TV REVIEWS : ‘Healing’ Leaves Some Critical Gaps

We’ll venture a guess that the inevitable home-videotape of the six-hour co-production by Turner Broadcasting and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, “The Heart of Healing: Remarkable Stories of How We Heal Ourselves” will be viewed much more carefully than the broadcast (tonight, Wednesday and Thursday at 5:05 p.m. and 9:05 p.m. on TBS).

Unlike with tape, one can’t fast-forward through the broadcast’s endlessly repetitive testimonials and accounts of self-healing by cancer and AIDS patients, of how the mind is a curative weapon, of the physician healing himself.

This is hardly news, although host Jane Seymour, taking a break from “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” exultantly presents it with all the fervor of an epochal revelation. Methods of biofeedback, stress reduction, meditation, mind control and self-healing advice from such writers as Norman Cousins are so thoroughly mainstream that they hardly bear comment.

Like a kind of metaphysical “Rescue 911,” “Heart of Healing” is best seen as a feel-good show to encourage those with ailments to use their own mental healing powers.

The program sloppily lumps together good science with Haitian voodoo and West Virginia faith healers--all brothers, it seems, in the quest for healing. The message, typically stated again and again, is that skeptics are wrong to claim that healing-by-faith raises false hopes, because the skeptics do nothing but raise false despair. This is nonsense, and repeating it doesn’t make it less nonsensical. Skeptics merely demand proof of extraordinary claims; only a fool would insist that the mind is somehow separate from the body. Leave this messy business aside, and the testimonials here contain some powerful evidence of the human will to live.