In 2001, current Members of the Institute of Psionic Medicine, undertook to revise and update the book Psionic Medicine, that had first been published in 1974.

Dr Keith Souter coordinated this effort into what has now become recognised as the definitive work on the subject, and which is written in a form that is accessible to patients and practitioners alike.

Copies of the book are available from the Secretary to the Society

The Foreword to the 2001 Edition was written by Professor Ervin Laszlo:

"It is a genuine pleasure to write a Foreword to a book that makes a rare and significant contribution to our individual and collective wellbeing.  Psionic Medicine: the study and treatment of causative factors in illness acquaints the reader with the nature and accomplishments of that uniquely advanced branch of the science of healing that goes under the name of psionic medicine.   

I have the privilege of first-hand knowledge of the efficacy of this form of medicine, having been under psionic medical care for nearly a decade.  My personal experience confirms an insight I had also reached independently, by way of inference from the latest findings of the physical and biological sciences.  It is that the living organism is not a mere mechanism, and also not merely a biochemical system, but a complex system of molecular, cellular, and field components.  This is relevant, for psionic medicine acts not on the molecular or cellular components of the organism, but on the field that governs its molecular and cellular processes.

The affirmation of a field as a basic element in the living organism is not new in the history of 20th century biology.  As early as 1925, Viennese biologist Paul Weiss, inspired by Wolfgang Koehler’s Gestalt theory, applied the field concept to processes of limb regeneration in amphibians, and later he generalized the concept to all forms of ontogenesis.  On the basis of his experimental work Weiss concluded that the emergence of organs and tissues during development indicates that the emerging parts assume patterned spatial relations exhibited in geometric features of position, proportion, and orientation.  These, he said, are “field actions.”  Each species has its own morphogenetic field, and each individual’s morphogenetic field is a nested hierarchy of subsidiary fields. 

Likewise in the 1920s Russian biologist Alexander Gurwitch noted that the role of individual cells in embryogenesis is determined neither by their own properties nor by their relations to neighboring cells, but by a factor that seems to involve the entire developmental system.  This, he said, is a system-wide force field created by the mutual effect of the individual force-fields associated with cells.  The boundaries of the field of an embryo, for example, do not coincide with the boundaries of the embryo itself: they penetrate beyond it.  Embryogenesis, Gurwitch said, occurs within the embryo’s morphogenetic field. 

In 1934 Conrad Waddington introduced the idea of “individuation fields” active in the formation of organs, and in 1957 extended the field-idea to “chreods,” the developmental pathways of embryogenesis.  This notion was elaborated by René Thom in mathematical models that represent the state toward which the organism is developing by “basins of attraction” within morphogenetic fields.  In the 1950s Harold Saxton Burr of Yale University measured the electromagnetic properties of what he called the L (life) field, and his coworkers showed that this field vanishes at the death of the organism. 

Although biological field-theories were pioneered in the 1920s and attained wide popularity in mid-century, the physical properties of the fields were not well defined and in subsequent decades interest in them declined.  In embryology, for example, biochemical methods did not enable researchers to discover the nature of the fields that would govern limb polarity, neural patterning, lens induction, and other developmental processes.  Field concepts came to be regarded as speculative, and in recent years only a handful of investigators persisted in producing biological field theories.  For the most part, biologists shifted their attention to the biochemistry of specific genetic mechanisms, a powerful approach that yielded a plethora of practical applications.

In the last few decades, however, though less known than research into genetic codes and mechanisms, field concepts resurfaced at the leading edge of biological research.  Canadian biologist Brian Goodwin advanced a field-based concept of regeneration and reproduction, processes in which a whole is generated from a part.  These, he said, cannot be viewed solely in terms of germ plasm and DNA, but must be seen as arising from the field properties of living organisms.  Biological fields generate spatial orders that influence the activity of genes, and gene activity in turn influences the fields.  The field is the unit of form and organization, while the molecules and cells that make up the body are the units of composition: fields structure them into the order that characterizes the organism.  Life is a “sacred dance” of cells within organisms, and of organisms within their milieu, where biological fields keep the partners in step.  Rupert Sheldrake, in turn, put forward the “hypothesis of formative causation” according to which morphic fields are associated with all living organisms and are responsible for their ongoing morphogenesis. 

Of course, the presence of complex fields associated with cellular matter has never been contested in biology—the evidence uncovered in biophysics brooks no contradiction.  However, in the mainstream of the biological sciences the role and function of the electric, magnetic, and other fields associated with cellular matter have not been considered of major relevance for the functioning of the organism, mere secondary effects produced by biochemically communicating cells, tissues, and organs.  The current rediscovery of biological fields constitutes a fundamental shift in emphasis.  It is like the “figure-ground switch” described by Gestalt psychologists, where the visual perception of an image is snapped back and forth between seeing one of its aspect as figure and another as ground.  In mainstream biology and medicine the figure is the assembly of organic molecules constituting the cell, while the fields produced by cellular communication—insofar as they are taken into account at all—are seen as the real but physiologically and medically insignificant background.  By contrast in leading-edge research the same as in alternative medicine the figure is the field, and the molecules, cells and organs on which it acts the ground.

The current Gestalt-switch comes about both in view of the experimental discovery of wide-ranging and quasi-instant interaction within the organism, and in light of alternative medicine’s discovery of subtle yet effective interaction between doctor and patient.  It appears that the living organism is an instantaneously interconnected system that maintains itself in its milieu as a whole, suffers damage as a whole, but can also heal itself as a whole.  These features depend crucially on the field-coordination of the organism’s vast number and wide variety of molecular and cellular processes. 

Recognizing the primacy of fields in the maintenance and reestablishment of health is fundamental for contemporary medicine.  In this concept the functioning of the organism does not approximate the workings of a machine, hence simple kinetic manipulations have corrective value only in specific cases such as, for example, those treated by chiropractors.  The functioning of the organism is also not fully and adequately represented by the concept of a biochemical system, and consequently the allopathic treatments prescribed by conventional Western medicine likewise have limited application.  The complement to mechanistic and biochemical treatment is alternative medicine’s field-based therapy, convincingly exemplified in psionic medicine.

Psionic medicine’s motto “tolle causam” (search for the cause) is eminently warranted.  Treating the field of the organism means treating the basic aspect of the living state, the one that in the cybernetic sense “governs” the orchestrated interaction of the organism’s myriad biochemical components.  Sickness is an impairment of the integrity of the organism’s governing field, and it is properly and effectively treated as such.  By comparison treating the biochemical processes of the patient means treating the entailed consequences of the impairment of his or her biofield, rather than the cause of the ailment, which is the impairment of the field itself.  Conventional treatment, illustrated for instance by the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, involves unnecessarily drastic measures, like shooting at mosquitos with cannonballs.  Treating the organism’s governing field is far less invasive and more efficient. 

A further aspect of psionic medicine meriting comment is its functioning across any hitherto tested finite distances.  This at first sight mind-boggling remote-diagnostic—and in some cases also remote-healing—feature is accounted for when we recognize that the field embedding and governing the cellular and multicellular organism is a quantum field.  This is not an ad hoc assumption: it follows from the finding that the scope of biological coherence transcends the scope of biochemical signal transmission, even if some biochemical signalling is remarkably effective.  The coherence exhibited by living organisms (the simultaneous and quasi-instant correlation of all its parts with all its other parts) is a form of quantum-coherence—the kind of coherence that can only be explained in reference to the concepts and laws of quantum theory.  Biologists in the emerging discipline of quantum biology speak of the “macroscopic wavefunction of the organism” and view living tissue as a Bose-Einstein condensate where effects analogous to superfluidity and superconductivity occur at ordinary temperatures.  

Theories and concepts coming to the fore at cutting-edge biology indicate that the organism’s biofield is a specific manifestation of a more fundamental quantum field—a field that mediates interaction throughout physical nature.  The biofield is a local structure within a wider and more basic field: the field that independently of each other both this writer and the founders of psionic medicine termed “psi field.”  The writer’s theory of the psi field offers a natural-science-account of the space- and time-transcending transmission of information coming to light in the practice of psionic medicine. 

Psionic medicine heralds the dawn of a new era in medical practice, with health-maintaining and curative potentials that are a significant addition to the repertory of treatment developed in biochemical medicine.  In psionic medicine the critical factor is not chemistry and surgical intervention—though such methods remain indicated in some cases—but subtle “informational” inputs that affect the patient’s biofield. The book in the hands of the reader provides a remarkably clear and concise overview of what psionic medicine is, how it works, and why it deserves the kind of attention that presently only molecular and genetics-based breakthroughs are accorded.  It merits serious and urgent attention by the general lay public and the medical profession alike.