Bill I'm so sorry to hear about your mother-in-law. Again with regards to any 'healing' modality - regular or 'new age' - the best motto is caveat emptor - let the buyer beware! Be VERY aware!

Regarding the power of the mind over the physical, there have been several documented psychological studies over the years about the phenomena of 'voodoo deaths'. To quote from the text "Biological Psychology - Fourth Edition" by James Kalat (pg. 458):

"Almost everyone knows of someone with a strong will to live who survived well beyond other's expectations or someone who gave up and died of a relatively minor ailment. The extreme case of the latter is voodoo death in which a healthy person dies apparently just because he or she believes that some curse has destined death.

Such phenomena were generally ignored by scientists until Walter Cannon (1942) published a collection of reasonably well-documented reports of voodoo death. A typical example was a woman who ate a fruit and then was told that it had come from a taboo place. Within hours she was dead.

The common pattern in such cases was that the intended victim knew about the magic spells and believed that he or she was sure to die from them. The person's friends and relatives also believed in the hex and began to treat the victim as a dying person. Overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness, the victim refused food and water and died usually within 24-48 hours. In some manner the terror and hopelessness led to death. (for more examples see Cannon, 1942; Cappannari, Rau, Abram, & Buchanan, 1975; Wintrob, 1973). Similiar examples occur in our own society - not people who die because they believe they are hexed but people who sometimes die quickly because they expect to."

He goes on to explain that these deaths may occur through a mechanism such as scientist Curt Richter discovered while studying the swimming ability of rats. He found that if a rat's whiskers (critical to it's ability to find it's way around) were cut off immediately before being thrown into a tank of water, the rat, normally an excellent and tireless swimmer, would swim frantically for a minute or two and then suddenly sink to the bottom, dead. Autopsies showed that the rats had not drowned; their hearts had simply stopped beating.

Why the sudden death? Apparently the combination of the dewhiskering operation and being immediately thrown into a tank of
water terrified the poor creatures so that the parasympathetic nervous system (which governs the body's natural 'fight or flight' responses like elevated heart/respiratory rates in reaction to threatening situations) was overstimulated, and the rats suffered massive heart failure in response to the perceived 'hopeless' situation. If the rats were given a few days to get used to being dewhiskered before being thrown into the water, or if they were 'rescued' (pulled out of the water) a few times during their first swim, they did not die but swam strongly as rats usually do!

Anyway, sorry to go on so long but I find this pretty interesting 'evidence' of the power of the mind - of what is BELIEVED to be true - over both the life AND death of the physical body! And these studies are rather dated now - there's probably many more available today!

daylia