Sure, Carol, I know you don't want fame for the sake of it. No well-adjusted person would. My point was just that something like that, carried out to correct standards, is not open to media manipulation.

As far as this being personal, if you go back a few hundred years then the wise women and apothecaries kept their herbal remedies secret and made rituals out of it. Early doctors were widely regarded as ineffectual, but they had no access to this body of knowledge, so all that they heard about was the rituals and not the contents of the herbal remedies. Today, we know that some of these herbal remedies would have had physical effects on the human body, and doctors (via the pharmaceutical industry) use them to heal people. But the first step was always finding what the herbs were and trying them out in controlled conditions. (And equally, we know that some of the herbal remedies and some of the doctors' techniques would have had no effect or actually been harmful, so not all old knowledge is good knowledge! ;-)

Now doctors today get some flak for not being open to the possibility of spiritual healing, especially in cases where "conventional medicine" has no answers yet. It seems there are two possibilities here. Firstly, people who practise "alternative therapies" can stay shtumm. Some of their patients will get better, some won't. The practitioners won't know why because they're not approaching it in the right way to test their therapies, nor will the patients, and no-one else with the same illness will ever be helped. Or secondly, people who practise "alternative therapies" can actively follow this stuff up. If it works, "alternative" will become "mainstream", and everyone with that illness, forever into the future, will be helped.

Maybe my mind just isn't set up to work with crystals. I've been into quite a few "mind-body-spirit" shops and felt nothing except occasional nausea from the incense sticks. ;-) But it seems to me that this is a time where "amateurs" rather than big business can really make a difference - it's in the same place that science, medicine and astronomy were 200 years ago. It seems odd to me that the people who could make a difference are prepared to say "we can do this" but then aren't prepared to take the next step towards backing it up which would benefit all humanity.

Bagpuss, thanks for that link - I'd forgotten about that one. :-)

Graham.