Yet another study claiming capability for distance healing-and thoughts on second hand reporting of science in general

I came across this news article for another study by Dean Radin which is claiming evidence for distance healing. You can find the link here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/srinivasan-pillay/the-science-of-distant-he_b_177986.html

Luckily, I don't have to debunk this one because Skeptico already took care of it for me.

However, this really does bring another point forward. Unfortunately, for quite the majority of research, we have to rely on second hand reports of studies. For example, the only place where you can find a direct abstract for this study is here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18602616?dopt=Citation

or one or two other places. However, there doesn't seem to be any actual online link for the original paper so that one can read it themselves. Which means that one would have to order the journal hard copy. This is only one example. Unless you belong to a university, for the most part, you have to fork out considerable money to actually get access to current scientific papers.

The difficulty with this is that relying on second hand reports allow for misrepresentation of studies and incorrect data getting to the public. Until the scientific journals themselves become cheaper, I would strongly recommend taking any reporting of a study you hear about from a second hand source with a grain of salt, regardless of whether the one reporting is a proponent, skeptic or "unbiased" and see if you can get ahold of the authors for a reprint.