|
|
Elisabeth Targ, M.D.
|
 Dr. Targ, is a psychiatrist, director of the Complementary Medicine Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. She is principal investigator for a four-year Department of Defense funded study comparing standard group psychotherapy vs. a mind/body/spirit exploration program for women with breast cancer and was principal investigator for the two CPMC studies of distant healing. She has focused work at her research institute on questions pertaining to the role of self-transcendence and intentionality in healing.
Dr. Targ’s career took a circuitous route in coming to do studies of spirituality and distant healing. She was raised in a non-religious academic household where her father, physicist Russell Targ, was pioneering research in remote viewing and parapsychology. Working in her father’s laboratory gave Dr. Targ early training in two principles 1) if you are very careful, you can design an experiment to test anything 2) if you do an experiment, you are obliged to accept your data and publish it (no matter how it comes out). The import of this is that just because your data doesn’t support what you always thought was true, it also doesn’t mean it was a fluke—it is still information.
In college and medical school Dr. Targ focused her research in the area of neurophysiology and psychopharmacology. However, despite a fascination with neurology of the brain, she felt psychiatry was the field that was asking the most interesting questions. As a young psychiatrist interested in mind-body medicine, she published studies comparing prozac vs. group therapy and imagery for people with AIDS. She was interested in how one’s thoughts and intentions might affect the body. Later, working in the acute inpatient units at San Francisco General Hospital, she noted that even highly-distressed patients often showed real transformation when introduced to contemplative work which brought them in touch with inner resources and the principle of universal connectivity.
Because of the combination of her background in psychoimmunology and parapsychology, in 1995 Dr. Targ was invited to join a project at California Pacific Medical Center investigating the role of spiritual exploration for women with breast cancer. Although she had no spiritual training, for the purposes of the project, Dr. Targ immersed herself in study of the great spiritual traditions and practices. With her colleagues, Drs. Ellen Levine and Robert Turner, she developed a curriculum for the patients involving meditation, yoga and contemplative work aimed at self-awareness, acceptance and transcendence. The benefits of the program were clear but even such a spiritually oriented program does not actually validate the spiritual principles, it simply shows that people who practice them feel better. It does not say why.
An additional piece in the puzzle came together when Targ and a colleague from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Fred Sicher, decided to collaborate on a project to look beyond the psychological/cultural aspects of spirituality and test the question of non-locality or intentionality in spiritual healing. Is spiritual healing about a belief system or a psychological relationship with a healer or is there some other force or connection at work. Targ acknowledges that she didn’t really think the experiments would work. She says she pursued them out of a sense of “ethical imperative.” People all over San Francisco were using (and paying for) this kind of healing and the medical establishment had no data one way or another as to whether or not it worked. When the first study was successful, she felt a second one had to be done before any conclusions could be drawn. With two studies from her own lab, now added to 150 in the literature, Targ feels that the concepts of universal connection and the ability of our intentions to shape our reality has to be taken very seriously.
Elisabeth Targ, M.D.,
California Pacific Medical Center,
2300 California Street, Suite 204
San Francisco, CA 94115.
tel:(415)923-6517
fax:(415)921-4117
|
|
|
|
