It’s not. Read this Twitter thread and get some perspective on the kind of garbage that can trickle through peer review. It’s an analysis of a paper titled “YXQ-EQ Induces Apoptosis and Inhibits Signaling Pathways Important for Metastasis in Non-Small Cell Lung Carcinoma Cells”, which sounds fairly mundane — lots of things inhibit cancer cells in a dish. The curious question, though, is what the heck is YXQ-EQ? I’d never heard of it.
Read further and you discover it’s qigong, the traditional Chinese exercise and meditation system, which the author somehow applied to a petri dish full of cancer cells for 5 minutes. How that was done is not explained.
Further, it’s not just regular qigong, it’s Yan Xin Qigong, hence the acronym.
The first author’s name is Yan Xin.
There are four articles on this mysterious YXQ-EQ, all by the same author, on PubMed. I looked for an explanation of YXQ-EQ elsewhere on the web, and it’s only associated with quacky alternative medicine sites. Meditation is fine; arguing that your meditation cured your cancer is nonsense; but I don’t see how Yan Xin convinced a dish of cells to meditate, or do calisthenics, and somehow not a single reviewer bothered to insist that the methodology be more thorough.
The only way these multiple papers got published is if they had really lazy reviewers, or extremely biased reviewers.