"What is Cancer and Why Do You Have It?"

Now there's an eye-catching title. It's a Lynn McTaggart teleconference with a Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who has cured over 3000 people of cancer. When you click on the "Order Now" button, you get three pricing options, $117 for the 90-minute conference call, the mp3 recording, and the transcript; $107 for the call and the transcript; and $87 for the conference call alone. The friend who forwarded it to me also enclosed a comment asking me whether she was alone in thinking that these prices were a bit high for a 90-minute conference call, particularly one with that title, and on that topic. She felt that giving people vital information about cancer was more in the order of public service than a business proposition. Ms. McTaggart is the highly successful author of The Field and The Intention Experiment and publisher of the internet journal What Doctors Don't Tell You. Click here if you would like to inquire about the pricing of this teleconference. Both mailing address and an e-mail address are provided.

Update Jan. 2011: Here is a short summary on some of what Dr. Kingsley does.

The mind is a powerful thing - part 2

I ran across an article entitled Cancer in the Mind's Eye written by Margaret Philp in 2006 and published in the Globe and Mail. The article illuminates a number of interesting points on the relationship of stress and cancer, and also on the power of the mind to lengthen survival and produce healing.

On the correlation between stress and the spread of cancer Ms. Philp wrote:

A recent study from the University of Texas that is turning heads injected mice with ovarian-cancer tumour cells. When the animals were tightly confined in plastic chambers for several hours at a time — causing a surge in their stress hormones — the tumours multiplied in size and number and were far more likely to metastasize. But blocking the stress hormones stalled the spread of the cancer...

And just last month, a study published in the medical journal Cancer Research by prominent PNI researcher Ronald Glaser showed that stress hormones increased the growth and spread of an incurable head-and-neck cancer called nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The hormone, norepinephrine, stimulated the tumour cell to produce two chemicals, one that spurs the growth of new blood vessels nourishing the cancer and another that breaks down healthy tissue allowing the tumour to spread more easily.

The article then goes on to describe Alastair Cunningham's Healing Journey, a program that uses meditation, introspection and visualization to help people cope with cancer. After working with thousands of cancer patients, Dr. Cunningham -- an immunologist turned psychologist who is also a cancer survivor -- has come to believe that the techniques taught in the program add not only quality but also quantity of life. And when oncologists reviewed the participants' files, they found that the ones who lived the longest, with a few exceptions, were the ones who practiced the techniques most diligently.

Dr. Cunningham also observed that longterm survivors tended to exhibit definite psychological shifts. He found that

the long[term] survivors all shared a clear sense of what was important in their lives, felt the freedom to shape their lives according to those priorities and were more accepting of themselves, others and their lot in life. For these people, cancer was perceived as a motivation for change rather than a life-destroying illness.

When I speak to energy healers across the board, most feel that cancer can be healed, but that unless the survivor changes his or her life to remove or deal with the stressors that contributed to the initial bout of illness, it will return. I have often thought of this as "blaming the patient", but I now have had cause to wonder if there is not something to it. Something caused the cancer in the first place. If it were all caused by environmental pollutants or mutant genes, we would all likely get it. In fact, we do, but our bodies are most of the time effectively dealing with it -- until one day, for some unknown reason, they don't. The million dollar question is why?

The article also mentions research that has shown the existence of a type-C personality, which can predispose one to cancer just as a type-A personality predisposes one to heart attacks or strokes. Type-C personalities are

too nice — prone to repressing their feelings and stoically appeasing others at the expense of their own needs. They have been described as unassertive, unable to express emotions and feeling hopeless, helpless and unloved. In some cases, they had also suffered the loss of a close relationship within a few years before their diagnosis.

Of course not all type-As get heart attacks, and likely not all type-Cs get cancer. But it does jump out that Type-Cs seem to live to make other people happy and are dependent for their own happiness on the happiness of others. Their reasons to live are other- rather than self-directed. When my own mother, a classic type-C, died of complications of her cancer treatment (which her oncologist had described as "prophylactic"), I strongly wished she had been more selfish about her own needs and her own survival. I would have rather had her around a few more years being "ornery" and difficult than not have her around at all.

Ms. Philp herself died in 2009 when her cancer returned. I found the last few paragraphs of her article quite thought-provoking. She wrote:

Some insist that the alluring promise of a cure with a mind-body approach strikes false hope in cancer patients with advanced disease. Others, Dr. Fortin among them, warn that the prospect can be subtly twisted to make people feel guilty that if their cancer comes back, it will be because they didn't work hard enough at healing.

But all I can do is what I can do. My life is joyfully consumed by the busyness of four children, their homework and school lunches, hockey games, swimming lessons, piano practising and Christmas parties, never mind my job at The Globe and Mail.

I am fastidious about diet and exercise. I faithfully visit a naturopath. But between bedtime stories and dinner dishes, I find little spare time to plunk down on the floor in a lotus position to meditate.

I do feel a little remiss at times for the healing work I'm not doing. And yet I am mindful of my abundant blessings in a way I never was before cancer. Not a day passes that I don't thrill at being alive to be a mother to my children. And maybe this is a healing meditation all its own.

Read also Part 1, Part 3, Anatomy of a miracle, Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?

The Emperor of All Maladies

I was listening to the CBC one morning this week and my attention was caught by an interview with a doctor by the name of Siddharta Mukherjee, who had written a book on cancer entitled The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

As Dr. Mukherjee sounded like a caring and knowledgeable physician whom one facing cancer might very well want to have as an oncologist, and also had interesting things to say, I next looked the book up on Amazon. Its Amazon ranking was #27 (anything under 100 is a best-seller) and it had nine 5-star reader reviews. One reader called it a "tour de force" and compared its author to Melville (of Moby Dick fame) for the scope and artistry of his writing; he also said that had he read this book in his teens, it might have inspired him to become a cancer researcher.

Publisher's Weekly described the book as "a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy." Clearly a book well worth reading, and one that readers are gravitating to in large numbers, judging by its popularity.

But now I would like you to take a step back and pretend that you are an alien and you have never heard of cancer, and look at the words that are being used to describe it. "The emperor of all maladies, the king of our terrors"; a "relentless, wily, and elusive enemy"; and from reader Kenneth E. MacWilliams this:

Siddhartha Mukherjee ... almost parentally takes us by the hand to give us the courage to open with him the door to that dark and foreboding closet in order to see what is really lurking inside. Since eventually most of us are going to have to wrestle with this monster anyway -- either as a victim or as a loved one of a victim -- looking intelligently and closely into that dark closet does diminish fear and enhance wise perspective. And on this incredible journey into the depths of that darkness, what an absolutely marvelous guide is this modern day Virgil called Siddharta Mukherjee as he leads us on this long and often harrowing journey through the swarth (sic) that cancer has cut through mankind throughout time. (my emphasis)

Do you feel the foreboding and the power of that language? Can you visualize, as an alien, the terrifying creature that is being described here, lurking in the darkness of that closet? What you are seeing is not the thing itself but what Richard Bartlett calls the "consensus reality" view of cancer, a morphic field that has been created by us through centuries of fear and not-knowing. We are afraid of it because for all our science and all our effort we have not been able to understand it or master it. The moment we understand it, it will lose its power and its terror, and it will be revealed, like the wizard of Oz, to have been much smaller and less frightening than we had believed it to be.

The face of any monster can change. The energy healing community has been saying with a quiet voice for years now that cancer can be treated and even healed without drastic and damaging interventions. Did you know that over 200 mice have now been cured of deadly cancers using energy healing in experiments that took place in accredited university laboratories and showed near-100% or 100% success rates? Or that the first series of these experiments took place over three decades ago, yet few people have heard of it? The results were so strange, so inexplicable, that no one wanted to know anything more. But the observed reality has been that, when energy healing works, cancer simply becomes a non-event. There is no monster, no monster-slayer, no heroes, no victims, no drama, no pain. Is this not something worth looking into for further research and development, for all our sakes?

A few years ago I read a small, insignicant article in the Globe and Mail that said that a few people in the American Southwest had contracted bubonic plague. Bubonic plague, the article went on to say, is easily treatable with erythromicin. Six hundred and fifty years ago bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe, an estimated 75 million people. Back then it, not cancer, was the "the emperor of all maladies, the king of our terrors." When new discoveries are made, things change -- sometimes faster than we can imagine.

Postscript, Feb. 25: I find it fascinating to see how well this book is doing. Everyone seems to be interested in cancer. It's almost like people slowing down to gawk at an accident scene on the highway. Yet few people, it seems, are interested in possible non-medical solutions to cancer. I wonder why that is. Here is another book to read alongside Emperor of All Maladies.

Postscript, May 14: It is now three months later, and the book is still at #107. People seem to be flocking to it almost the way they would slow down to view a road accident. For an antidote to the pessimism of the Emperor of All Maladies, read Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson, now available from Sounds True. It's a paradigm changing book, sitting around #48,000. For my part I would rather have people reading Embrace, Release, Heal, but it seems that people prefer doom and gloom to hope.

What’s wrong with “anomalous” healing?

If you look up “anomalous healing” on Google, you will find, among other things, a video on Youtube by Dr. Bengston and the PEAR report on intentional healing which I excerpted in my previous post. If you look up the meaning of the word “anomalous” in a dictionary, you will find the definition “deviating from what is standard, normal, or expected”. In short, something “anomalous” is also something “weird” or “strange”.

The problem with “anomalous healing” is the use of the word “anomalous”. “Anomalous” healing is also considered to be something “paranormal”, which is why it was studied by PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (there is that word again!). And “paranormal” in turn conjures up things like ESP, remote viewing, and strange CIA experiments (like the men who stared at goats in the recent reality-based movie of the same name).

In short, it’s all something strange and somehow not quite respectable, at least not to rational-minded people.

Part of Bill Bengston’s book The Energy Cure features Bennett Mayrick, his mentor, who among other talents developed an impressive ability to heal cancer. Because his other talents were token-object reading (psychometry) and cloud-busting, he is described in the book as a “psychic”. Rational-minded readers who might otherwise be impressed with the results of Bill’s experiments may run for the hills when they read about the “psychic” from whom he had learned to heal, a jack-of-all-trades who lived on the fringes of society, never quite able to fit in.

But in fact it is quite likely that these “paranormal” abilities are nothing more than abilities that will become "normal" as we evolve, and that people like Bennett Mayrick are just precursors of a future iteration of humanity, reluctantly pointing the way. The rest of us, stuck in our 3-D boxes, may consider their abilities weird and worrisome, but that’s not their fault, but ours.

Consider this: today a man healing someone of cancer through bioenergy healing is considered to be doing something strange and “anomalous”. But a nurse wearing a facemask and rubber gloves putting -- at doctors' orders -- a poisonous substance into a patient which if spilled could cause serious burns and would be considered a biohazard is doing something acceptable and “normal”. Which scenario would you rather see as anomalous?


Postscript: An alert reader directed me to a book entitled Walking Through Walls about Lew Smith, a successful Miami interior decorator who seemingly overnight developed abilities very similar to Bennett Mayrick's, including cloud busting and healing, at more or less the same time. Some of his experiences echo those described by Bill Bengston in The Energy Cure, as for instance the disbelief of the medical establishment resulting in cured patients undergoing dangerous procedures, and patients in treatment, like Bill's mice, feeling healthy and energetic while their cancer was apparently still strongly viable. The book was written by Mr. Smith's son, Philip Smith, who is planning a second book more focused on his father's healings. It would be interesting to read Walking Through Walls (and its successor) side by side with The Energy Cure.

How "energy healing" works

This is how "energy healing" works, according to the PEAR lab. I put "energy healing" in quotes because what is being suggested here is clearly not based on energy, but information:

Taking consciousness as a form or manifestation of information, Jahn and Dunne suggest a metaphoric extension of quantum mechanical principles into the consciousness domain (3, 36). Consciousness is regarded as both particulate and wavelike, in analogy with quantum mechanical descriptions of matter and energy. In its nonlocalized, wavelike manifestation, it is unbounded and can penetrate barriers and resonate with other consciousnesses and the environment, thereby acquiring or inserting information that is unique to the interacting system. Based on this metaphor, Jahn and Dunne suggest possible mechanisms for anomalous influence. For example, they invoke the quantum mechanical principle of indistinguishability to help understand bonding. When molecules are formed from atoms, the constituent elements lose their identity and from this loss a classically anomalous "exchange force" results, producing a strong covalent bond. Analogously, through a sacrifice of conscious individuality, a unifying resonant bond may be established with another consciousness or a physical system, allowing the acquisition or insertion of information. Viewed as an influence of one system on another, this would be anomalous, but in a coherent, unified system, information is distributed throughout. The merging of subjective identities with each other, or with the environment, enables the transfer of objective information manifesting as coherence between previously separable constituents, yielding a total system within which entropy is reduced (37). While these suggestions may seem abstruse, the fundamental principles are parallel to those involved in common interactive experiences such as falling in love, or creating a work of art, or enjoying the beauty of a sunset.

...The research on anomalous interactions provides intriguing evidence that a nonlocal intervention such as intentional healing may contribute similarly to the continuing exchange of information that is essential to maintaining the integrity of living systems... Living bodies, with homeostatic, immune, and nervous systems that epitomize the realm of applied nonlinear dynamics are intrinsically susceptible to influence from small inputs and are able to identify and amplify the most subtle of inchoate patterns and information. Biological systems utilize random processes and uncertainty to maintain the highest level of sensitivity to subtle changes in the environment. They are reactive on the finest scale to information that reduces entropic disorder and provides an increment of structure and predictability, yielding a stable internal milieu and successful interaction with the environment. In this context, we see that healing a wound or recovering from an illness is dependent upon the generation or addition of appropriate information to help restore order and structure.

... An injury or disease manifests as a disturbance or disorder in a system that, when healthy, is magnificently structured and orderly. It is, on the other hand, so complex that its function at the fine scale is beyond our full scientific understanding, as in the extraordinarily precise homeostatic control of the body, or in the exact mechanisms of mending and regeneration when we are injured, or in the creation of ideas. When there is a disruption, and healing is required, the need is for additional order, the infusion of information. Of course consciousness is nothing if not a manifestation of information, and in its creative and structuring capacities, it is ideally suited as a reservoir for the processes that sustain and restore health and wellbeing.

This is just a small excerpt from an article entitled "The Physical Basis of Intentional Healing Systems" written by Roger D. Nelson for the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab and published in 1999. To read the full document, click here. The PEAR lab itself closed in 2007.

If I understand the excerpt correctly, it says that based on the principles of quantum physics one consciousness can affect another consciousness and help it return to healthy homeostasis. The effect observed at PEAR was not very strong, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has been getting stronger, and that the ability can be developed.

The mind is a powerful thing

I had a discussion with a patient today that helped me crystalize some of my ideas about the contribution of patients to the success of their treatment. As we were speaking it suddenly came to me that no form of treatment, allopathic or alternative, actually heals anyone. What all forms of treatment do is help create conditions favourable to healing. The final step -- the actual healing -- comes from the patient himself.

We have all heard stories where healing occurred against impossible odds -- and also stories where people who should not have died did. At one end is the almost unbelievable Krebiozen story, described in Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe, in which a man riddled with tumours and expected to die was given an experimental drug called Krebiozen by his physician (see embedded video below). The tumours practically melted away and the man was discharged from the hospital to resume his normal life. Then he read in the paper that Krebiozen was shown to be less effective than expected -- and his tumours returned with a vengeance. The second time his curious physician gave him nothing more than a saline injection, and told him that it was a new, improved form of Krebiozen. Again the tumours melted "like snowballs on a hot stove", but the patient died after reading in the paper that Krebiozen had been definitively discredited.

At the other end of the spectrum are the victims of voodoo curses who die because they believe they have been mortally hexed, or patients whose lives are shortened by negative prognoses. Larry Dossey wrote an entire book on this subject entitled Be Careful What You Pray For: You Just Might Get It. He calls it the "nocebo" effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect. The doctor, who is seen as a powerful and knowledgeable authority figure, pronounces that the patient has 3 months to live. The patient believes this, and obediently dies in the allotted time. Dossey cites a case where the patient had in fact been misdiagnosed and did not have the condition that was supposed to kill him. He died anyway because his doctor told him he would. The mind is an incredibly powerful thing, far more powerful than we give it credit for, for better or for worse.

The question then is, how can the mind's power for healing be engaged? The general pattern for cancer patients -- in fact, patients in general -- is to go to a practitioner (doctor, naturopath, chiropractor, homeopath, energy healer) and ask to be healed of an ailment. The patient expects that the practitioner will use some outside agency (chemotherapy, radiation, chelation, intravenous vitamin-C, cleansing agent, bioenergy) to cure him. In this scenario the patient is a passive recipient of the treatment, much like one goes to the dentist and opens one's mouth, and then quietly submits to whatever happens next.

What happens next outside the dentist's office, at least in the case of cancer patients who seek alternative therapies, is often nothing much, because most treatments don't have immediate effect. Most alternative treatments work through creating a positive healing environment for the body by removing stressors or harmful agents and/or by building up the immune system. This takes time. In the meantime the patient goes on to the next practitioner, and the next, and the next, in each case expecting something immediate and miraculous to happen, ultimately ending up disappointed, unless somewhere along the way he also manages to engage the incredible ability of his own body/mind to heal himself.

It seems to me that the next step in healing is to help the patient do just that. I will be returning to this topic in further posts as I work out the ideas around it -- stay tuned as this is definitely a work in progress and I am quite aware that I only raised the question and have not yet answered it. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Now available for your perusal: The mind is a powerful thing - Part 2

Postscript: Here is Michael Talbot on Youtube, speaking about the holographic brain model. The discussion on the Krebiozen story comes shortly after the 20-minute mark:

Bioenergy healing and childhood cancers

Children, according to Dr. Bengston, are very responsive to energy healing because, unlike adults, they are in the process of "composing" (as opposed to "decomposing") and have no preconceptions or prejudices that could get in the way. They also have a much faster metabolic rate than adults, and Dr. Bengston had observed that metabolic rate is a determining factor in how fast remission occurs.

Two years ago two of us trained in the Bengston method gave a single treatment to a little boy who had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a deadly form of childhood cancer. We had intended to treat him before he received chemotherapy, but were too late. The effect of our treatment was to give him what his mom described as "the best bloodwork he had since his diagnosis," which astonished the medical staff, as the effect of chemotherapy is supposed to be the exact opposite. Since the Bengston method is contraindicated when the patient is receiving chemotherapy or radiation, we decided not to continue, for fear that we might counteract the effectiveness of the allopathic treatment he was receiving.

At about the same time I had an interesting discussion with a nurse from Sick Kids' hospital. I proposed to her that we try energy treatments on the small percentage of cases they see where the initial diagnosis is so dire that the parents are told "nothing can be done" (other than palliative care). It made great sense to me that the parents of children who had no chance of survival through conventional means should be given the option of trying alternative therapies with the blessing of the hospital.

Her response surprised me. She said that in 99 per cent of these cases, where conventional therapies offer no hope, parents still opt to give their children chemotherapy and radiation, they are so desperate to see something done. It makes me wonder what these parents would do if they were told about all their options, not just the conventional ones.

I have also heard of cases where the parent does choose alternative treatments in preference to conventional ones and the state then intervenes and removes the child from the parent's care so the child can receive chemotherapy or radiation -- even when he or she has refused it! I am not sure, however, that this would also apply to cases where conventional therapies offer no hope.

But I think my proposal to the nurse was entirely reasonable. Chemotherapy and radiation cause great suffering. Why subject a child to them where they offer no hope? What possible harm could there be in offering energy healing as an option?

Postscript: I just found this interesting and informative article on childhood cancer from the BC Children's Hospital Foundation.

Can healing be learned? - Part 3

Almost as if in response to my comment that in order to become the most effective healers we can be we each have to find our own connection to the Source, along comes Frank Kinslow, the founder of Quantum Entrainment, with a method that seems to teach just that. Healing modalities are proliferating like bunnies these days!

Frank Kinslow is a chiropractor who spent many years on a path of spiritual search and meditation, and his healing method is based on going to your own source, what he calls your capital-S "Self", the eternal you that observes the small everyday "you" going about its business. The first exercise for learning the method, which is really a non-method, involves observing your thoughts. It is not you who does the healing, it's "awareness".

Quantum Entrainment seems to have some similarity to Matrix Energetics in at least one technique. Richard Bartlett of ME teaches "two-pointing", where you find two points, connect them, and then through observation "collapse the wave." Frank Kinslow teaches "triangulation", where you find two points, connect them, observe the way they feel, connect to your Self, and then watch what happens.

Having spent two years learning Mahamudra meditation, I can really appreciate the simplicity of Kinslow's method and I have now also begun to incorporate his "thought observing" exercise both into my meditation and into some of my healing practice. It's quite effective at stilling the chattering monkey mind that interferes with healing.

For the purposes of the specific topic of this blog I should note that in his book Kinslow also describes his experience treating a case of metastasized uterine cancer and touches on a number of topics covered in this blog: e.g., the acceptance or non-acceptance of energy healing by medical staff, and the participation of the patient in the healing.

This was Kinslow's experience: When he began treating this patient in the hospital room where she was expected to die, he was initially unwelcome by staff, who then became quite accepting and helpful when they saw the effects of his treatment. He saw the cancer shrink markedly in eight treatments, with the primary tumour disappearing altogether and the secondary tumour shrinking from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a walnut. The patient was then released to go home and resumed a normal life, but when Kinslow offered to continue treating her until the cancer went away altogether, she said that would not be necessary, that "she would take it from here". When the cancer became a threat again and he offered to resume treating it, she still declined treatment and died peacefully at home. Her family said that the extra time he gave her was the most beautiful time of her life and that she was grateful for it. Why this happens is appropriately the topic of another, more lengthy discussion, about life, illness, death, choices, beliefs, and how little we know about what really goes on.

Since I've not studied or experienced Mr. Kinslow's method, this post is not an endorsement but a commentary on what I've read about it. I do like its meditative aspects, however, and will follow up further on it.

Herewith a link to a free audio download of two of Mr. Kinslow's meditations.

Are energy healing modalities affected by the personality of the founder?

A few years ago I took a workshop in a method called BodySpin. The method, which involved the use of small, specially designed magnets illustrated with intricate and colourful geometric patterns, was quite elegant and architectural. Its creator, Jeff Levin, also happened to be an architect.

Richard Bartlett, the creator of Matrix Energetics, who likes to play air guitar at the beginning and end of his workshops, comes across as a would-be rock star and media personality. He is spontaneous, fun, and irreverent, and he created a system that is likewise spontaneous, fun, and irreverent.

Bill Bengston is a professor and a self-described skeptic and rationalist. So when almost 40 years ago he encountered a strange man who was able to bust clouds, read real-time diagnoses from signatures hidden in envelopes, and eventually developed the ability to cure cancer, he immediately asked himself, what is this strange phenomenon? can I prove that it exists? can I tease it apart to see what makes it work?

Out of these questions came a series of seminal experiments that proved that what we call "energy healing" indeed exists and can work on cancer. At the same time Dr. Bengston also devised a teaching method which he has since used in a dozen or so workshops, but his preference as a skeptic and as a rationalist continues to be the probing of these healing energies in the lab to see if they will yield up their secrets.

By way of contrast to Dr. Bengston's approach, I would like to present the case of Richard Gordon, the founder of Quantum Touch. Like Dr. Bengston, Richard Gordon 30-odd years ago met a man who could dissolve grapefruit-sized tumours and move vertebrae with the touch of a finger. Richard Gordon learned to heal from him and developed Quantum Touch, which has since then become a world-wide phenomenon with reputedly over 500 instructors. He says Quantum Touch is easy to learn and his motto is "your love has impact". Along the way there seems to have been some dilution, but practitioners out there are arguably doing quantities of "good" -- as are practitioners of other modalities all over the world.

Both Dr. Bengston and Mr. Gordon serve the public weal through their own particular means and it is difficult to judge which means will ultimately prove to be of greater benefit to society. Dr. Bengston would like to figure out the underlying mechanism of healing and find alternate means of delivery for it. Richard Gordon wants to teach his method to as many people as possible so they can go out there and help others.

Judging by the unprecented results of Dr. Bengston's mouse experiments, the closest we have come to date to finding a cure for cancer is the healing energy that came through Bennett Mayrick, Dr. Bengston's mentor, almost 40 years ago. It was then that Dr. Bengston also learned to cure cancer, and a short while later a method was devised to also teach others. Yes, it is a worthwhile exercise to study this healing energy in a lab to see what makes it tick and whether it can be reproduced by other means; but it also belongs in the hands of people helping real cancer patients in real time, out in the real world. That is why I keep carping on the need for an institute to do teaching as well as research, so not only the energy itself could be studied, but also the most effective means of passing it on.

Bill Bengston interview with Dr. Kamau Kokayi on WBAI New York

I particularly recommend listening to this interview if you are curious about the role of consciousness in healing. Dr. Kokayi asks Dr. Bengston some very compelling questions about the implications of his research. At ca the 39 minute mark Dr. Bengston says that he is trying to find the underlying mechanism for the healings and Dr. Kokayi comments that it sounds like he is trying to find an underlying mechanism for consciousness. An interesting discussion ensues.

You will need to scroll down the page to get to the interview, which is dated November 3rd.

An important link for practitioners

I was impressed by this thorough and informative FAQ for cancer patients posted on the website of a Bengston practitioner who has learned the method in 2008 and has received a good deal of personal mentoring since from Dr. Bengston himself.

I noticed that many of the challenges she faced were similar to the ones we did: tumours that grew, the need for many hours of treatment, and the uncertainty of patients about the progress of their treatment.

She writes:

Wouldn’t it be nice if the tumor got smaller and smaller and smaller and then gone? It doesn’t usually work this way. Be prepared. This is a natural, not a magical process and most tumors get bigger before they get smaller.

Patients tend to become quite concerned by this development, but then they are encouraged to practice the "cycling" process, to recall that the mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments developed large tumours that then imploded and healed, and to notice how they are feeling:

If you are feeling good, sleeping well, eating well, living well and your body is "taking" the treatment, it is all a sign that you are getting well. In fact, in nearly every tumor it gets bigger before it gets smaller … [I]f you are responding well to the treatments, and your gut says you are OK and if other aspects of your health are improving, it bodes well.

How many sessions are needed? It is dependent on the cancer. According to this practitioner, it could be 20 or 200 or more. We too have found that there was a need for many sessions. I suspect we could have helped some of our patients more efficaciously if we treated them 4 hours a day instead of one. But realistically we simply didn’t have the time; also, if a practitioner is to eat, he or she needs to be paid, and how many patients can afford this kind of intensive treatment?

The patient is asked to make a huge leap of faith: to put many hours into treatment, to pay large sums of money, and to accept that his or her cancer will grow before imploding. Yes, their sleep has improved, they have more energy, and they are able to do things that other people with their cancer are no longer capable of. But then they go to their doctor, who says “your tumour is larger” or “such and such cancer marker has gone up”, and then they start looking at you funny and wondering if you are really doing them any good. I think their often unarticulated fear is that though they are feeling well, in fact much better than anyone else in their condition would be feeling, their cancer may just be gathering steam in the background and preparing to pounce.

It sounds like this practitioner, with Dr. Bengston’s mentoring and personal assistance, may have overcome the hurdles that some of the rest of us stumbled over when trying to treat terminal cancers. But I note that none of us, not this practitioner or even Dr. Bengston himself, can ultimately guarantee that a full cure will occur. Of course neither can an oncologist, and a patient is likely to have a much better quality of life with this treatment.

In my opinion this powerful method begs for institutionalized learning, ongoing follow-up, and the creation of an accumulated body of knowledge to assist practitioners. Longer-term teaching would allow practitioners to strengthen their abilities, follow-up would help them with any problems they encounter, and an accumulated body of knowledge would give them access to the experiences of those who have gone before them. This helpful FAQ is a beginning.

It's a two-way street

Last week I was treating one of my semi-regular patients who has a very prominent and visible tumour. He is "semi-regular" because he is one of those cancer sufferers about whom Bill would say that managing their condition has become a full-time occupation (of course who could blame them?) and as a result he spends a good deal of time in the States receiving intravenous vitamin C and ozone injections. He has decided not to go for allopathic treatment, which he said would put him through a great deal of suffering for a small chance of remission. Instead, he wants to prove that alternative treatments work, and he is trying as many of them as he can.

Last week I tried something new with him, which resulted in a very "intense" treatment. Although I wasn't touching him, he said he felt his tumour being "sqeezed" and "pulled". The treatment was so intense that he said it was almost uncomfortable. But two days later he called me and said that the tumour was smaller. I suggested that we do it again.

The second treatment was much less intense. I kept asking him what he was feeling, and he said that it felt "nice and warm and soothing." Nice and warm and soothing was not what we were looking for. It occurred to me that, forewarned by the last treatment, and not wanting to experience the same discomfort, he was now unconsciously blocking.

Keep in mind that the practitioner does not by a conscious act of will "put energy into" the patient. It's more like the patient and the practitioner are engaged in a dance, and the patient is the one who leads.

I told him what I thought was happening and reminded him that he was in the driver's seat and that what he wanted mattered. If he wanted a nice, soothing treatment, that's what he would get. But if he wanted something that worked, he would have to ask for it. The question I suggested to him was "how intense does this have to be for it to be effective?" And then I suggested that he allow the energy to become as intense as it needed to be, regardless of discomfort.

What happened next was a lot of heat and a lot intensity. The skin around the tumour got quite red and shiny. I do not know what has happened since, because he has left for the States for more intravenous vitamin C and ozone injections. But I was stunned by how much his intention mattered.