A wonderful way for frauds to infect the gullible with idiotic ideas and sell them expensive, worthless products.

According to one retailer,

In 1994, the National Institutes of Health in the United States adopted a new term – biofield – to describe a growing body of research showing a subtle field that permeates and extends beyond the physical body.

There is no evidence from the NIH website that the term was invented by NIH scientists or endorsed by the NIH.

• In 2001 the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine or NCCAM (part of NIH) set up grants for “frontier medicine.” NCCAM noted

  there is a relative paucity of data that
  convincingly demonstrates safety, efficacy, effectiveness, and mechanisms

  of such things as biofields.

• A search for “biofield” on the NIH site returns no results that are older than 2001.
• NIH believes the idea of a biofield has “no plausible biomedical explanation” and it is considered an “unconventional application” of medicine.
• In the Strategic Plan 2005-2009 for NCCAM, the biofield is listed as one of many practices “that are unproven by science.”
• In the Glossary section of the Strategic Plan, NCCAM provides this definition of “biofield”:
  

  A vital energy or life force that is believed by many energy medicine practitioners to flow throughout the body. The existence of biofields has not been scientifically proven, and they have not been measured by conventional instruments.

Someone invented the idea that NIH invented the term, and invented a date as well.

A biofield is claimed to be an invisible energy field that surrounds and permeates a living body, undetectable by science. If it is imperceptible by physical measurement, it could not be affected by any real force such as EMF from TVs, computers, etc. Any products that claim to help your biofield are dubious as there is no method to establish their effects. The biofield belongs in the realm of spirituality, not science.

— Nathan Robertson, biophysicist

NCCAM has a research listing for “energy medicine,” the Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science. This center integrates and reports on

research on the effects of low energy fields. The research is focused on developing standardized bioassays (cellular biology) and psychophysiological and biophysical markers of biofield effects, and on the application of the markers developed to measure outcomes in the recovery of surgical patients.

The program is headed by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona. He doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by the rest of his colleagues. Follow this link to read more about his ideas and research.