One well-known practitioner of radionics is Dr P S Deb, a highly-qualified neurologist and alternative healer. He shows me how long-distance healing works. Dr Deb first takes out a "radionics box", a black electronic box measuring about 8" by 10". Inside it are slots of different shapes and sizes. In one of these he places a tissue sample of the patient (a blood sample, for example, or a hair). In another slot he places the relevant medicine. Then he closes the box and switches it on.

"Through the process of radionics," he explains, "the properties of the medication will be transferred to the patient's tissue sample. And through the tissue sample they will then be transmitted to the patient -- wherever he may be, whether in the next room, or halfway across the globe -- thereby healing him"

What's more, Dr Deb claims, radionics works with any system of medication, whether allopathic, homeopathic, ayurvedic, or even with faith healing. And in that it has intriguing parallels with metaphysical healing systems like reiki and pranik healing.

So how the hell does it work?

Radionics is apparently based two basic premises. The first is the premise that there is a vital energy that pervades the universe, and all living things within it: an energy that seems very similar to the ancient Indian concept of prana, or the Chinese concept of qi-gong. Modern science has named it the "Human Energy Field".

The second premise is the premise of a certain "universal connected-ness" that binds us, wherever in the world we may be. A strange experiment conducted in France in the 1950s demonstrates this point. The researchers apparently kept a batch of insects in pairs until a bond developed between them. Then they separated the pairs and took one set to the US, while the other set was kept in France. They found, to their amazement, that if they pricked one insect in the US, its partner in France would register pain, and vice versa. Then they took the experiment one step further: they took a photograph of one insect in the US and pricked it… and again, astonishingly, the partner in France registered pain!

One of the first people to do research in radionics was a British doctor called Dr Abrams, back in the 1920s. Abrams believed that physical diseases affected the nervous system and caused it to emit an energy field whose electrical resistance could actually be measured. For example, he found that cancer produced a resistance of 50 ohms, syphilis produced a resistance of 55 ohms, and so on. Thus, by measuring the electrical resistance you could identify the disease.

In the 1960s two other British doctors, de la Warr and Dawn, corroborated Abrams' findings by discovering that that they could actually photograph the radiation patterns caused by different types of living tissue. And by studying the radiation patterns they could detect diseases like cysts, tumors and cancers within the body.

Then, taking this one step further, they found that through the principles of radionics, they could normalise the radiation field … and thereby automatically normalize the disease itself!

Medical science, of course, scoffs at the idea of radionics. But, interestingly, there is a lot of research taking place in the field of modern physics that seems to suggest that the energies harnessed in radionics are very real, although we may not understand them fully as yet. (In fact, the latest discoveries in physics are beginning to throw light on the phenomenon of "action at a distance", which is central to radionics.)

The basic concepts of radionics mesh comfortably with the work of Nobel Prize winning physicist, Brian Josephson, best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity. After being the youngest person ever to have won the Nobel Prize, Josephson has gone on to explore the parallels between quantum physics and ancient Eastern philosophies… especially in the area of a single, unified "cosmic consciousness". (One of his famous "thought experiments", for example, plays with the concept that if you dip your car keys in a river upstream, you should, theoretically, be able to start your car with water drawn from the river downstream!)

The concept of radionics also appears to be in synch with the work of the brilliant -- if controversial -- British biologist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, in the field of "morphic resonance". In one of his experiments, for example, he found that if you put rats into identically difficult mazes in different parts of the world, you'll find that that as soon as one rat somewhere learns to find his way out of the maze, the other rats in other unconnected parts of the world will also suddenly learn to find their way out of their own respective mazes. (Interestingly, Sheldrake, like Brian Josephson, has also been influenced by Eastern philosophy, and, in fact, spent time at an ashram in southern India in the 1970s.)

There is obviously a great deal that we still need to understand. But for the time being it seems that the bottom-line is this: the human body is not just a physical structure, but a vast sea of energy fields that are constantly ebbing, flowing, vibrating and radiating. Mankind has understood this in the past. And we may be reaching the point when we shall rediscover it all over again. The Human Energy Field -- and the science of radionics with it -- could be the new frontier of diagnostics and healing.

Only time, and research, will tell.