In 1992, the United States National Institutes of Health created a new department called the “Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM)”
The purpose was to begin to mesh “manual medicine”, or the study of structural approaches such as chiropractic with the study of “energetic therapies” such as Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and qigong.
In order to create a unifying term for this study of energy therapy, the term “Biofield” was created in the hope that the energies these different modalities were using could be unified under this term. The term “Biofield therapies” was created to describe the diagnostic and therapeutic healing modalities using this Biofield.
The Biofield was defined as “a massless field, not necessarily electromagnetic, that surrounds and permeates living bodies and affects the body.”
This term became officially recognized by the National Library of Medicine and is an official search term for peer-reviewed literature.
The successor to OAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, now provides grant to fund Biofield research.
Furthermore, a second category of “Distant healing” became an official category of study. “Distant healing” is defined as “remote healing over a distance performed through intention and/or prayer.”
This category was separated from “Biofield study” because it was thought that a local healer may be using Electromagnetic fields in the Biofield that diminish over a distance, whereas a distant healer may be using a different system. This area is very new to science, thus the distinction is understandable.
You can learn more about Biofield studies by visiting chi.is
Source:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654789/
