RESULTS

Table 1 shows the demographic data of patients in two groups.

Students two-tailed 't' test performed on the values obtained immediately before and after the PH and P sessions (table 2), shows that in the PH group Pain Analogue Scale, heart rate, galvanic skin conductance and blood pressure have changed to a highly significant degree (p<0.001) with a lesser degree of significance in respiratory rate (p=0.002) and amplitude of pulse wave in finger plethysmography (p=0.01).

                                                              Table III 

In P group all the major parameters are non-significant except heart rate (p<0.001) and blood pressure (0.05). Similar changes are seen in the sub groups A and B who had reserved the days of healing and placebo sessions (table3). Another interesting point that may be noted from this table is that the initial mean values (for PAS, systolic and diastolic BP) in group B (PH on the first day) are significantly low (p<0.001) as compared to group A (P session first day) where the differences for the initial values are non-significant for these there parameters.

Could this difference be due to the lasting effect of PH the previous day or other factors such as, leisure or strangeness of being away from home, change of diet, familiarity of the healer and the healing session, and so on, factors which were constant for both groups? Table 4 shows the transformation matrix obtained after Multivariate discriminant analysis with Wilk's Lambda test for significance11. This also shows that the PH group had the best results in both group. A (88 per cent) and group B (92 per cent).