In fact, we had some evidence that it was necessary to get these animals to be quiet during the treatment period. Just putting them in the box, with them twisting and turning, trying to get out of the box, is not the state that we felt was the right one for them to accept the treatment. That kind of attitude of agitation and anxiety corresponds to what we would consider to be a negative attitude in people.

 

 To further quieten the animals, one or two weeks before the proper experiment began, we would gentle them; that is, we would quietly stroke their fur on the back. All mice were gentled in this way before it was known whether an animal was going to go into the control or the treated group.

 

 I want to emphasize that when we did these experiments, I used the same kind of experimental design as if I would have been testing a drug or food. In other words, we tried to make these experiments conform to the best that we knew how in biological experimentation. My problems at that time were to learn how to apply this laying on of hands treatment to the animals so as to give the treatment a fair trial.

 

We started our experiments by having Mr. E. lay hands on healthy adult mice to see if the growth of the mice would be accelerated, but we failed to see any remarkable change.

 

 From that time on, we began to work with animals that were sick in some way and in the first series of experiments we tested the effect of laying on of hands on the development of goiters in mice. We began here because Mr. E. said that he had success with this type of patient during the ten years he had worked in Hungary.

 

 Now, our mice were healthy to start with, but I made them goitrous artificially by giving them a diet, which was low in iodine, and also by incorporating into their diet a chemical (thiouracil), which prevents almost all of the iodine, which may be present in the animal's body from getting into the thyroid gland.

 

 So the combination of both the diet and thiouracil really caused the gland to grow.

 

 This was an artificial kind of goiter, and although it bears a resemblance to the type that you get in the human, in the latter there probably are factors other than just iodine deficiency to account for the appearance of the goiter. However, we didn't know of any goiters spontaneously arising in large numbers of animals and so we had to proceed as follows:

 

 On Day 0 of the experiment, we sacrificed six mice and we found that their normal thyroid weight was around two milligrams. Then I put them all on an iodine deficient diet for about 11 days, during which time the animals were still not separated into control and treated groups.

 

 On the eleventh day we sacrificed five more mice and we noted a slight increase in weight of the thyroid at this point. Then we put thiouracil in the drinking water, and from here on they had both the iodine deficient diet and thiouracil. We found earlier that if we gave both the diet and the chemical at the same time, the animals became ill with diarrhea and so had to gradually adapt them to this dietary treatment, which they were given until Day 39 of the experiment.

Silva Method Dynamics Center

Silva Mental Dynamics Center