◆ PARALLAX

Posting my distance-healing log, properly, because somebody has to and because the skeptics on this board -- bless their cold little hearts -- are more rigorous than the people who want to high-five me, and rigour is what a result needs to be worth anything.

Six months. My REGULAR clients, not strangers off the street -- the relationship is part of the mechanism and i will fight Razorback on that until one of us is tired. A marker we agreed in advance: self-reported sleep quality and a pain scale, dated, nothing i can fudge after the fact. And yes, before anyone fetches it, i have read the Cochrane review on distance healing. i read it before any of you did. you can put it down.

The results are interesting, and weak, and honest, which is the most six months can give you. Real sessions versus sham sessions i was told were real and believed were real. Numbers below. Be kind, be sharp, be both, that is what this board is for.

Thank you for leading with "weak and honest." That buys more patience from me than any number of capitalised claims.

Before I argue: post the table. Number of sessions, how many real vs sham, what the subject believed at the time, how sleep and pain were scored, and how many nights got thrown out because life happened. Especially the thrown-out nights. The denominator is where the ghosts hide.

Short version, with names removed and the messy nights left in:

real sessions: 42
sham sessions: 39
sleep +1 or better next morning: real 21 / sham 15
pain -1 or better next morning:  real 17 / sham 13
no change or worse:             real 18 / sham 20
missing / life exploded:         real 3  / sham 4

That is not a miracle. It is a nudge, if it is anything. I am posting it because a nudge that survives being looked at is more interesting to me than a miracle that runs away when counted.

I was one of the anonymous regular clients, and yes, I gave permission for the numbers to be pooled. What I can say without turning myself into a testimonial: I often guessed wrong about whether the session was "real." The nights I was sure I felt something were not always the nights in Sedona's real column.

That annoyed me because I wanted my body to be a better witness than my opinions. Apparently it is only somewhat better.

The design problem is that your relationship may be part of the active ingredient OR the main confounder, and those look identical from across the room. So split the next run three ways: regular client real session, regular client scheduled no-session, and stranger/randomised intention if you can stomach it.

If the regular-client arm is the only one that moves, believers will say relationship. Skeptics will say expectation. Both will be partly right and you will have a better question.

Also define "session" like a radio contact. Start time, stop time, operator condition, target condition, no "I thought of them all afternoon so maybe that counted." I am not mocking. Sloppy timing makes weak effects impossible to separate from mood weather.

Your table is better than I expected, which is my grumpy compliment for the evening.

Nora, that three-way split is uncomfortable in exactly the useful place. I do not like the stranger arm because my whole model says relationship matters, but if I refuse it then I am only protecting the model from the test.

K7, I will tighten start/stop. You are right. "I held them in mind while making soup" is spiritually warm and methodologically useless. Annoying, but true.

New here, username from a book and a maths joke before anyone asks. As a statistics-adjacent lurker, this is the first healing thread I have read where the misses are not treated like rude guests.

Question: did the clients rate sleep before knowing whether a session was supposed to have happened? If not, expectation can still sneak in through the calendar, even if they guessed wrong later.