In part 1, I looked at Spring Forest Qigong’s webpage of research and found that they clearly misquoted research that showed no real benefit from Qigong as strongly showing that a healer can effectively beam energy and cause significant changes in a patient.  I started looking at the other abstracts they present and noting poor research design and differences between what the research actually showed and what the authors concluded it showed.  This is a very regular pattern in alternative medicine research.  It is sad, as the extraordinary claims of external Qigong healers would revolutionize the world of science and medicine if there was just one really good quality study verifying the ability to project or detect human energy at a distance without confounding variables such as suggestion, deception, or bias.

In part 2, I continued reviewing the lengthy research abstract PDF from the Spring Forest Qigong site and found the same pattern.  They didn’t organize or edit this PDF, and there are duplicate abstracts, abstracts that show absolutely zero benefit from Qigong, abstracts that are just someone’s ideas about what should be studied, and a few poor-quality Chinese studies with very questionable results.  Most studies show that Qigong is a form of exercise, and that doing it increases basic fitness.  It is rarely found to be better than other forms of exercise, and surprisingly, some studies show that for neck pain or knee arthritis, sitting around doing nothing produces the same results as exercise or Qigong.

Since I like to do a thorough job, and also would love to find some convincing research to open my mind to the possibility that Qigong has special benefits over other forms of exercise, I’m going to keep slogging through this PDF, and distilling the important points here for others to more quickly review. Continue reading →

In my last post, I started critically evaluating Qi Gong research as presented on the Spring Forest Qigong site.  While they sell courses teaching distance healing skills, Qi emission therapy, and suggest that these can have a significant effect upon cancer, HIV, comas, and more, the research they have copied to their site isn’t supportive of any of those claims (so far).  This was brought to my attention by a nice young man who had seen the research page and though those abstracts were solid evidence of external Qi abilities.  While I would like to see such abilities proven in good quality research, so far the studies just show exercise increases fitness.  I recently have read a few books about research design and the flaws in poor medical research methodology.  _Snake Oil Science_ and _Trick or Treatment_ were my favorites.  As an acupuncturist I wasn’t happy to face these facts, but as a truth-seeker, I found it important and fascinating.

Spring Forest Qigong’s research page has a link to a PDF of medical research abstracts about Qi Gong.  I didn’t realize how long it was when I started reviewing each abstract, pointing out what seems to me as obvious problems with research design, methodology, and skewed conclusions.  It appears that the Spring Forest folks grabbed every abstract they could find on Qigong and Taiji exercises and put them together.  It is possible that there is some great research in there, but so far, I haven’t found any.  So far, the most hopeful research has shown that Qigong exercises may help swimmers catch less colds, but the group was about 13 people and it could have been that they weren’t hanging out in public as much because they were home doing Qigong.  Another decent study looked at diabetes and found some slightly significant improvement in blood glucose levels in the Qigong group but no significant difference in other factors.  It was also a very small study, which reduces the significance of the findings.

I’ll be moving more quickly through this next group, but I plan to address them all so I’m not “cherry-picking” just the good or just the bad.  In this post I put the study title and the most important snippets from the abstract.  You may find reading the whole PDF interesting, and if you feel I missed something important, let me know if the comments.  I finished the first part with the 18th, so here we go: Continue reading →