Dr. Joe Dispenza: Faith Healing Under the Guise of Science

Interdimensional beings make an appearance at Dr. Joe Dispenza's meditation retreat

 

Backed by science! 

“I started sensing presences in the room during our weeklong events. I started — out of the corner of my eye — I started perceiving certain things. Uh, there was an energy in the room that I noticed. And they’re very noble, and they’re very interested in what we’re doing. Many times in the beginning, they observe. They’re along the walls and they’re not small. They’re very, very tall. Three meters, maybe more, tall. They’re beautiful and big. And they have this grace about them, this presence.” 

– Joe Dispenza interview

Last time we learned about the biological transformation of 20 participants who attended a week-long meditation retreat. A team of researchers collected blood and brain biomarkers to search for changes in neuroplasticity, metabolic reprogramming, functional cell signaling, proteomics, inflammation, endogenous opioids, metabolomics, exosome-specific transcriptomics, and functional brain connectivity measured via fMRI.

 

When there's a financial motive to claim that a supernatural experience rewires your brain, changes gene expression, reduces pain, and boosts immunity, it helps to publish tangible evidence in a peer-reviewed journal (Communications Biology, which has a medium-hefty impact factor of 5.2)

 

 

I composed a list of potential flaws in a blog post and provided even more detail on PubPeer (a moderated commentary site). In brief:

 

1. No control group (can't separate meditation from the passage of time)
2. Massive overfitting in machine learning models
3. Major confound of excessive head motion in the MRI scanner
4. Uncorrected multiple comparisons
5. Inconsistent statistics
6. Possible p-hacking and post hoc explanations 

 

The meditation teacher, Joe Dispenza¹, charges $2,500 to attend his retreats. The activities include practices that have no basis in physical reality; we are supposed to accept them on faith.²

 

 

Disclaimer: I respect the preferences and beliefs of the attendees. If they describe a mystical merging with god and the universe, I won't question their subjective experiences (these are private by their very nature). One person cannot directly access the mental contents of another.

My problem is with the charlatans and grifters, influencers and gurus who take advantage of sick and vulnerable people. And many sick people attended the retreat described in the paper (Jinich-Diamant et al., 2025). Out of 561 attendees who completed the screening form, 399 of them were too ill to participate in the study. But they pay to be healed, just like at an evangelical tent revival — the blind can now see, the deaf can hear, the crippled stand up and walk out of their wheelchairs.

Notice how none of these miraculous cures are ever published in a medical journal.

Dispenza's website is filled with testimonials, “Stories of Transformation”, where his followers testify to the miraculous properties of Coherence Healing^TM.³ It is dangerous and misleading to claim (without scientific evidence) that your practices can “cure” stage 4 cancer. A research participant at a retreat shared this tragic story:
 

Toward the end, we gathered around a girl with stage 4 cancer. All her hair was gone from the chemo. I had my brain scanning [EEG] cap on as we circled her to "heal" her by sending her "positive energy" (whatever the hell that is). Honestly, I don't know what to make of this. I felt weird about it. The girl screamed in the middle of our circle as bad "spirits" left her body. If you've ever seen the exorcist, you have roughly the right idea. This was a secular version of faith healing. Even for a skeptic like me, it was intensely emotional.

. . .

Everyone involved was added to a group text to keep up with her healing. We all got updates over the next few weeks. People sent plenty of “positive vibes.”

One morning, we got a text that she had passed away. It was a gut punch. 

 

So who is at fault here, who failed? The Coherence Healing^TM group didn't release enough positive energy? The girl didn't destroy her own cancerous cells through the power of thought? The meditation guru is blameless, of course. He continues to exploit sick and dying children by bringing them onstage at the end of his retreats. A direct quote: “We bring children in at the end of the event and we heal them of really serious health conditions.”

 

 

Another egregious con is the offer of remote healing sessions for children with autism.

Dr Joe’s Remote Coherence Healing™ groups are excited to provide a series of 12 healing sessions for individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The effects of Remote Coherence Healing™ on children challenged by incoherence have produced compelling results. We would be honored to include your child, as sessions become available.

This is offensive (“challenged by incoherence”) and a blatant misrepresentation of a practice supported by no evidence.


“Science is the new language of mysticism,” says Dispenza. 

Uh no. Science is the systematic study of physical reality through observation and experimentation. You can’t redefine its subject matter (the natural world) to suit your agenda of Quantum Healing, manifesting abundance, and miracle cures. The normal rules of physics will still apply to you when you meditate. You cannot produce proteins by thought alone.

 

I'm not sure what that means, but the question was posed in his new video, SOURCE: It's Within You. The most surprising aspect was that the senior author of the Communications Biology paper (Dr. Hemal H. Patel, Professor of Anesthesiology at UCSD) believes you can change gene expression by mere thought. The target was SERPINA5, shown below on the left.

 

The Experimental group also viewed four other real genes and their associated proteins. In contrast, the Control group was shown four "fake" genes along with SERPINA5. The participants studied flash cards with the name of a protein and its crystal structure. As Patel explained:

So every morning they were supposed to focus on those five genes and five proteins and intently increase the elevation of these things. ... Can the mind control the expression pattern of these five genes that were targeted.

Lo and behold, the Experimental group had increased levels of the SerpinA5 protein, but the Control group did not. Why not?? Their intent focus on SerpinA5 was disrupted by the fake decoy genes! 

Somehow the innate intelligence of the body could not accept the order, because even though there was a real protein in there, it wasn't just one real and four fake, it was the entire order that the mind and body were looking for. And since the four weren't real, the intelligence cancelled the order.

This is preposterous. The body was expecting, specifically, those four real genes? Would any other collection of four real genes work? For the Controls, how did the body "know" about the fake genes, and how did it "know" to cancel the upregulation of SerpinA5?

 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said Carl Sagan. I don't think we'll ever see this evidence published in a peer-reviewed journal.

 

Footnotes

 

¹ Dr. Joe has a Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Life University, which lost its accreditation in 2002. He has 3.8 million followers on Instagram, though. 

² Summary of activities at a retreat.

 

Reconceptualization (25 hrs): "Daily lectures emphasized the body’s self-healing abilities, the mind’s capacity to shape lived reality, and the healing power of present-centeredness and mystical-type experiences." 

Meditation (33 hours): "All meditations were guided, delivered with atmospheric music, and taught Kundalini techniques, which combine conscious meta-awareness and conscious breathing exercises with slow, ascending, focused interoceptive attention on purported energetic centers along the midline..." 

Guided healing rituals, i.e. “energy healing” (5 hrs): These "brought 6–8 “healers” around one “healee” in which the former were instructed to practice loving-kindness compassion meditation while focusing attention on their heart, hands, and on the latter’s body."

³ In 2024, I wrote a post about Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi, an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with hundreds of publications in low-quality journals that have little-to-no peer review. His proprietary blessing treatment, the Trivedi Effect® (based on “biofield energy transmissions”) is similar to Dispenza's Remote Coherence Healing^TM (“connect to the quantum field”).

Reference 

Jinich-Diamant A, Simpson S, Zuniga-Hertz JP, Chitteti R, Schilling JM, Bonds JA, Case L, Chernov AV, Dispenza J, Maree J, Amkie Stahl NE, Licamele M, Fazlalipour N, Devulapalli S, Christov-Moore L, Reggente N, Poirier MA, Moeller-Bertram T, Patel HH. Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention. Communications Biology. 2025 Nov 6;8(1):1525.

Additional Resources

The cult-like rise of Joe Dispenza
How Joe Dispenza and his book "You Are the Placebo" spread dangerous messaging to vulnerable people.

Essentially, if this practice doesn’t cure your cancer, then you are the problem. Either you’re trying too hard or not enough. But ultimately, the fault is yours. Not the man who’s 'teaching' you.

The Brainwashing Cult of Joe Dispenza – Scott Carney (video)

It's just not based in science. In fact, this is part of the pattern that is actually Dispenza's main tactic. He funds studies and then misrepresents the results whole cloth to sell out conference centers.

Dr. Joe Dispenza & New Age Faith Healing – Anna's Analysis (video)

 

In response to the final paragraph on Coherence Healing^TM, Anna noted: “Always important to have a loophole like that when it doesn't work out...”

 

Feedback Joe Dispenza Retreat

I just want to share some cautions and warnings around the Joe Dispenza advanced retreats, as I feel care needs to be taken so no others have an experience like mine, where I came back in worse pain than before, and also in shock from how little care and how much shaming there was for people who are not able to heal or still in pain.

 

Criticism of Joe Dispenza

My criticism of Dr. Joe Dispenza primarily revolves around the scientific validity of his claims and methodologies.

Joe Dispenza: a chiropractor excells in pseudoscientific bullshit

Dispenza is at his most dangerous firstly when he implies that he can cure serious illness. In this way, he can cause the premature death of many patients. Secondly, he systematically undermines rational thinking which inevitably will cause significant harm to the already badly damaged US society.

How Joseph Dispenza Seduced America With Pseudoscience

In one particularly disturbing instance, Dispenza told a 44-year-old woman struggling with infertility that she wasn’t getting pregnant because she didn’t have “happy eggs.”

The woman had already tried several rounds of fertility treatment, and wondered if it was worth the continued cost. “The spirit is waiting for you to have happy eggs before you have a kid,” Dispenza told her, as her eyes filled with tears. “[The baby] doesn’t want to live in guilt, it wants to live in joy.”

“We’re going to help you,” he added, resting both hands on her shoulders. “You change the field, you change matter… You just need a little help.”

Fake Science AND Joe Dispenza (You Need Therapy podcast)

...pseudoscience mimics real science by co-opting their terms and using them in a way that sets you up to want to believe it’s true.

Placebo Joe Dispenza (Conspirituality podcast)

If you get treated by someone who says they’re a doctor, but they’re not, can they still have a placebo effect? That’s the question we’d like to ask Dr. Joe Dispenza, who’s not a doctor, but who plays one on the internet, treating one and all with the placebo of his bafflegab about Quantum healing and TimeSpace.