Summary of Health Surveys Conducted in Mainland China to Assess Falun Gong's Effects on Healing Illness and Maintaining Fitness

Abstract

Falun Gong is a high-level cultivation practice founded by Mr. Li Hongzhi. It cultivates "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance," the highest characteristic of the universe. It is a genuinely advanced cultivation way in the Buddha school that cultivates both one's mind and body. Through cultivating their xinxing as well as performing physical exercises, practitioners of Falun Gong are able to achieve improvement in their minds and bodies as well as in an overall sense.

The number of people practicing Falun Gong has been rapidly growing since Mr. Li Hongzhi first made the practice public in 1992. According to a Chinese government survey in early 1999, between 70 and 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong in Mainland China. Among all the different methods aimed to improve one's health, Falun Gong had the fastest growth rate and the most far-reaching influence among the Chinese people. Because of that, it aroused interest from the medical community and scrutiny from the Chinese government. During 1998, five separate health surveys were conducted in Beijing, Wuhan, the region of Dalian, and Guandong Province by local medical institutions. They collected information from more than 35,000 people, and are the most systematic and comprehensive health surveys done on Falun Gong practitioners to date. This article is a summary report on the results obtained from these five health surveys as mentioned above.

According to these surveys, Falun Gong practitioners came from a variety of social and educational backgrounds. The majority were female (72.9%) and over age 50 (62.1%). More than 90% of them had suffered from at least one disease before they began to practice Falun Gong. The surveys concluded that Falun Gong had provided significant health and fitness benefits to more than 98% of its practitioners. Seventy percent of them were able to achieve complete or near-complete recoveries from the diseases that they had been suffering from. People also indicated that they had achieved significant improvements in their mental and psychological well being. The savings that resulted from their significantly reduced expenses for medical care had also brought remarkable economic benefits to both the country and the employers of these practitioners. The surveys also documented extraordinary phenomena that appeared to be common occurrences among the practitioners. For example, the vast majority of practitioners were able to achieve rapid improvement in their physical and mental health as soon as they began to practice Falun Gong. They no longer needed to take oral medicine or shots. Yet the diseases from which they had been suffering did not worsen or reappear. Instead, they became healthier and healthier. Many of them were able to recover from diseases that the medical community considered to be terminal diseases or diseases that were difficult to diagnose and treat. In addition, it was common for Falun Gong practitioners to exhibit traits of undergoing aging-reversal processes. Many elderly women had their menstrual cycles restarted. This article summarizes the findings of the surveys and provides discussions to the results of the surveys, in the hopes of serving as a foundation for further future research studies.
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Falun Gong is a high-level cultivation practice founded by Mr. Li Hongzhi. It cultivates "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance," the highest characteristic of the universe. It is a genuinely advanced cultivation way in the Buddha school that cultivates both one's mind and body. Falun Gong stresses that the cultivation of xinxing (mind/heart nature or moral character) is the key to the growth of gong (cultivation energy). Falun Gong practitioners are asked to upgrade their xinxing by following the principle of "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" in everything they do and be good people wherever they are. Through cultivating their xinxing as well as performing physical exercises, practitioners of Falun Gong are able to achieve improvement in their minds and bodies as well as in an overall sense. The number of people practicing Falun Gong has been rapidly growing since Mr. Li Hongzhi first made the practice public in 1992. According to a Chinese government survey in early 1999, between 70 and 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong in Mainland China. Among all the different methods aimed to improve one's health, Falun Gong had the fastest growth rate and the most far-reaching influence among the Chinese people. Because of that, it aroused interest from the medical community and scrutiny from the Chinese government. During 1998, five separate health surveys were conducted in Beijing, Wuhan, the region of Dalian, and Guandong Province by local medical institutions. They collected information from more than 35,000 people, and are the most systematic and comprehensive health surveys done on Falun Gong practitioners to date. The surveys concluded that Falun Gong had provided significant health and fitness benefits to more than 98% of its practitioners. The savings that resulted from their significantly reduced expenses for medical care brought remarkable economic benefits to both the country and the employers of these practitioners. In order to let more people discover the truth about Falun Gong, especially since the Chinese government has fabricated a lot of lies to distort the true situations concerning Falun Gong, we feel that it is necessary to summarize the five health surveys as mentioned above and discuss the findings from the surveys. We hope that it will serve as a foundation for further future research studies.

Data Sources:

• Health Survey Report on over 10,000 Falun Gong Practitioners in Beijing (hereafter referred to as the Beijing Survey)




• Health Survey Report on Falun Gong Practitioners at Zizhu Park Practice Site in Beijing,




• Partial Surveys on Xinxing Cultivation and Fitness Effects among Falun Gong Practitioners in Wuhan




• Physical Health Survey Report on the Falun Gong Population in Dalian Region




• Summary of Health Survey of Falun Gong Practitioners in Guangdong Province

(Note: The last surveys were both done by Hu Mingqin, Research Professor of Pathology, 1st Army University of Medicine)

We also collected 298 case reports involving Falun Gong practitioners who had held posts inside of the Communist Party, army, government and post-secondary institutions of Guangzhou Province. The two surveys in Beijing used two different population samples without overlapping cases.

Research Methodology, Content, and Samples:

• The Beijing Report surveyed over 12,000 Falun Gong practitioners from five districts in Beijing.




• The Guangdong Report surveyed over 12,500 Falun Gong practitioners from the cities of Foshan, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, Shantou, Meizhou, Chaozhou, Jieyang, Qingyuan, and Shaoguan in Guangdong Province.




• The Wuhan Report surveyed the health conditions of 2,005 Falun Gong practitioners from more than 50 practice sites in Wuhan before and after they began to practice Falun Gong.




• The Dalian Report surveyed over 6,000 Falun Gong practitioners.




• The Beijing Zizhu Park Report surveyed nearly 600 practitioners at the Zizhuyuan practice site in Beijing.

All five of these surveys were conducted by research teams made up of local medical experts who conducted random tabular surveys on local Falun Gong practitioners. The investigation teams used methods from group surveys, random sampling, and repeated sampling to design a list of questions in a tabular form. Those who were chosen as survey targets were then asked to fill out the form based on self-assessment of their own health conditions. The forms were then collected by local assistant coordinators, handed over to the designated staff, and processed by professionals using computers to categorize and perform statistical analysis. In the Beijing survey, designated staff reviewed all the forms and nullified any form that did not have all the questions answered. The other four surveys accepted all the returned forms.

The five surveys collected general information about people practicing Falun Dafa, including age, occupation, education, duration of practice, and the like, effects on healing and fitness, and changes in medical care expenditures. Each survey also had its unique individual characteristics. The Beijing Survey and the Guangdong Survey investigated changes in psychological conditions of practitioners after they began to practice Falun Gong. The Wuhan Survey investigated the changes to three big undesirable personal habits (drinking, smoking and gambling) after people began to practice Falun Gong. The Dalian Survey compared the number of diseases that the practitioners had been suffering from before and after they began to practice Faun Gong, the degree of physical improvement, and literacy improvement among illiterate practitioners after they began to practice Falun Gong. Both the Wuhan Survey and Zizhu Park Survey investigated physical changes to the practitioners after they began to practice Falun Gong by categorizing all the diseases. This paper performs an overall analysis on three major categories, general information, healing and fitness effects, and changes in medical care expenses based on the data gathered from the five surveys.

Results:

1. General Information

1.1 Geographical areas, number, and gender distribution of Falun Gong practitioners sampled in the five surveys:

1.2 Age distribution

Because the five surveys applied different age categories, we are only able to divide each population sample into below-age-50 and above-age-50 groups. Table 1.2 below indicates that 62.1% of people surveyed belonged to the above-age-50 group.

1.3 Duration of time since beginning to practice Falun Gong

Because each survey had used different categories when classifying the duration of practice time, we classified the data from different places into under-two-years and over-two-years categories. Statistical results show that the majority of people had practiced Falun Gong for less than two years (see Table 1.3).

1.4 Practitioners Education Background

In the Wuhan Survey and the Beijing Zizhu Park Survey, the educational backgrounds of practitioners were investigated. The results are tabulated in table 1.4 below.

2. Healing and Fitness Effects

All five surveys concentrated on collecting information on physical changes in local practitioners before and after they began to practice Falun Gong. Those who had been suffering from various diseases amounted to 31,030 people or 90.3% of the total. In Table 2.1, it can be seen that the types of diseases that they had suffered from are widely distributed. Disorders in various body functional systems were involved, with the most diseases in digestive system, bones and joints, and cardiovascular system. In order to measure the healing and fitness effects of Falun Gong, the survey results have been statistically classified into three categories: full recovery and enjoying general good health (symptoms having disappeared), improving (symptoms having weakened), and no improvement (there being no clear changes in symptoms). In the Guangdong, Beijing, and Dalian surveys, each individual surveyed was considered as one survey unit (regardless of how many diseases an individual used to suffer from). According to survey data, out of 28,571 practitioners, 23,619 or 82.7% had achieved full recovery and general good health, 4,616 practitioners or 16.2% had obtained improvement in their health, 336 or 1.2% of the practitioners had not observed any changes to their health. The Wuhan and Beijing Zizhu Park surveys used a type of disease as one survey unit and classified the diseases by body systems (see Table 2.1). According to survey data, 2,483 practitioners or 25.3% had suffered from at least one disease before they began to practice Falun Gong. The number of the diseases that they had suffered from was 6,772. Of these, 4,926, or 72.7%, had been completely or nearly-completely cured, 1,712 or 25.3% had shown signs of improvement, and 133 or 2.0% had no observable changes. In one case, the patient reported the worsening of the disease after beginning to practice Falun Gong (see Table 2.1). The overall summary is shown in Table 2.2.

Both the Guangdong Province and Beijing surveys investigated psychological conditions among Falun Gong practitioners before and after they began to practice Falun Gong. The results of the investigation can be seen in Table 2.3. Both psychological and mental conditions of Falun Gong practitioners had been greatly improved. 86.5% of the practitioners surveyed indicated that their moral standards had improved through cultivation in Falun Dafa and they had been able to completely maintain control as well as improve their mental well-being.

3. Changes in Medical Care Expenses Before and After the Practice

Savings from reduced medical care expenses by Falun Gong practitioners after they began to practice Falun Gong have been remarkable. The surveys in Guangdong, Beijing, and Dalian Region all looked into the changes in medical care expenses since the practitioners began to practice Falun Gong. Because the classifications listed in Wuhan survey is different from those in other places, the data are not included in this current study. Please see Table 3 for details.

Discussion

1. The geographical areas covered in these five surveys represent the most densely populated areas in China. They are also four of the five geographic regions where most Falun Gong practitioners reside, namely, Dalian (in Northeast), Beijing (in North China), Wuhan (in Central China), and Guangdong Province (in South China). No relevant survey report has been seen from Eastern China, the fifth region with a large population of Falun Gong practitioners. Each of these regions has its own geographic and climatic conditions, local characteristics, and disease types/distribution. Therefore, it is believed that these five surveys are able to comprehensively reflect the characteristics and situations of Falun Gong cultivators in Mainland China.

2. These five surveys collected general information on Falun Gong cultivators, including their gender, age, education, and the length of practice. In the Wuhan Survey, the occupations of practitioners were also investigated. In the Wuhan Survey and the Beijing Zizhu Park Survey, the educational backgrounds of the practitioners were recorded. These surveys thus also contribute data about the social standing of Falun Gong cultivators as a group. From the surveys it was found that Falun Gong cultivators come from all walks of life with different educational backgrounds. Seventy-two percent of them were female and 62.1% of them were above the age of 50. More than 90% of them had suffered from at least one disease before they began to practice Falun Gong. It can be said that most of these practitioners started practicing Falun Gong in the hope of curing diseases and becoming healthy.

3. Healing and Fitness Effects of Falun Gong

3.1 These five surveys did not use a uniform form. On one hand, this created some difficulty in summarization. On the other hand, since the surveys were conducted from different angles to study various issues, they constitute a pioneer work that can open up people's minds and provide a foundation and reference for future studies.

3.2 In these five surveys, Guangdong Province, Beijing, and Dalian Region used individuals as survey units, not counting the total number of diseases suffered by each individual. The survey results show that 82.7% of the practitioners had achieved full recovery and good health after they began to practice Falun Gong. Some 16.2% of the practitioners had shown improvements to their health after they began the practice, and only 1.2% of the practitioners had observed no changes to their health after they began the practice. Wuhan and Beijing Zizhuy Park used individual diseases as the survey units and classified the diseases by bodily functional systems. The results from these two surveys showed that 72.7% of the total number of diseases were either completely or nearly-completely cured since the practitioners began the practice, 25.3% of the total diseases were alleviated since the practice began, and only 2.0% of the total diseases remained unchanged. The approach of taking the diseases as the unit is more specific and provides more information from the perspective of medicinal analysis. From the perspective of individual patients, the physical and psychological impacts of achieving complete recovery from all the diseases is different from achieving complete recovery from only some of the diseases. But the Dalian Survey indicates that when comparing those who had been suffering from only one disease and those who had suffered from multiple diseases before they began cultivation, there was no statistical difference in the percentage of each group who achieved complete recovery (89.72% versus 88.83%, U=0.50<2.58, P>0.01) (See table 4 for more information). This illustrates that the healing effects of Falun Gong were applied to the body of each practitioner as a whole and not only to certain individual diseases. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the two survey methods should be further discussed and compared. When performing future investigation, both methods can be used at the same time.

3.3 Falun Gong is a great cultivation way that improves both one's mind and one's body. It means that practitioners are able to achieve improvements in their minds and bodies, as well as in an overall sense, through elevating their xinxing (moral character) and performing the exercises. Falun Gong stresses that the cultivation of xinxing is the key to the growth of gong (cultivation energy). Falun Gong practitioners are asked to upgrade their xinxing by following the principle of "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" in everything they do and to be good people wherever they are. In the initial stage of cultivating a person's body, his diseases are cured and his health is improved. As he progresses in cultivation, his life is extended, and then he undergoes the aging reversal process. The tables above have shown that more than 98% of practitioners had observed improvement in their health. More than 70% had achieved complete or near-complete recovery from the diseases from which they had suffered. Moreover, these five surveys have also recorded many extraordinary and miraculous phenomena among Falun Gong practitioners. These phenomena are not rare or isolated cases but common, widespread phenomena. Hu Mingqin, Research Professor of Pathology at the First Army University of Medicine of China who was involved in the Guangdong Health Survey, divided the extraordinary phenomena that he observed into the following major categories:

(1) The majority of the practitioners made startling improvement in their physical and mental health very rapidly. Some practitioners found their symptoms had vanished and felt lightness all over their bodies within three to five days after first listening to Teacher Li's lectures or reading his book at home. The vast majority of practitioners saw their symptoms completely disappear or experienced significant improvement in their health in a short period of time ranging from several months up to a year or two.

(2) Many practitioners used to be known as "medicine pots" or frequent visitors to the hospital. In the process of practicing Falun Gong, they found that they no longer needed to continue taking oral pills or injections. Their diseases did not recur, and they became healthier and healthier physically. Among them were cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and diabetes patients warned by doctors that "they will never live with taking the medicine". All these phenomena seem to be beyond comprehension from the perspective of modern medicine.

(3) Among the practitioners who had diseases before they began the practice, some had suffered from diseases that were either considered incurable or difficult to treat. There were even people who had been "sentenced to death" by hospitals or deemed "terminally ill" by authoritative experts. Yet, through practicing Falun Dafa, they miraculously recovered and regained their health. When hospitals re-examined them, cancerous cells had vanished, and diseases that were considered terminal or difficult to treat had been cured

(4) Many practitioners not only had been cured of various diseases, but also had undergone an aging-reversal process. Elderly cultivators saw wrinkles disappearing, hair turning black, face glowing, and skin smoothening. What was particularly perplexing is that many elderly women had re-experienced menstruation. In one case, an 88-year-old woman had her menstruation again and exhibited other signs of reversal of aging.

These four types of phenomena were also commonly observed in four other surveys as well. The Dalian Survey indicates that 99% of practitioners saw significant improvement in their health within a year from the time they first began their cultivation. The Guangzhou Survey indicates that while 72.3% of practitioners had been practicing Falun Gong for less than 2 years, 98% of them observed significant improvement to their health within 1 or 2 years. According to table 1.3, 61.5% of all the practitioners in the five surveys had been practicing less than two years. The Dalian Survey results also indicated that, as the time of practicing Falun Gong lengthens, the percentage of people who make complete or near-complete recoveries also increased as well.

Falun Gong's ability to cure diseases that modern science considers as being terminal or difficult to treat is also verified in the survey data. The Wuhan and Beijing Zizhu Park surveys show that among the 206 diseases that were considered terminal or difficult to treat, 137 or 66.5% of them were completed cured. In the Guangzhou survey, out of 298 case files involving practitioners who had held positions in the Communist Party, army, government and post-secondary institutions, 12 cancer patients were completed cured, and all the side-effects from the cancer treatment regimen had also disappeared as well.

All the surveys indicated that the Falun Gong practitioners were consistently undergoing the aging reversal process. In the 298 cases mentioned above, 4 ladies who were more than 70 years old saw their menstrual cycles restarted. All these phenomena have clearly validated the power of Falun Gong in healing diseases and maintaining fitness.

3.4 Falun Gong's ability to improve people's moral characters was also partially verified in the surveys. In these surveys, people indicated that they had experienced significant improvement in their mental and psychological conditions. According to the Beijing Survey and Guangzhou Survey, 86.5% of practitioners felt that their moral standards had improved. This is especially true for those practitioners in the Beijing Survey who reported that they had already been healthy when they first began to practice Falun Gong. Out of those, only 57.9% reported further improvement to their health, while 88.4% of them reported improvement in their mental states. Another item worth noting is that the practitioners were consistently able to eliminate bad personal habits. The Wuhan Survey indicated that 99.5% of practitioners who had been addicted to drinking, smoking or gambling were able to quit their addictions. This observation is almost inconceivable in modern medicine as modern medicine at present has no effective methods for treating addictions.

3.5 The surveys also indicated that each practitioner was able to save 2600 RMB per year in medical expenses. The resultant economic benefits for the individuals and for society were quite impressive. After they began practicing Falun Gong, their health and moral characters had improved, which also brought positive impact to their families.

3.6 The above conclusions show that the practice of Falun Gong brought positive benefits to the practitioners' health, mental states and families as well as to society as a whole.

4. Possible Explanations for the Healing Effect of Falun Gong

The several astonishing physical effects and other phenomena brought about by cultivating in Falun Gong as discussed above are beyond the understanding of modern medicine and conventional science. Why did diseases that were deemed incurable by modern medicine disappear after the patient began to practice Falun Dafa? How is it that diseases that are considered difficult to treat by modern medicine responded so effortlessly after the practice of Falun Gong was begun? In order to answer these questions, it is appropriate to talk about cultivation within Falun Dafa. The cultivation of Falun Dafa focuses on studying the Fa to cultivate one's heart. The Fa principles in Zhuan Falun serve as guidance for practitioners to get rid of attachments through cultivating in their daily lives. The physical exercises serve as secondary complements. When practitioners start to practice cultivation, Teacher Li Hongzhi's fashen (law body; a body made of gong and Fa) will purify the practitioners' body, which is the main reason why most practitioners rapidly improved their physical conditions after they began to practice. Hu Mingqin, Professor of Pathology at the First Army University of Medicine of China stated in his survey summary that when Falun Dafa practitioners talked being cured from the diseases, all of them expressed their heart-felt gratitude to Teacher Li Hongzhi. All of them said that it is Teacher Li's fashen that had purified their bodies. Many practitioners with their celestial eye opened also observed Teacher Li's fashen or falun purifying the practitioners' bodies. These supernatural phenomena are really hard for modern medicine to comprehend.

According to Falun Gong's principles, every disease is caused by a corresponding energy field that exists in an extremely microscopic dimension or illness karma. Furthermore, the energy field caused by karma is completely opposite of that of de (virtue/merit). In order to heal an illness at a fundamental level, one has to eliminate the energy field that leads to the illness or karma and replace it with a good energy field or de. Falun Gong is precisely designed to guide people to complete such a process through cultivation. The first thing that Falun Gong teaches its practitioners is that the meaning and purpose of a human life is to return to one's original, true self through cultivation. In the end, the person is returned to the most original, perfect state both physically and mentally. Falun Gong requires cultivators to give up psychological and behavioral attachments to any physical object or concept. Smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling and other behaviors are manifestations of strong attachments, and precisely things that one needs to overcome during cultivation. When a person develops a strong desire for cultivation, he obtains a complete understanding of what lies beneath his addictions and the harm that these things cause. Because of that, it is easier for him to take action to rectify the situation. For the sake of cultivation, he resolutely gets rid of all of his bad habits and addictions that are harmful to his body and mind. Contemporary science considers bad personal habits as being 70% responsible for diseases. Cultivators uphold "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" in their daily lives. They treat others with honesty and kindness. They are able to endure hardships, personal losses, and mistreatment, and search inwardly whenever there is a conflict. Therefore, things that tend to cause mental stress and adverse emotional impacts are turned into opportunities for cultivators to upgrade their xinxing. Mental stress is a major cause of many different kinds of acute and chronic diseases, and can even lead to sudden death. But cultivation frees people from worries caused by mental stress and uproots the causes of many diseases. These are the things that contemporary medicine can understand and has also identified. But despite that, contemporary medicine also recognizes the fact that it is extremely difficult to change human behavior and therefore cannot fully utilize this knowledge to prevent illness. From this summary report, it is obvious that cultivation in Falun Gong is able to achieve this behavioral modification.

Besides improving the mental states of its practitioners, Falun Gong uses its physical exercise components to open up hundreds of energy channels in one's body, forming a heavenly circulation, which promotes energy exchange and speeds up purification of the body. In addition, along with ascension through cultivation, the energy channels will continue to become wider and wider and eventually merge into one. According to Chinese medicine, one major cause for diseases is that one's energy channels are not fully open, which lead to blockade of qi and blood. Because of that, one's phlegm stasis affects his respiratory system or inflammation due to long term blocking. If the energy channels are widened or merged into one, this blocking phenomenon won't take place, hence preventing diseases from occurring.

In his report, Hu Mingqin, Research Professor of Pathology at the First Army University of Medicine of China, highlighted the fact that the understanding that Falun Gong practitioners have toward illness is very different from that of ancient or contemporary medicine. Ancient Chinese medicine believes that the imbalance between yin and yang and the excessive counter-balancing effects of the Five Elements are causes for sickness. Therefore, it focuses on adjusting yin and yang to smoothen one's energy channels when treating an ill patient. The traditional biomedical model of contemporary medicine looks for causes for diseases from the perspectives of microbiology, physics, chemistry, and mechanics. It uses surgical operations, drugs, and other methods to treat an ill patient. Its newest biological-mental-social model stresses that mental and social factors are also important causes for diseases, and believes that many cardiac diseases and new diseases that have surfaced in modern times are closely correlated with these factors. Therefore, it emphasizes improving one's mental state and behavior to prevent illnesses. Falun Dafa cultivators believe that human diseases are due to the existence of karma. They believe sickness karma can be removed through cultivation. The body is then purified. Thus, when they physically experience symptoms of being ill in the course of cultivation, they believe that these are the signs of removal of sickness karma and purification of the body, and consider them good phenomena. There have been many cases where the practitioner began to experience signs of being ill as soon as they started reading Zhuan Falun. Their symptoms included throwing up, loose bowels, and discharging excrements of pus and blood. In some cases, the diseases that used to be thought cured resurfaced with old symptoms. In all the cases, after a short time of body purification, the body immediately becomes light, the spirit becomes high, and all the previous diseases have vanished. Contemporary medicine's explanation toward the healing effects of qigong is that qigong can adjust a person's mind and body, and is thus able to cure some diseases that are caused by psychological factors. Some people consider qigong to be a form of psychotherapy. Yet these five surveys demonstrated that many practitioners with demonstrable pathological defects had also recovered fully from their illnesses. When they were re-examined, the pathologic defects had disappeared completely. If Falun Gong is simply a form of psychotherapy, then one can not explain how it has the ability to cure these diseases.

Lili Feng, an Associate Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, found that white cells of Falun Gong practitioner have undergone some extraordinary changes, including increased immunological activity, lower metabolism rates, and lower levels of activity of genes for proteolytic enzymes. One most interesting discovery that she made is that cells of Falun Gong practitioners exhibit traits of mutual control, which bring benefits to both parties. Her research has proved from a side angle that the healing effect of Falun Gong can not be simply attributed to it being effective as a psychotherapy.

Certain patients who had suffered from terminal illnesses or diseases that are considered difficult to treat were completely cured shortly after they began to practice Falun Gong. Regarding this issue, Professor Lili Feng has offered an explanation based on the principles of Falun Gong. According to her, the fundamental nature of cancer is still karma, which is no different from any other diseases. Most people tend to consider "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" as belonging to the spiritual realm. Nonetheless, more and more academicians and researchers have published research papers on well-known professional journals that explore the inseparability of spirit and body and the direct impact of mental status on physical health and disease prevention. Treating Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance as life's basic characteristic provides a satisfactory explanation to why most of those terminal diseases that were cured on their own often happened on patients who held optimistic attitudes toward life. Optimism and openness of mind can enable a living being to maintain the best self-regulation of his own bodily system, which then enables the body to return to the best state. Falun Dafa cultivators actively assimilate themselves to the principle of Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance, which produces positive impacts on their nervous, endocrinal, and immune systems as well as on their individual cells and gene control. It is possible that when people are truthful, benevolent, and forbearing mentally, socially, and psychologically, the truthfulness-benevolence-forbearance nature will also be exhibited biologically. A being is supposed to be healthy to start with.

Professor Lili Feng also discussed her understanding and research on the phenomenon of practitioners undergoing an aging reversal process. "Exercise Number Two of Falun Gong – Holding the Wheel – is a unique high posture standing exercise. In this exercise, the practitioners are asked to hold three postures around their heads for long periods of time. It is known that in the head there is a vital organ – the pineal body, which is the base for the Celestial Eye as well as the only organ to generate internal melatonin. The receptors of melatonin can be found everywhere in the body and are vital to all body systems and to anti-aging. I have obtained initial data that demonstrates that many Falun Gong cultivators have a very high melatonin level. This may serve to explain some of Falun Gong's healing and fitness effects."

Within its scope of current understanding, contemporary modern has also become to recognize the relationship between illnesses and people's mental and spiritual states. It has developed a new biological-psychological-social model aimed to preserve people's health. Yet contemporary medicine is unable to offer effective methods to improve many of these different components of maintaining perfect health. Falun Gong is different from any ordinary qigong that offers simple maintenance of one's fitness. It is not a method aimed at curing illnesses. Instead, it is a method that teaches people to cultivate. Therefore, only genuine practitioners will receive purification of their bodies, which are viewed as healing illnesses and maintaining fitness in the eyes of non-practitioners. Healing illnesses and maintaining fitness is just one component of Falun Gong. Falun Gong itself is a very extraordinary and profound cultivation system. Despite this, the results of these five health surveys have demonstrated its extraordinary healing effects that deserves careful consideration and further research from the medical community as well as from the entire scientific community.

Directions for Future Studies

1. Falun Gong has spread to more than fifty countries. It is therefore appropriate to conduct worldwide health surveys. At this time, it is feasible to conduct such surveys in Taiwan and the surrounding area in the Asian-Pacific Region, Australia, Americas, and Europe.

2. A uniform table should be developed for the worldwide surveys. At the minimum, major contents and survey methods should be consistent to facilitate summarization.

3. The contents that the new surveys should be based on those of the surveys done in Mainland China with additional improvements. Cultivation in Falun Gong differs from other qigong practices as it considers studying the Fa and cultivating the heart as being the most important. Therefore, the correlation between the Fa studies and health, and the correlation between mental and physical changes should be both explored in future studies.

4. It is recommended that a multi-perspective and multi-level survey be initiated, extending it from a pure health survey to a health-social-cultural one, from studying individuals to studying families and the society.

5. Certain results obtained from future surveys should be studied in depth. Examples include the studies of Falun Gong practitioners' body tissues, cells and molecular structures.

Reference:

Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2001: Stephen McPhee et al.,
McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange

Thanks to all the Falun Gong practitioners who participated in these five health surveys in Mainland China.