Theory:Healing touch

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The following fan theories are about Healing touch.

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Theories

Theory	Citations	Notes
Jeremy Greer's healing touch is better then Linderman's.	None	+ Jeremy was able to kill with his ability, Linderman wasn't. - Their abilities might not be the same, Jeremy's ability was named before all of the effects of his ability could be documented. • It also depends on what you mean by 'better'. On the one hand, Jeremy could both give and take life. On the other hand, Linderman had had decades to perfect his ability. Jeremy Greer's power was more versatile, but it is unknown if it was actually superior. + Linderman was a villain, but he was never shown to kill with his ability. • Linderman was arrogant; he may have felt that such 'barbaric' uses of his abilities would be an affront to the essential dignity of his power (at least in his wacky, ubermensch-revering mind).
The ability negatively affects those who use it.	None	+ Ishi was dying for an unknown reason, and Linderman may have been aging prematurely. - Nothing suggests the ability affects its used negatively. Linderman had his ability for years, and was never even hinted having any sort of health problem or debilitation. Nothing suggests he aged too fast either. • Linderman was as old as Charles Deveaux. - Ishi could be sick due to carrying the Catalyst, it could have adverse effects in hosting it for a long time. • Ishi could be sick due to any natural reason. + Peter is currently experiencing negative health effects from constantly using this ability.
It's not possible to heal Tracy or someone else with freezing or water mimicry.	None	+ It's only possible to heal things if they live of have lived before, there is no life in water. - It may not be possible to heal Tracy when she is in water form, but when she is in human form (and alive), she can be healed. • Donald Essex was hurt with a chemical and dissolved. • The authors mentioned that the substance that water mimics become isn't actually water (that is, H2O). Thus, it might be some sort of bizarre organic life (like a giant amoeba).
Jeremy's power is not the same as Linderman's and Ishi's, it involves some sort of life force transfer.	None	+ Jeremy was able to do things Linderman and Ishi never demonstrated, even though they had their abilities much longer. - He may have just had a very powerful form of healing touch. • It has never been indicated that there are more powerful versions of the same ability. • Yes it has - Peter and Arthur's abilities, for example. • Information that didn't make into the shown isn't necessarily canon. • Arthur's ability is not necessarily stronger then Peter's, while he is able to take powers away he needs to make physical contact, Peter just has to be around the person. Also, Peter can take abilities without harming the owner. + Peter becomes exhausted when using this ability. That might be because he was transferring his own "life force" from himself into his patients. - Over-use of any ability will eventually lead to exhaustion. If Peter was sacrificing his own life force, he would be prematurely aging and dying, not becoming fatigued. + Fatigue comes because his stamina is being depleted, he doesn't need to age to show that he is becoming weaker. Linderman healed lots of people in the war, and he was never even implied to get tired, nor did he age. - Linderman healed many, true, but we never saw him heal many people in rapid succession. Peter has been using his ability almost non-stop since he acquired it. Everything has a limit. + In War Buddies, Part 3 he is shown healing a man's broken jaw at least nine times, yet he never implied that he was starting to become fatigued. - There's a big difference between fixing up a broken jaw (with rest between) and healing the horrific wounds of dozens of people almost nonstop. • Hesam mentioned he and Peter saved only four people that "weren't as bad as they thought", and Peter healed was seen healing only one other patient out of these four. + Since he is not altering his victim's ages with his ability, there is no reason as to why he would get older. • Vitality is a different concept then age. + There is a similar ability which involves transferal, but of age instead of life. - The writers stated that age transferal cannot be used to heal someone. + A similar ability, not the same ability. - Jeremy himself never demonstrated any ill effect from using his ability. + Jeremy hardly ever healed someone in the dire conditions the people Peter rescued were. - In Tabula Rasa, Jeremy healed Peter (who had a gaping hole in his chest cavity) while terrified, traumatized, and only knowing about the 'killing' aspect of his ability. • He said he used to be a healer, implying that at one point he used his ability to heal. At the time however, he thought his ability had mutated permanently. + Jeremy never had to heal several people in succession, however. - If Jeremy's ability involved transferring life force, then absorbing his parents' life forces would have felt good. He would probably have become like Linda Tavara: amoral and addicted to his own ability. + Life force and auras are not necessarily the same thing. Taking it from someone doesn't mean it feels good. Linda felt that because she sort of fed on those auras. - The auras which Linda saw were those peoples' souls. Since they were also affected by illness and other external factors, it seems likely that a person's life force is linked to their soul. If absorbing someone's soul felt good, it seems likely that absorbing someone's life force would have a similar effect. • It is not known what life-force truly is, therefore it is impossible to tell what absorbing it would feel like. - Linda gushed for pages and pages about how wonderful taking auras felt. It's quite obvious she found doing so pleasurable. + Still, auras and lifeforce might not necessarily be the same thing. - Noah knows a lot about evolved humans. He also studied Jeremy for a long time. It seems unlikely that he would have missed something like that. + At the time Jeremy was taken in for testing, he hadn't manifested the killing part of his ability, or rather still had an emotional balance that translates in healing when he uses his ability. Noah said Jeremy later returned to an unstable home, emotional instability bringing out the harmful effects of his ability. - The Company may have been heartless, but it very rarely got basic facts about peoples' powers wrong. They would have tested Jeremy to the point of exhaustion; any life-force transference would have been noted (and probably then followed by more tests). + Noah is not omniscient. He was unaware that Jeremy could kill with his power so he could have been unaware of how his ability actually worked, among other things. - If Jeremy's ability involved life force transferal, then it seems likely that the 'taking' aspect would have manifested alongside the 'giving' aspect. + Not if different emotions and mindsets trigger different effects. - If this ability is actually 'life force transferal', then it seems unlikely that both halves of the ability would activate several years apart. + It's possible that Jeremy never felt violent or angry enough to subconsciously want to harm someone until his angsty adolescence. - That is extremely unlikely. Everyone feels angry, and childhood emotions can sometimes be much more intense than adult ones. • Angry enough. + Children rarely experience homicidal urges. A male adolescent experiences is much more likely to. - Actually, children have committed murder (and other such crimes) over trifles because they had yet to develop the ability to control their emotions, fully understand the consequences of their actions, and see things from others' perspectives. - Jeremy wasn't feeling homicidal when he killed his parents; he was simply frustrated and angry. These are emotions you can find in any human of any age. + They are stronger and more common in adolescents however. • It is not known for certain how Jeremy felt when he killed his parents. + It's possible that releasing one's life force is easier then absorbing someone else's. + Considering that both a company founder and the wife of a company founder had this ability for several decades, it seems unlikely that Noah would have been unaware that Jeremy could kill if they all had the same ability. - Brian Davis and Aviv both have telekinesis. However, Aviv could lift and move several metric tons of metal (the carnival rides) with ease, while Brian Davis could barely move a teacup across a table. People with the same ability don't necessarily have the same 'power level'. + Aviv has had his ability for a while, and has actively developed it. Brian Davis wanted his ability to go away. - Julien Dumont, despite the various power-boosters and special treatments the Company put him through, was only able to produce naked, inert clones that took time to 'awaken' and couldn't clone themselves. Evan, on the other hand, lived long before the Company existed, and almost certainly had to develop his ability through trial and error. He could produce dozens of fully functional, fully clothed, and fully armed clones in seconds, and each clone was capable of replicating itself with ease. Evan's version of cloning was obviously superior to Julien's. - Maury and Matt both had telepathy. However, Matt managed to progress from reading minds to controlling minds to seeing the future to transferring one man's soul into another man's body in a remarkably short time. Maury was rather old, but never managed to develop his ability beyond controlling minds. Some evolved humans are just flat-out more powerful than others. • We don't know how much Maury pushed his ability. Matt was only able to see the future because of an interaction between his ability and an experience with another evolved human who induced visions of the future in him. Also, Matt didn't transfer a soul, he made a man believe he was someone else, and that man had ways to fill in the blanks Matt couldn't. The only thing left from Nathan in Sylar is the memories he picked up, which most likely due to Matt's tampering with Sylar's mind, are able to take control. + The creators specifically said that Matt's ability was progressing far beyond that of his father's. + Linderman and Ishi both had their ability much longer then Jeremy, it is unlikely that he would be more proficient with it. • Killing with Jeremy's ability is not necessarily harder then healing. It is just a different use. Therefore, whether the ability is used to kill or heal may not be affected proficiency level. + When describing a woman with the same ability as Jeremy, Noah stated that she could "control the flow of life". Linderman and Ishi's ability has always been described as healing, not controlling the flow of life. - He may have been using a metaphor. One could describe sound manipulation as "the voice of the banshee", but that doesn't mean it was granted by the ghost of a dead woman. - Yeah, but that's different. It has been described as "the flow of life". + There is a difference between describing the effects of an ability and describes its sensory effects. - The odds of an ability which is 100% identical to another in every measurable way existing is almost nil.