Vedic Sound Brings the Future of Medicine
Exerpts of an interview with Dr. Edwards Smith
by Helen Ederer of Enlightenment magazine, March 2001.
Edwards Smith, M.D. is a board-certified Rheumatologist with 32
years of clinical experience in the treatment of arthritis.
• Enlightenment: When did you first become interested in ways to address the pain and suffering of arthritis?
• Dr. Smith: My interest in this goes back to childhood. My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis, and when my grandfather died she came to live with us. I told her that I was going to medical school to find a cure for her problem.
• Enlightenment: How did you get involved in research on Maliarishi Vedic Vibration Technology (MVVT)?
• Dr. Smith: In 1997, I was invited to Europe to witness demonstrations of an ancient technique that was being used to address arthritis, as well as many other chronic health complaints. The first demonstration was in Berlin, and the results were truly incredible.
I saw patient after patient after patient go in the room and then come out saying that they were 60 percent, 80 percent, or even 100 percent improved. I never expected to see results like that. There were people literally going in on crutches and coming out with little or no pain.
So I became part of the research study to document these results. We spent several days in Berlin collecting data and then went on to France. It turned out that 176 out of 241 patients in the study had arthritic complaints. The most common category of relief from arthritis symptoms was 100 per cent improvement. There was nothing we knew of in medicine capable of giving this kind of result so quickly.
• Enlightenment: Could people have started feeling better due to their hope or expectation?
• Dr. Smith: We made sure that we completely controlled for expectation. Positive expectation produces an effect which is quite measurable in the body. If you take something that you think is going to help you, you'll definitely feel better. We call it the placebo effect. So when you are doing research, you want to make sure that the effect you see is not due to the placebo effect, but is really due to the intervention itself.
• Enlightenment: How did you control for the placebo effect?
• Dr. Smith: The MVVT program was administered by trained experts. Each expert had been given the knowledge of how to address only one kind of disorder. So one expert had the technique for musculoskelctal disorders, another for neurologic disorders, a third for gastrointestinal disorders, and so on.
This allowed us to expose the patients to two types of consultation: a control consultation — which was for a condition that they did not have: and an experimental consultation — which was for the condition that they did have. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either the control or experimental consultation.
The procedure was simple. Patients went into the room, received an MVVT consultation, and after a few minutes came out again. When we asked them how they felt, they might respond, for example, "I feel five per cent better." Then we would say, "We want you to go in and have another session." A person with only five-percent relief had most likely gotten the control consultation.
So they went back in and were seen by a different expert, one who addressed their real condition. When they came out the second time, we would ask, "How do you feel?" They would say, "Well, I feel 80 percent better. I can't believe it. It's just incredible."
We always asked them to score their improvement by percentage as precisely as they could. Some patients got a control consultation first, and others got an experimental consultation first. If the person getting a control consultation did not have complete relief, they were sent back for the experimental consultation.
• Enlightenment: Did the experts know whether they were giving a control or an experimental consultation?
• Dr. Smith: No, they didn't. This is how a "double-blind" study is run. The patient doesn't know whether the procedure is for their disorder or not, and the expert doesn't know whether the patient has the problem they are addressing. During a control consultation, for example, they may give a gastrointestinal procedure to someone with an arthritis disorder.
• Enlightenment: What were the results when you analyzed the data?
• Dr. Smith: They were remarkable. The significance of data — how likely it is that the results are due to chance — is determined through statistical analysis and expressed in terms of a "p" value. If there are only five chances in a hundred that your results are due to chance alone, that would correspond to a p value of .05 and would be considered statistically significant data.
With respect to pain and the arthritic syndromes, we got a p value of less than one to the minus 49th power. That's an infinitesimal amount. In clinical research, I've never seen p values like this before.
We also used a standard statistical measure called "effect size." Normally, if you have an effect size of .4 you might feel like you have done very good and significant research. We had effect sizes as high as 1.5, so the results were extremely significant when analyzed statistically.
• Enlightenment: You obviously found the statistics very convincing.
• Dr. Smith: Certainly, but when you saw those people coming out of the room and feeling incredible relief from chronic conditions, you didn't need statistics to know that something very important was going on. These people had chronic conditions for many years, some for as long as 41 years.
And it wasn't that they had not gone to physcians for care. The reason they had come to this program was that they hadn't found relief from the other modalities that they had tried. To see these people get such a dramatic response right on the spot, well, I hadn't seen anything like that before in my career. We knew that this wasn't due to the placebo effect, since we had done a controlled double-blind random assignment study. That made it all the more believable.
• Enlightenment: Has the research been published or presented at any scientific conferences?
• Dr. Smith: The paper we wrote up on this study is in the review process for publication and has cleared several hurdles. We hope it will be published soon. [*]
Last summer I submitted an abstract of this study to the New Mexico Chapter of the American College of Physicians, and it was accepted for a poster presentation at their fall meeting. Just the fact that the paper was accepted for presentation indicates a tremendous change in thinking within the medical profession, a greater openness to non-mainstream ideas for addressing arthritis.
• Enlightenment: You are so positive when you speak about what you witnessed in Europe.
• Dr. Smith: Well how could you not be, when you saw these people come out of the room so transformed by their experience. I'm a Rheumatologist, and I know what these people had. I've dealt with their problems for decades. To see them walk in the room and come out a few minutes later with such incredible improvement — and to see it over and over again, day in day out — it couldn't help but make a profound impression. I realised at that time that medicine had suddenly made a major change, that this was the medicine of the future.
[*] Since published in Frontiers in Bioscience, Vol 6, h7-17, April 1, 2001
Patient Personal Account from Mrs Tommie Lane
"I've been suffering for about 30years from osteoarthritis. I tried diet, food supplements, and liniments, yet my knees continued to trouble me and the joints in my hands started to distort. In trying this program, my hope was that I would find some relief from the distortion and the discomfort in my joints. I was not prepared for total, instant relief. I was astounded!
"Before the consultation my hands at times would not be able to close fully. After three sessions they not only close fully, but they're completely flexible.
"The discomfort in my knees was strongest
early in the morning. Ordinarily when I get out of bed I stand
very carefully at first before I start to walk. After one session
of the MVVT program I think I could have jumped out of bed! For
the first time in years the stiffness and discomfort of getting
out of bed in the morning was completely
gone.
"The results that I have had are increasing on a daily basis. I'm learning now to walk with grace and ease, where before I was an old lady waddling, trying to keep up. I am experiencing comfort where before I had discomfort and outright pain."
Enlightenment magazine, March 2001