Helical Heart

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A New Look at Circulation: The Helical Heart and the Microvascular Flow

As for many others, my interest in the topic of the helical heart started with a man named Francisco “Paco” Torrent-Guasp (1931–2005), a brilliant Spanish cardiologist whom I met forty years ago at a conference. When I met him, I told myself, “This man is either mad or a genius.”

In a posthumous tribute, British cardiac surgeon Donald N. Ross noted how Torrent-Guasp fundamentally challenged accepted dogma.¹ In the early 1970s, when Torrent-Guasp first started making his unconventional ideas known, the heart “was perceived to be a simple, thick muscular organ.” In his communications with Ross at that time, Torrent-Guasp lamented that “none of his associates took him seriously, nor attempted to study his meticulous dissections aimed at establishing the intricate structure of the heart muscle.” Even after forty years of careful study, no one initially believed Torrent-Guasp when he announced, “The heart is not a pump—it’s a double helix.”

Later, as Ross describes, conventional cardiology belatedly attempted “to keep up with [Torrent-Guasp’s] anatomical revelations,” but by then, the out-of-the-box Spanish cardiologist had “turned his thoughts to not only the structural details but also to the increasingly intriguing action of the heart,” which conventional circles largely viewed as an “unsolved enigma.” In the remainder of this article, I will describe how Torrent-Guasp and pioneers in the field of energy medicine helped to reshape our thinking about the heart’s structure and function.

AN ANATOMICAL MODEL WITH A TWIST

According to the classical understanding of heart anatomy (Figure 1), the heart has two atria, two ventricles, the septum (a wall of tissue separating the left and right atria and ventricles), the aorta coming from the left ventricle and the pulmonary valve that lies between the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery. Seemingly, it’s all very clear. (After all, it’s in the textbooks!)

Following a heart transplant, clinicians and researchers sometimes dissect or otherwise analyze the explanted (native) heart to study its anatomy and pathology.² When I met Torrent-Guasp, I was the medical chief of the Heart Failure and Transplant Unit at Hospital Santa Creu in Barcelona. He told me, to my astonishment, that if you boil a heart for thirty minutes to soften its collagen structure, you can easily separate the atria from the ventricles with your bare hands—no scissors or scalpel needed. I was so impressed by this statement that I told my surgeon, “We must get him here when we do our next heart transplant so that we can watch him unroll an explanted heart before our very eyes.”

When we had a scheduled transplant, I called Paco (who lived six hundred kilometers away in the southern province of Alicante) and asked him to come demonstrate in person. He drove fantastically fast to Barcelona and was in a pathology room at seven the next morning dissecting a boiled heart. He made a film for us demonstrating how to sequentially unfold the ventricular myocardial band with one’s hands. (The only time you need scissors is to cut the left trigone—thick connective tissue—to release the aorta.) When you get to the point of releasing the left ventricular cavity, that is when the “magic” happens because then the heart can be unrolled. In simple terms, you can “unravel” the heart into a “continuous myocardial band that extends from the pulmonary artery to the aorta,”³ with a one-hundred-eighty-degree twist in the middle section (Figure 2).⁴

When Paco was in Barcelona, we repeated the process with bovine hearts and painted the various segments so as to see exactly where the segments were going: from the right ventricle to the left ventricle, then spiraling down the descending segment and then up the ascending segment. Then we re-rolled them and sectioned them in longitudinal and transversal cuts, as though we were doing echocardiography. When we looked at the superposed layers, we could clearly see that the heart is not homogeneous.

Paco had critics who claimed that his manual dissection produced a continuous band merely because of where he placed his fingers, but that is not true. The fibers of the heart are surrounded by structured water, and a type of magnetic resonance called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) can take advantage of that fact to study the pathway of the fibers of the heart. I have co-authored papers with a computer scientist named Ferran Poveda from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who devised a way of summarizing the pathways of all the fibers. In our conclusion to a paper published in 2013, we stated that DTI objectively reveals “a continuous helical myocardial fiber arrangement of both right and left ventricles, supporting the anatomical model of the helical ventricular myocardial band [HVMB] described by F. Torrent-Guasp.”⁵

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

In a 2006 article, Paco and I wrote, “The fundamental question should be ‘what do we really know about normal and diseased heart structure and function?’ rather than becoming boxed-in by prior conceptions.”⁶ The fact is that Torrent-Guasp’s HVMB model changed everything and introduced important implications for cardiology. Discussing the first critical implication, we argued in a 2011 paper that the understanding of the heart “as a single myocardial band adopting spatially a double-helical structure” requires a reconsideration of how the ventricles exert their function.⁷

In simple terms, the HVMB model tells us that there is no such thing as “squeeze” or “unsqueeze” the heart, as the conventional understanding would have it—instead, the real movement of the heart is “twist” and “untwist.” In systole, the base comes down, but the apex remains. This is due to the “motor” of the heart, which is the descending segment that contracts in systole. When it contracts in systole, the ascending segment becomes horizontal. In diastole, contraction pulls the base of the heart up for the diastolic movement. Stated another way (and contrary to standard explanations), diastole is mostly active, not passive—it’s a contraction, but in the context of a double-helix heart. It may seem counterintuitive to say that a contraction can expand the heart, but it does. This is why one must understand the helical mechanism.

A second implication has to do with reinterpretation of the electrocardiogram (ECG). The classical interpretation (found in all cardiology and ECG textbooks) defines the ECG’s three waves as follows:

1. The P wave is considered to be a marker of atrial activation.
2. The QRS is interpreted as ventricular “activation” or “depolarization.”
3. The T wave is described as the electrical recovery phase or “repolarization.”

The QRS wave—which shows up on the ECG monitor as the peak—is said to represent a quick electrical impulse that “follows a radial distribution from endocardium to epicardium.”⁸ This interpretation arose because in 1956, someone stuck an electrode inside the heart and another one outside the heart, and the first one to show activation was the endocardium, followed by the epicardium. However, the conclusions reached in the 1950s about the movement of electricity from endo- to epicardium relied on the methodology and technology available at the time3 and also predated Torrent-Guasp’s groundbreaking reconceptualization of ventricular architecture. Through the lens of the HVMB model, it becomes apparent that the electrical pathways cannot pass in this way from endocardium to epicardium. The sequence of electromechanical activation—which is base-to-apex, not apex-to-base⁹ as described by conventional cardiology—is what counts.

In a study published in 2008 by researchers at the Laboratory of Cardiac Energetics at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),¹⁰ the authors include a figure (their Figure 4) showing that when the QRS wave has ended, the myocardium has not even started to contract. If there is no movement in the myocardium yet, it is erroneous to interpret the QRS as the “ventricular activation.” This in turn requires that we rethink the T wave. In a 2016 paper, we wrote, “We believe that the T wave might reflect the electromagnetic field associated with the mechanical activity of the working myocardium and the blood motion.”⁸ In short, the T wave is the electromagnetic counterpart of mechanical activity, not “repolarization.” This is very important because it puts the T wave in the center of ECG evaluation.

HELICAL HEART AS FIELD ANTENNA

A principle of quantum physics is that the heart is both a particle (matter) and a wave or field. In fact, the heart is the body’s most powerful field of magnetic induction.

James Oschman, who wrote Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, knew of Torrent-Guasp long before I did. Torrent-Guasp gave him a model of the heart, and Oschman immediately understood that the heart is an antenna. Oschman describes this in his 2015 paper, “The Heart as a Bi-directional Scalar Field Antenna.”¹¹ Why an antenna? Because the double helix is a non-orientable geometric surface that is essentially a Möbius strip.

The one-hundred-eighty-degree twist described previously is the key to understanding that the ventricular architecture is a Möbius strip. The Möbius strip, in turn, is one of the configurations used to document something called the Aharonov-Bohm effect,¹² which relates nonlocal quantum space with magnetic fields. As Oschman puts it, “the heart’s energy fields. . . are coupled to fields of information that are not bound by the limits of time and space.”¹¹

 

What information does the cardiac antenna convey? This is still an open question, but there are several possibilities. The first possibility is simply emotions. In a 1995 paper,¹³ Rollin McCraty (executive vice president and research director at the HeartMath Institute) reported on the effects of emotions on heart rate variability (HRV), finding that positive emotions led to beneficial alterations in HRV. A second role of the cardiac antenna could be the sense of wellbeing. In 2021, a conference paper I coauthored with Barcelona engineer Joaquim Comas and others discussed the positive short-term impact of polarity therapy on physiological signals in patients with chronic anxiety.¹⁴

Intuition is a third possible role for the antenna. In another paper by McCraty and coauthors published in 2004,¹⁵ they discussed “the surprising role of the heart” in intuitive perception. The authors wrote, “It appears that the heart is involved in the processing and decoding of intuitive information” and is “processed in the same way as conventional sensory input.” Finally, McCraty has written about the heart’s role in synchronizing body fields.¹⁶ In Figure 3 (next page), which shows heart rate, respiration and blood pressure, you can see that the left looks a bit chaotic, whereas the right side is almost identical in all three aspects. In the span of five minutes, visualizing a loving situation leads to synchronization of every field of the body via the heart! The heart rate, respiration and blood pressure become coherent and synchronized. A coherent state is marked by the feeling, “wow, it’s all one.” Everything synchronizes, like an orchestra with an excellent conductor. Can an orchestra do without a conductor? Yes, but this perfection—this state of coherence—can only be attained with a good conductor in charge.

QUESTIONING THE PUMP

According to the esoteric philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the heart cannot be understood as a hydraulic pump. Ralph Marinelli and coauthors summarized Steiner’s observations and presented experimen tal corroboration in an ingenious 1995 paper titled, “The Heart Is Not a Pump: A Refutation of the Pressure Propulsion Premise of Heart Function.”¹⁷

If the heart is not a pump, we have to ask, what is the force behind the blood’s movement? Austrian-born osteopath, chiropractor and naturopath Randolph Stone (1890–1981), who mentored my polarity teacher Dr. Jim Feil, studied many different health systems, including India’s Ayurvedic system, writing marvelous (though challenging to understand) books about energy therapy and “the conscious art of living well.” He pioneered polarity therapy, a biofield energy therapy that combines Eastern and Western techniques—both hands-on and touchless—to improve the flow and balance of energy within body and mind.¹⁸ Stone said that the circulation has more to do with energy circuits and waves than with mechanical forces of the heart as a pump. In his view, if the blood is not circulating freely, it is really the energy circuit that is at fault, and if you remove blocks in the field, you can restore normal circulation. He wrote, “The outward and inward currents must move in all fields if there is to be health and happiness.” He continued, “The heart center is the pivot for the circulation of these energies through the blood. . . and becomes the control center for these energies.”¹⁹

Another observation about the flawed pump theory has to do with something called the Bourdon Effect. The Bourdon Effect is associated with the pressure elongation of piping and pipeline systems, that is, the “tendency of pipe bends to open up under internal pressure force.”²⁰ You can use a mechanical gauge called a Bourdon tube (a curved, hollow tube that straightens when pressure is applied) to measure pressure.²¹ Dr. Tom Cowan describes this very well in Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, using the example of a coiled hose; if you turn on the water, the hose straightens. Interestingly, in a 1951 paper in the journal Circulation, when researchers studied the changes in configuration of the ventricles during the cardiac cycle, they observed, “[I]t is worth noting that, contrary to the principle of the [Bourdon] tube, the aortic arch assumed a greater curvature during periods when its luminal pressure was increased” [emphasis added].²² What the authors were pointing out was that during cardiac ejection (systole), contrary to what the Bourdon Effect would lead us to expect, the aortic arch does not open, it closes. That fact is impossible to explain if you assume that the heart is a pump.

Again, if the heart is not a pump, we have to ask, what is the mechanism? It turns out that the mechanism has to do with negative pressures in the aortic arch and vortex dynamics—like a tornado. Papers looking at the aortic arch have identified vortical mechanisms, showing that correlated with an increased aortic arch diameter is “the presence and strength of supraphysiologic-helix and vortex formation” in the aortic arch.²³

You can use Doppler cardiac imaging of the red blood cells to measure blood flow. Italian researchers wrote in 2014 that evaluation of blood flow “presents a new paradigm in cardiac function analysis.”²⁴ Discussing cardiac “vorticity,” they explained:

“Vortices have a crucial role in fluid dynamics. The stability of cardiac vorticity is vital to the dynamic balance between rotating blood and myocardial tissue and to the development of cardiac dysfunction. Moreover, vortex dynamics immediately reflect physiological changes to the surrounding system, and can provide early indications of long-term outcome.”

What drives this dance of the blood? Recognizing that the heart is the highest magnetic induction organ of the body, the plausible hypothesis is that the heart is magnetic, not mechanical. The idea is that the cardiac field “sucks” the blood along the large pulsatile vessels in the form of vortices.

ENTER THE BIOFIELD

The concept of the magnetic heart gives rise to another question: Could expansion of the energetic biofield increase circulation? I have already mentioned a study we did that validated energy therapy in twenty-five patients with chronic anxiety but a normal heart.¹⁴ Polarity therapy (the intervention) essentially expands the biofield. After a single thirty-minute session, we observed immediate reductions in blood pressure as well as reduced heart rate, reduced body temperature, a reduction in sympathetic activity and an increase in parasympathetic activity. I have stopped giving drugs to my hypertensive patients because all they need are two or three sessions of polarity therapy; the body learns how to not react. When you expand the biofield, the autonomic sympathetic activity goes to sleep. In our study, we also observed increased cardiac coherence and a greater sense of well-being, with the latter reported subjectively but also measured objectively by television monitors that could detect micro-changes in facial expression.

In terms of cardiology, our polarity therapy results showed an increased cardiac pulse and increased efficiency of the ventricular function. Let’s look more closely at those. First, when we calculated the area under the curve (AUC) for the cardiac pulse before and after treatment, we found a statistically significant difference. Merely expanding the biofield increased the cardiac pulse.¹⁴ Even in patients who had a normal heart rate at baseline—in other words, a normal ECG—biofield therapy improved circulation.

To assess ventricular efficiency after biofield therapy, we looked at the T wave AUC as a marker of electromagnetic ventricular activity. Before treatment, the T wave AUC was large, and after treatment, the area was smaller. Why? Because the heart works more efficiently when the biofield expands.¹⁴

A LOOK AT THE ARTERIOLES

What about the tiny arterioles and capillaries, which are another critical aspect of the circulation? To understand what is happening there, it is important to know that in the arterioles, there is a basal membrane, a thin (but very important) muscle layer and an endothelium. In comparison, the capillaries only have the basal membrane and the endothelium—but no muscle component.

In the arteriole vessel wall, the endothelium is a cellular monolayer (that is, a single layer of cells), and beneath the endothelium is the smooth muscle. A gas called nitric oxide (NO) keeps the arteries open and regulates vascular tone. NO is produced via a very short metabolic pathway: the amino acid L-arginine, via nitric oxide synthase (NOS) enzymes, produces NO, which flows to and dilates the smooth muscle. (In other words, we are constantly being dilated by a gas.)

Decreased NO is a marker of endothelial dysfunction. In fact, a method to detect impairment of NO synthesis is to assess endothelial function using acetylcholine.²⁵ If you see vasodilatation, the endothelium is normal, but if you observe vasoconstriction, that is a sign of an altered endothelium. Again, this is in the arterioles, which have the muscle layer.

Patients who have chronic dilated cardiomyopathy have enlarged hearts that are not contracting—poor function. It is one of the diseases that often points toward a heart transplant, because seemingly there is no other solution. Curiously, however, there appears to be no organic basis for the dysfunction.^26,27 In 2002, we published a study on coronary endothelial dysfunction and myocardial cell damage in chronic idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy.²⁸ We found that spasm in the arterioles (or what researchers termed “microvascular hyperreactivity”²⁹ in a 1982 paper) was correlated with myocardial cell damage. The more spasm, the more myocyte damage. We were able to quantify the degree of damage according to the degree of spasm.

FOURTH-PHASE WATER AND THE HEART

What is the cause of the endothelial dysfunction and myocyte damage that we observed in chronic dilated cardiomyopathy? To answer this question, we must turn to the capillary circulation. At the level of the aorta and its main branches, circulation is pulsatile—the vortex dynamics are clear. However, at the microvascular level, pulsatility does not exist because capillary circulation is continuous and, as already mentioned, there is no muscle there.

At the capillary level, energization of the capillaries by the exclusion zone of the fourth phase of water (as described by the brilliant Gerald Pollack) can explain blood flow. Everyone should read Dr. Pollack’s marvelous book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor.³⁰ Pollack tells us that if you put small particles in a glass of water, the particulated water does not reach the glass. He calls this structured or liquid crystalline water the “exclusion zone” (EZ).

When the EZ is built, water, which is neutral, divides into negative charges (electrons) and positive charges (protons and hydrogen ions). Functionally, this creates a battery, but it’s not free—it requires energy to stay like this. As Pollack writes, “some energy [has] to sustain the charge separation once it [is] established.”³⁰ Where does the energy come from? The sun! Specifically, explains Pollack, “The vehicle of energy supply [is] radiant electromagnetic energy—which the water absorbs and uses for building the EZ and maintaining the attendant charge separation.” In the presence of sun (or infrared radiation), you can create a battery that runs forever. Importantly, EZ size is proportional to the intensity of the light energy. If you illuminate a glass of water, the exclusion zone increases.

The exclusion zone sticks to hydrophilic surfaces, and in humans, the cellular mitochondria are full of hydrophilic membranes. As it happens, the hydrogen ions formed in the exclusion zone are the substrate for ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the body’s energy currency. British scientist Peter Mitchell (1920–1992) received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1978 for describing the synthesis of ATP from the hydrogen ions. The elegant implications of Pollack’s work are that there is a relationship between the division of charges in the structured water in our body and our production of ATP.

If you immerse a tube with a hydrophilic surface in a glass of water, it will induce a spontaneous flow. The driving force comes from the radiant energy absorbed and stored in the water. This observation takes us back to the capillaries: capillary circulation is the result of the energy absorbed and stored in the exclusion zone. This is the same mechanism that drives water up a three-hundred-foot sequoia tree against the force of gravity.

In a fascinating study published in 2023, Pollack and coauthor Zheng Li showed that an infrared-dependent, blood-vessel-based flow-driving mechanism operates in the circulatory system, “complementing the action of the heart.”³¹ Considering “the possibility that, by exploiting this mechanism, blood vessels, themselves, could propel flow,” they stopped the heart of a three-day-old chick embryo and monitored the microcirculation. They observed that blood continued to flow, albeit at a lower velocity, for fifty minutes—and when they introduced infrared energy, the postmortem flow increased. In other words, in the setting of a stopped heart, flow velocity increased with exposure to infrared energy and diminished without it. The finding that energy in the form of light is a driving force in the capillaries is a major scientific contribution.

Summing up, we can observe that helical suction by the cardiac field provides the driving force in the arteries and arterioles, while capillary flow is made possible by the fourth phase of water, energized by the sun. Blood circulation is a fascinating dance between two energetic forces.

ENERGY THERAPY

Once again, we can ask, does energy therapy increase the efficiency of microcirculation, and how? In a normal biofield, you have normal microcirculation. In a blocked biofield, you have less energy, reduced exclusion zone, less ATP and impaired microcirculation. Patients say, “I feel blocked.” However, these physiologic indicators are actually defense mechanisms; the person has contracted their biofield because of emotions.

Could emotions be a cause of dilated cardiomyopathy? Medicine does not consider the possibility of emotions being the origin of heart conditions because it deems emotions physiologically irrelevant. However, when UCLA neurologist Valerie Hunt (1916–2014) measured electromagnetism around the body, she unequivocally concluded that emotions organize the biofield. In an expanded cardiac field, your heart is okay, but in a blocked biofield, you may have a broken heart. In the framework of Indian chakras, we’re talking about the third (solar plexus) and fourth (heart) chakras. Grief, disappointment, betrayal, solitude and frustration can all close your biofield—and close your cardiac field as well. When the heart’s energy field closes, it is like entering a tunnel when you’re on the phone—you’ve lost reception and the information cannot reach you. Another way of describing it is that the conductor is missing the sheet music—and music is directed by the conductor, not the musicians. When you open the cardiac field, suddenly the conductor has the sheet music.

As I began learning about energy medicine, I learned that magnetic induction with the hands is very powerful. With the hands, you can expand the biofield and literally release a broken heart. Without needing years of training, everyone can do this. I taught my daughter how to move energy with her hands when she was fourteen, and when her classmates were anxious, they would come to her to feel better. When you put your hands on a person who is suffering from anxiety, you can relieve it within minutes. People have done this for thousands of years.

Beyond alleviating anxiety, I have three cases that show that you can use energy therapy to reverse more serious conditions like dilated cardiomyopathy. In my very first case, a seventy-year-old woman had been diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy at age fifty-five, characterized by progression of heart failure. Her clinical symptoms appeared when the first of her four daughters, against her strong religious beliefs, decided to divorce. From her perspective, this was a family disaster, and she experienced great sorrow and anger. One year after polarity therapy opened her third and fourth chakras, her ventricular function had returned to normal—a complete reversal of cardiac dysfunction.

My second case was a forty-eight-year-old man. During a vacation in France, he learned that he had been fired. Experiencing a great sense of betrayal and disappointment, he developed chest pain and breathlessness and progressed to ventricular failure so severe that he was put on the waiting list for a heart transplant. After energy therapy, he gradually improved, and one year later, his heart was normal. He no longer had any need to be on the waiting list.

My third case was a sixty-year-old architect sent for a heart transplant. Severe heart failure had arisen ten years previously, coinciding with the cancer death of his nine-year-old son. After energy therapy, he experienced his son telling him, “Dad, it was not in your hands [to cure me]. Don’t blame yourself. I told you I was going to die.” He had not recalled his son’s death prediction, but this procedure transformed him, relieving him of his grief and guilt. Within a few months, his heart was normal.

These three individuals are but a small sample of the patients I’ve seen over the years. Their cases show that energy therapy can improve and even reverse heart failure. The dramatic reconceptualization of the heart’s structure and function launched by Torrent-Guasp has led us far beyond the confines of conventional cardiology.

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SIDEBARS

FRANCISCO TORRENT-GUASP
When Spanish cardiologist Francisco “Paco” Torrent-Guasp passed away in 2005, fellow cardiologist Juan Cosín Aguilar, one-time president of the Spanish Society of Cardiology, wrote a tribute to his mentor and close friend in the Revista Española de Cardiología (Spanish Journal of Cardiology).³² Aguilar commented, “It was [British cardiology expert] Jane Somerville who, in 1970, in London had likened Paco to Leonardo da Vinci in the quality of his paintings (what Somerville did not know was that Paco was indeed a painter; he even once exhibited in Paris) and also in that he was a product that could easily be exemplary of the time and places of the Renaissance. Paco was cultured, wise, extremely curious, imaginative, spontaneous, unconventional, nonconformist, enthusiastic, committed, and well-endowed with common sense. . . . Dr. Torrent-Guasp was a free-minded individual, master of his own time and his own arguments. To know him you had to listen with a mind free from fears and totally without prejudice.”

According to Aguilar, Torrent-Guasp became interested in the heartʼs functioning while still a medical student in the mid-1950s and “thought it strange that. . . an impossible mechanism should be considered viable.” That impulse of disbelief in conventional explanations led him to conduct microscope studies and then to dissect hearts “from all kinds of animals,” with much of his research self-financed. Aguilar went on to explain:

“In 1973, for the first time in history, [Torrent-Guasp] described the structure of the heart as a band of muscle that starts at the pulmonary artery entry-point and ends below the aorta exit, wrapping itself into a double helical coil that bounds both ventricular cavities with a wall to separate them. Taking this architecture as his basis, in 1997 he presented a theory that provided an explanation as to how progressive contraction of the band accounted for the ejection and suction of the blood. By then, it was 43 years later. . . . Dr Torrent-Guaspʼs cardiac structure is now [in 2005] the anatomy of the heart.”

GIANTS IN THE STUDY OF THE HEART AND ENERGY MEDICINE
In addition to Francisco Torrent-Guasp, there are a number of other intellectual giants—past and present—who have contributed to our knowledge of the heart and energy medicine. Those who are no longer with us include:
• Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925): Dr. Tom Cowan introduced me to Steinerʼs brilliant thinking about the heart.
• Dr. Randolph Stone (1890–1981): Stone was a doctor of osteopathy, chiropractic and naturopathy who studied the Ayurvedic and Oriental systems of medicine as well as the folk health practices of various cultures. Synthesizing East and West, he developed a type of energy medicine called polarity therapy (polaritytherapy.org).³³
• Harold Saxton Burr (1889–1973): At Yale, Burr made significant contributions to the study of the nervous system and bio-energetic phenomena, building our understanding of the human biofield.³⁴
• Robert O. Becker (1923–2008): Twice nominated for a Nobel Prize, orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker was a pioneer in the study of bioelectricity. In 1998, he published the seminal book, The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life.³⁵
• Valerie Hunt (1916–2014): An emeritus professor of physiological sciences at UCLA, Hunt is credited with being the first scientist to measure the human bioenergy field in a laboratory.³⁶
Important thinkers who are still with us include Dr. Tom Cowan, author of Human Heart, Cosmic Heart³⁷ and familiar, of course, to the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) audience. Others include:
• Rollin McCraty: McCraty is executive vice president and research director at the HeartMath Institute. As a psychophysiologist, McCraty has broadened our understanding of the physiology of emotion and the influence of emotions on health.³⁸
• Gerald Pollack: Dr. Pollack is widely known for his groundbreaking work on the fourth phase of water.³⁹
• Caroline Myss: Myss writes and speaks about the fields of human consciousness, spirituality and mysticism, health, energy medicine and the science of medical intuition.⁴⁰
• James Oschman: Physiologist, cellular biologist and biophysicist Oschman is the author of the 2000 book, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis.⁴¹ A second edition was published in 2015.
• Jim Feil: My polarity therapy teacher, Dr. Jim Feil, studied with polarity therapy founder Dr. Randolph Stone and has been training other polarity therapists since 1976.⁴²

IRON AND THE CARDIAC FIELD
The conclusion that helical suction by the cardiac field provides the driving force in the arteries and arterioles leads to the question, what is the element that is the target of the cardiac magnetic fieldʼs suction? I believe that, just as an ordinary magnet attracts iron, it is the iron atom in each one of the four oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules. This would explain the severe anemia observed in patients with chronic heart failure,⁴³ which has always been somewhat of a medical enigma.⁴⁴

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REFERENCES

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2. Song J, Xing Y, Chen X, et al. Processing of the explanted heart. N Am J Med Sci. 2014 Dec;6(12):613-617.

3. Coghlan HC, Coghlan AR, Buckberg GD, et al. “The electrical spiral of the heart”: its role in the helical continuum. The hypothesis of the anisotropic conducting matrix.Suppl 1:S178-S187.

4. Ballester M, Ferreira A, Carreras F. The myocardial band. Heart Failure Clinics. 2008;4(3):261-272.

5. Poveda F, Gil D, Martí E, et al. Helical structure of the cardiac ventricular
   anatomy assessed by diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging with multiresolution tractography. Rev Esp Cardiol (Engl Ed). 2013 Oct;66(10):782-790.

6. Kocica MJ, Corno AF, Carreras-Costa F, Ballester-Rodés M … Torrent-Guasp F. The helical ventricular myocardial band: global, three-dimensional, functional architecture of the ventricular myocardium. Surg. 2006 Apr;29 Suppl 1:S21-S40.

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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2025

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