issue of chronic pain—the US military has participated in research that might at first seem surprising.

In addition to meeting Ron and Maggie, we'll also hear from Dr. Wayne Jonas, a retired Army physician and former NIH director, who has led numerous studies with the military into alternative treatments like acupuncture and healing touch. Treatments that might seem on the surface to be too "woo woo" for something like the military.

But there's a pragmatism at work here. The military is only interested in one thing—does it work? And as we'll see in the research, that answer is a resounding yes.

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Music composed by Dan Baboulene.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

For thousands of years, healers across cultures have described a life force that flows through the body — invisible, intelligent, and fundamental to health. In Chinese medicine, it's called Qi. And for centuries, western science has had no idea what to do with it.

Now, that might be changing.

At Harvard, researchers are finding physical evidence for something practitioners have mapped for millennia: pathways in the body that carry Qi called meridians. When scientists injected fluorescent dye at a specific acupuncture point on the wrist, it traveled up the arm through no known vessel — vein, artery, or lymphatic — and emerged exactly where ancient tradition said it would. The meridians, it turns out, may not be a metaphor.

But understanding what Qi is might matter less than understanding what you can do with it. Anne Hering has practiced Qigong every day for decades — not as a treatment for a specific condition, but as what traditional Chinese medicine calls yang sheng: the art of nourishing life. The chronic pain she was told she'd carry forever is gone. And she'll tell you the most important thing she learned wasn't a technique. It was that the body already knows how to heal — if you give it the right conditions.

Two Harvard scientists and a Qigong teacher in the Netherlands arrived at almost exactly the same definition of Qi — from completely different directions. What they converged on might change how you think about your own health.

Music composed by Dan Baboulene.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

Original Airing: 5/12/2026

Produced by Sounds True Studios.

Music composed by Dan Baboulene.

Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the latest in biofield science.

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. Be sure to visit us at https://www.phenomenahealing.com to find out the
latest in biofield science.