So how effective is Bengston Bioenergy?

The mouse experiments have done wonders in proving that Bill's method works. We know that method cures mice, but the important question is whether it cures people. Anecdotally we have heard that in Bill's hands it does cure people, so the next question is: can the people Bill teaches also cure people the way Bill does after taking his workshops?

We've been doing workshops now for a year and a half, six to date, five for newbies and one workshop for "alumni" who have already taken the introductory one; there have also been several "alumni" evenings with Bill. I've been at every single event as the main organizer. Several people have attended a few as helpers. We also have monthly meetings. We are excited by the potential of the work. But after a year and a half I would have hoped to have more concrete results, or at least a half a dozen documented cures, to show for our labours. Our results have been promising, but not necessarily conclusive.

We have had success with suspected cancers in the testing stages, even some that were strongly suspected, considered to be metastases or recurrences of a prior cancer. The first test would confirm the presence of something worrysome, but the next test would find nothing, or the "something" would just disappear before the biopsy, so no biopsy would be done. From the patient's perspective these are the best-case scenarios because they involve the least amount of suffering, but for those of us trying to prove that the technique works, they don't do much. In the view of orthodox medicine the lump that disappears wasn't cancer in the first place because, by definition, cancer doesn't just "disappear" all by itself without painful, momentous, and destructive intervention.

We have had a bunch of interesting anomalous results. A visible tumour that shrank to less than half its size in two treatments -- then proceeded to just "hang out", still shrinking slowly, for the next six months (it's still there). A lymphoma that was re-diagnosed, first as leukemia, then as a case of lupus. A case of acute myelogenous leukemia where the white blood cell count reversed and a case of stage-4 pancreatic cancer that went into a 10-week remission (these will be the subjects of separate posts as both these patients subsequently died). With non-cancerous conditions we've seen a severely prolapsed uterus return to normal after treatment and knee-replacement surgery cancelled after the patient no longer needed a cane to walk.

Judging from my limited experience I would say that these treatments have a different rhythm and a different way of working from standard medical treatments. The outcome is either inexplicable and mysterious -- things vanishing from one day to the next -- or languidly slow. My preference is for the quick, inexplicable vanishings. With slow you can doubt whether it's working, and so can the patient. It can also take months, and months, and months of treatment. But what we have observed is an increase in the well-being of the person receiving treatment even when the treatment is taking its sweet old time. The results we've observed are different from some of the ones Bill describes where tumours simply shrink as if someone were playing a movie backwards.

The other observation I would make is that all these healings have been done by a handful of people. All of them have other types of energy practices such as Reiki, shamanism, or deep meditation in their background. They have also either attended more than one workshop or have had access to Bill in one-on-one training situations. People who take one of Bill's workshops from scratch, with no other "energy" background, tend to be shy about trying out the technique to begin with, and they also have less access to patients, so we have less of a chance to find out how effectively they could use it. An argument could be made that because they have the method in its purest form, they ought to be the best at it.

So it's exciting and promising, but as yet, no cigar.

I expect the first documented cures will come from Bill's own bailiwick, where there is now also a group, with some people receiving active mentoring from him. This kind of mentoring and participation by the teacher is how Bill learned the technique in the first place, so it would make sense for the method to work best under these conditions.

Postscript Oct. 20, 2011: I have recently heard another cancer healer say that cancer adapts to treatment over time, so the longer the treatment goes on, the less effective it becomes, unless you radically change it up as you go along to keep the cancer "confused". Our experiences treating people seem to confirm this observation. This particular healer, Kurt Peterson, gets around the problem by giving one whopping full-day treatment to knock out the cancer for once and for all. Both Kurt Peterson and Bill appear to be very strong healers; the rest of us here seem to have only managed, by and large, to keep people relatively healthy while slowing the cancer down. It's been helpful, but not quite what I was aiming for.