The Right to Choose

Before Christmas I had a long written discussion with a British blogger named Josephine who sent and posted an irate letter to the London Evening Standard for "promoting a fundraising campaign set up in order to send a five-year-old girl suffering a rare form of brain cancer to the controversial Burzynski Clinic."

I do not know enough about Dr. Burzynski to be a supporter, but this posting, which claimed that the "Burzynski Clinic are exploiting [vulnerable patients] (and the well-meaning public) in an unscrupulous, unethical, even illegal manner" and charged that the Evening Standard was "effectively complicit" in this, needled me into a response.

According to the Standard the girl suffers from a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, called a supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumour, for which she had already been treated with chemotherapy and radiation. I would presume that if the treatment she received had worked to satisfaction, i.e., the child were now in remission, the family would not be raising funds to go to the Burzynski clinic. Elsewhere on the web I read that this type of cancer has a worse prognosis than other childhood brain cancers.

The issue at hand, for me, was that Josephine and the commenters who supported her view seemed to be implying that this family and their child should somehow be deprived of the right to access the treatment the Burzynski clinic offered because it was unproven and controversial.

To me, that is simply wrong.

They were contrasting Burzynski's unproven and controversial treatment to the scientifically proven (and therefore superior) treatments offered by orthodox medicine, namely the same chemotherapy and radiation which the child had already received, which were apparently not successful in eliminating her cancer.

The chief defence given for the superiority of these treatments to Dr. Burzynski's is that they are "scientifically proven". Scientifically proven to do what? To shrink a cancer tumour by a certain percentage for a certain period of time, apparently. What happens on the day after? Or the day after that? And is there any proven correlation between shrinking tumours and long-term survival? Not necessarily. But this scientifically proven treatment is the gold standard, and it's the treatment everyone must have, even if the chances of 5-year survival are minuscule and even if the treatment guarantees horrific suffering and in some cases may even lead to death.

Can someone explain to me why it should be the preferred treatment? Or why people should be prevented from accessing other treatments, which may not be scientifically proven, but for whose effectiveness there exists a body of anecdotal evidence?

And just how scientific is scientific medicine, anyway?

Dr. John Ioannidis ("Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science", The Atlantic, November 2010) has made a career of doing meta-analyses of medical studies. After years of painstaking research he has come to the conclusion that a large percentage of these studies is misleading, exaggerated, or simply wrong. He discovered an "astonishing range of errors":

from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

When Dr. Ioannidis zeroed in on 49 of the most quoted research articles published in top medical journals, comprising the creme de la creme of medical research from the past thirteen years, he found that of the 49,

45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.

He has concluded that overall as much as "90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed". That's a shockingly high number.

Then we have Dr. David Eddy, written up in Business Week in an article entitled "Medical Guesswork". Dr. Eddy has been hard at work exposing the "dark secret" of modern medicine, which is that as much as 85 per cent of medical procedures are not backed by any hard science. "We don't know what we are doing," Dr. Eddy says of his own profession. "I've spent 25 years proving that what we lovingly call clinical judgment is woefully outmatched by the complexities of medicine."

When he tested doctors on clinical judgement, citing a "typical patient" and a "typical treatment" in their specialty, he found that doctors' predictions for the successful outcome of the treatment ranged wildly over the map, from 0 to 100 per cent.

He found a number of promising but unproven procedures that upon closer look turned out to be useless and even harmful, as for instance costly bone marrow transplants for women with breast cancer. I note that because these procedures are performed by trusted doctors, and not so-called "charlatans" who are out to fleece vulnerable cancer patients, they are widely accepted by the public and the people who receive them (and sometimes die from them), and are even lauded as cutting-edge, heroic medicine.

My intention here is not to lambaste doctors. Josephine pointed out to me that I probably would not be here today to "rant" at her from across the Atlantic were it not for their ministrations. I had to agree with her, given that I received certain vaccinations, a timely appendectomy, as well as many doses of antibiotics in my youth. Who knows where I would be without them. I also recognize that most doctors are conscientious, well-meaning individuals, who have no idea how much of the medicine they practice, which they spent years of their lives learning, is not science based.

What I am here to point out is that our so-called modern scientific medicine is likely about as infallible as the pope is, given that the pope is probably right at least some of the time -- yet many of those who follow it are far more fervent in their belief than the most fervent Catholic. They hold up "scientific medicine" as some kind of talisman of infallibility, which it most definitely is not. Both Dr. Ioannidis and Dr. Eddy suggest that in actuality less than 20 per cent of medicine is scientifically based. The rest is little more than guesswork and educated hunches based on anecdotal evidence -- the same kind of anecdotal evidence that is deemed insufficient to prove efficacy in the case of the Burzynski clinic.

Whether or not modern medicine has clay feet, a family who is faced with the loss of their child to cancer should have the right to research and seek out other treatments. If medicine had a magic bullet to save her, they would not need to.

Postscript January 2, 1 p.m. EST: I just finished listening to a news program on CBC Radio that included a segment on hope and cancer. A doctor whose name alas I cannot remember was quoted as saying that too much hope is not good for cancer patients. He opined that hopeful terminal cancer patients who were looking for a cure often opted for aggressive chemotherapy instead of palliative care. He said that he and his colleagues were seeing more and more patients dying from the side effects of their chemotherapy, going straight from their treatment to ER, and from there to the morgue. What a horrendous way to die and how odd to pin the blame on hope, rather than the dreadful, toxic treatments that are on offer! Again I ask, why should these people not have been allowed to seek out alternative therapies instead?

Researcher tackles "unexpected remissions"

I thank Sheila for this link, which made me want to whoop with joy.

Coming on the heels of Dr. Lissa Rankin's inspiring TED talk on what health truly is, and how healthcare should address it, Dr. Kelly Turner's research on what she calls "unexpected remissions" is giving me even more hope for the future of medicine.

I recommend reading her article, "When Cancer Disappears", accessible through the link above, but in the meantime here are the highlights:

1) Dr. Turner doesn't like calling "spontaneous remissions" spontaneous, because they may not be -- but they are certainly unexpected. A "spontaneous" or "unexpected" remission is when a cancer heals without allopathic treatment, or through other means after allopathic treatment failed.

2) Dr. Turner interviewed 20 people who experienced such remissions and 50 holistic healers all over the world for her research.

3) She summarizes her findings and outlines the beliefs and practices she most commonly found among those who healed. Her findings echo what I and my energy healing colleagues have been saying for years. Energy blockages need to be released. The lifestyle that contributed to the cancer needs to be changed. There is a mind-body-spirit interaction and an energy that connects all three. The will to live matters. And, as Leigh Fortson said in her book Embrace, Release, Heal, it is important for cancer patients to have choices and to feel in control of their treatment.

Dr. Turner, who is not a physician but a researcher in the field of Integrative Oncology, has a website on which she is collecting stories of "unexpected remissions". She is also at work on a book for cancer patients summarizing her research.

Revolutionary health message from a woman doctor

The time to watch this is before you need a doctor. Especially relevant to women!


This message needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?

Stress is deeply implicated in cancer. Not only can stress contribute to the onset of cancer, but it can also help it spread. And I would say that there are few life events more stressful than living with a cancer diagnosis.

Meditation short circuits that stress.

One of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the first one, is that "life is suffering". According to the Buddha, life is suffering because of "old age, sickness and death", but also because of many subtle day-to-day discontents such as not having what we want, having to put up with what we don't want, and the subtlest one of all, being aware, even when we are happy, that the happiness won't last. But the Buddha might as well have said "life is stressful," because that would have been just as true.

Meditation was one of the Buddha's psychological remedy for the pain of the First Noble Truth. Meditation teaches you to live in the now. Regretting the past or dreading the future take up huge amounts of mental and physical energy. Every moment of living in the now is like a vacation from regret and dread, freeing up energy for healing, creativity and resilience. The peace of living in the moment without fear floods your bloodstream with positive hormones. It gives your body a rest.

Cancer can fill you with fear of the future and regret for the things that you have not done in the past. Meditation teaches you how to stop those thoughts. Fear in particular constricts you -- it makes your breathing shallow, so you don't get sufficient oxygen (and cancer thrives in an anaerobic environment). It constricts your mind too, so you become trapped in a circuit of negative thinking. Negative thinking in turn floods your body with stress hormones -- which cancer also loves.
(Meditation tips for everyday living)
One type of meditation I have done is called Radiant Mind. We were shown on a very vivid graph how everything happens in the moment. Your mind might travel back with memories or forward in anticipation or dread, but it still resides here, in the moment. Everything you experience in your mind affects your body. The quality of your life, and to a large extent the health of your body, depend on how you feel in the moment, and it is from moment to moment to moment that the tenor of your life is determined. One exercise we were taught was to stay in the moment, accept everything in the moment, observe everything in the moment and let everything go, moment to moment.

Another type of meditation I learned is Mahamudra. In Mahamudra you calm the mind by focusing on the breath, and then you ask "where is my mind? what shape is it? what size? what colour?" You discover that's it's nowhere and everywhere, that is has no shape and no colour, and that it is not you. There is more to you than your mind, more to you than your body, more to you than your self, more to you than your pain. You can wedge some breathing space between yourself and your pain, yourself and your fear, by looking at them as an impartial observer.

If you can learn to become that impartial observer called "awareness", and so stop identifying with your body, with your fear, with your pain, you will have won an important battle in your quest for health. Alastair Cunningham, the creator of the Healing Journey, recognized this and made meditation one of the cornerstones of his program. Many graduates of the program fared much better with their cancer than their diagnoses suggested.

Meditation resources abound. There are CDs, DVDs, local meditation centers and teachers, Buddhist temples both of the Zen and the Tibetan variety, and Youtube videos galore. I would in particular recommend Adyashanti's teachings. But there are many others, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Pema Chodron, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh. Find one who speaks to you.









Postscript January 19: Just found this article on a cancer survivor who partly credits the Healing Journey program for her healing.

Open Letter to Oncologists

Dear Doctor,

Let me begin by saying that I respect the care and devotion you give your patients and that I understand that you are working within a widely accepted paradigm that you were taught many years ago in medical school.

But I am writing to you with some frustration because I have seen the suffering that this paradigm can cause.

I am not speaking of the many cancer patients who experience successful outcomes through the accepted practices of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. I am speaking of the ones who come to you to whom you have to say "I am sorry. Your cancer is too advanced to treat. All we can offer is palliative chemotherapy or radiation to improve your quality of life when it becomes compromised."

All too often "palliative" chemotherapy and radiation mean weeks or months of suffering (nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, exhaustion, pain) for a few weeks or months of added life. It is questionable how this improves quality of life.

I fully understand that because of your training you are not aware that there are alternatives. The purpose of this letter is to make you aware of at least some of them.

For eighteen months in 2007 and 2008 I trained in an energy healing method that was specifically said to be effective for cancer. Since then, I learned another one that is likewise said to be helpful for cancer sufferers. Over the past four years I and a colleague have worked with many cancer patients. I would like to tell you of our experiences.

In our work treating end-stage cancer patients we found that most of them experienced significant pain relief. In one case a patient in hospital who was expected to die within days of stage-4 pancreatic cancer instead rallied, and was sent home a week after we began treating him. Five days after the first treatment he no longer needed morphine. His jaundice reversed. Instead of dying within days, he went on to live another 10 weeks, able to resume some normal activities, including shopping, barbecuing, and going to the cottage. This was an extraordinary case.

In other instances we asked end-stage cancer patients in significant pain what their pain level was after treatment. Before treatment, it was 10 out of 10; after treatment 2 out of 10. Pain relief could last a couple of days.

In one instance a patient with end-stage bladder cancer, who developed a large inoperable metastatic tumour while receiving chemotherapy, came in supported by his wife, visibly in considerable pain. After treatment he walked out unassisted and laughing. He then opted for a round of heavy duty last-ditch radiation and died. His wife said he told her he wished he had continued working with us.

Energy healing modalities such as Reiki and Therapeutic Touch are already accepted under the current medical paradigm as adjunctive treatments. So a terminal cancer patient might receive palliative chemotherapy and radiation, and then receive Reiki or Therapeutic Touch from a nurse or a hospital volunteer to deal with the side effects of the treatment. But I would submit that the new energy healing modalities, which seem to pack more punch than Reiki or TT, would not need to be adjunctive to chemotherapy or radiation. In cases where the aim is palliation, they can be used as stand-alone treatments.

In our experience patients who have no hope of beating their cancer can live far longer and far more productively with energy treatments than allopathic ones. One man we treated who had bile duct cancer with metastases to the liver, and was expected to live 7 or 8 months, instead lived 20. Significantly, for the first 12 months while he was receiving energy treatments, he was able to walk the dog, paint his house, rearrange his garage, help the neighbour build a deck, and (at the end of the 12 months) travel to a national park to go salmon fishing and white water rafting. After 12 months he terminated energy treatments and was eventually persuaded to try chemo and radiation. He died 8 months after ending his bioenergy treatments and once again his family told us that in retrospect they believed it would have been better if he had continued working with us.

You are too quick to dismiss us. One doctor said of our pancreatic cancer patient who was sent home to live 10 extra weeks, instead of dying within days as expected, that his sudden turn-around was probably "the natural course of his disease". This in spite of the fact that man's own doctor called it "a miracle".

My point is that the patient has nothing to lose and a lot to gain. No side effects to treatment. An extended life span. Pain relief. More energy to live daily life. Society would also benefit, given the runaway costs of allopathic hospital treatment (e.g., $5000 a month per patient for chemo pills). I would think doctors and nursing staff would also benefit in not having to witness, helplessly and on a daily basis, the suffering of these patients.

All I ask is that you be willing to work with us, in particular if the terminal patient in question is a child. I just saw an interview with Dr. Andrew Weill in which he said that already twenty percent of medical schools are teaching an integrative healthcare model. What I propose is as good as integrative medicine gets. Everyone benefits.

Please think about it.

Anatomy of a miracle

When you write a blog about energy healing and cancer you become a magnet for stories of miraculous healings. You read about them in your research and people contact you with links and even personal stories. You find out that miracles abound.

After a while you begin to ponder why some people see miracles while many others get a mundane reality of painful treatment, side effects, decline and death. What's the difference? Why did Anita Moorjani come back from the other side and heal from her stage 4 cancer? How did Jeff in chapter 5 of Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal become cancer free in 6 weeks after being told to go home and put his affairs in order? How did many others in Leigh's book experience miraculous healing? How did David, the "Geordie Healer", beat multiple myeloma not once but twice? How did John Hill's 93-year-old mom get cured? What's the secret?

Alastair Cunningham of Toronto, who developed the Healing Journey program, has seen many cancer patients over the years, most in very dire stages of the disease. Many of them died, but a handful of them transcended even stage-4 cancers. These survivors were warriors of the spirit, who remade their lives, looked into their own hearts, dropped their grudges, and faithfully followed the program, which was heavy on meditation (or maybe I should say "light"?) and self-understanding.

It is a tenet of psychoanalysis that everything in a patient's life contributes to the neurotic structure causing the problems that brought him to the analyst's office in the first place. With cancer patients we assume that what brought them to their disease had to do mostly with physical things: diet, unhealthy lifestyle, poor genetics, or outside influences such as smoking, excessive alcohol, asbestos or other carcinogens. Few people dare to mention other factors such as lack of a self or depression or unexamined emotions. But in fact we should be looking at the whole picture, as Leigh Fortson did. When Leigh looked deep inside herself, she found a raging artistic younger self who felt left behind. When she took account of this part of herself, she got better.

Anita Moorjani through her near-death experience discovered that we are far more than bodies. We are spirit and we carry everything that becomes our life in our energy field. If cancer is in our energy field and we weaken, we develop cancer. If cancer is removed from our energy field, it is also removed from our bodies. Our chief task is to love ourselves, and from that love we will see arising a genuine love for others. If we love others but not ourselves, we will weaken. Many cancer patients I've seen loved others to the exclusion of themselves.

David, the "Geordie Healer", has an amazing blog. When I first found it, I contacted him to ask if I could quote from it. He said I could. So here is an excerpt:

If I tell you that cancer is no more than an energy; you could visualise this energy as a darkness within the light of our being, then you give it recognisable form. This energy, or darkness has affected the cells in your physical body, and you have 60 trillion of them. Your chemical DNA is also an energy that allows cells to die and new cells to grow according to your DNA blueprint. DNA is affected by thoughts, fear, food we eat, our environment and our thoughts about ourselves. Negativity is poison to our body, negative thoughts, feelings, anger, fear, keeping alive past hurt, extreme emotion, ego responses. Our preoccupation with negativity has a resonance that usually manifests dis-ease...disease. Every cell in your body is replaced over a 7 year period, this slows with age and we are meant to degrade slowly, to eventually die. What are we physically, not much according to science, cells are made up if atoms and molecules, these are 99.9999999% empty space. If you compressed 7 billion people in this world into a structure that had no spaces in between the atoms you would have a structure the size of a sugar lump. We are so much more than physical matter and we all need to know this.

David beat multiple myeloma once, but then in 2010 it returned.

In 2010 my cancer was again found in my body. I had just been through a clinical depression, my world was black, I did things that were alien to me and was in a hole of my own making, lost for a time to light and love. I lost my wife, my business nearly failed and I was doom and gloom. No wonder my cancer returned. It was a major lesson for me and having learned it, the cancer that threatened to kill me was removed for a second time. This time it will not be back, I learned the lesson. Hells bells who could beat MM twice; I did.

What did David do?

If I tell you that you have the tools within you and the connection to your soul that sees Multiple Myeloma as a minor disturbance in your energy field, and that it can be removed completely. Would you listen?

You can never access this healing power with your mind, your mind is weak. You must go within, meditation, where you still the mind and take your awareness in silence into your heart area. Your heart is your doorway and your shield of protection. You may be surprised to know that the heart carries an energy that is 50 times stronger than the brain. Relax and take several deep breaths, on each breath feel yourself going deeper into your heart, visualise a doorway and walk through it when you feel calm. Through this doorway visualise a landscape that is calming for you, by water, in nature, walking on a beach, etc, etc, close the door behind you and feel the warmth of the sun as it bathes you in light. In this place the sun is your soul and you can visit this place any time you like, in this place you will carry the energy from your soul into your heart. Light chases dark and this light and warmth from your soul connection will flood your cells with light. See it chase away the darkness that is cancer, it cannot exist in the light of your soul. Importantly...KNOW IT IS HAPPENING. See the colour black being washed down through your feet and into the earth where the energy is recycled and cleansed.

When you question consensus thinking and beliefs and know who you are, as an eternal being having a physical experience, connected to an awesome power of soul, you can transcend the limitations your parents and caregivers instilled into you. You can change the fear, the stress and be comforted by the connection to your soul that you might not have known you have. Your soul loves you unconditionally and will revel in the connection. Do it once or twice a day, and remember, nothing relevant is past, nothing happens in the future, the future only exists as possibility, EVERYTHING HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT OF NOW. Now is the most important moment you have, make it work for you.

This is the same message Anita Moorjani brought back: love yourself, love the moment, and build on each moment to make your life a work of art. The only thing required of you in this lifetime is that you be you.

And here is an excerpt from John Hill's qigong meditations, which he used to help heal his mom:

Hold the general intent that you are the Center of the Universe, your breathing goes infinitely in/out to the ends of creation, including all centers – the hollow center of a seed, the Big Bang, you as a tiny dot in your mother’s womb, the consciousness center of everyone past/future on the planet, every living thing growing from a dot to full growth, etc. Hold this macroscopic intention in a free-floating relaxed manner. As in all these meditative efforts, our minds will tend to drift from the intent – that’s fine, in fact this drifting adds to the ground covered, as long as you allow yourself to come back to your original intent/visualization. While existing as Center, also include the center of each cell, molecule, and atom of your body. Since you are breathing love from the center of creation to the infinite ends of creation, you are also breathing this love from the center of each cell in your body throughout the universe that is your body/mind/spirit. Your universe is also your mom and dad making love at your beginning through all things you have and will experience – all these things are visible from the center of your sphere.

He did this meditation and some others he mentions while visualising being one with his mother, one cell not yet differentiated. Here too, love is the centre.

People will scoff that this is simplistic, but it has vast advantages over radiation and chemo. I suspect that when the practice becomes genuine, it floods the body with hormones that do a world of good, suffering is eased, and even if death must follow, it will be a far less harrowing experience than what physical medicine alone has to offer.

Since all these people who experienced miraculous cures bring us the same message, I for one believe that there must be something to it. Namaste.

Waivers, disclaimers & legal releases

Energy healers sometimes ask clients to sign disclaimer or release forms in which the client acknowledges that the practitioner works in the energy field and not on the body, and makes no promises about any actual healing taking place as a result of the treatment. The client is often informed, as for instance on Dr. Bengston's website, that "the physical body ... is the domain of the medical field and other allied health care professionals." But these days, probably as a result of malpractice suits, the medical field seems quite reluctant to take on the responsibility that we have been allotting to it.

Yesterday I had to make a visit to walk-in clinic in an American city to be seen by an actual bona fide medical doctor, and I was asked to sign a form that said

I am aware that the practice of medicine is not an exact science and I acknowledge that NO guarantee or assurance has been made or implied to me as to the results that may be obtained by examination or treatment.

In other words, we make no promises, folks. But hold on, isn't medicine supposed to be evidence-based and scientific, in contradistinction to energy healing, which is not? Isn't the perceived superiority of medicine based on its alleged scientific and evidence-based nature, and the resulting belief that we can pretty much count on certain drugs doing certain things to certain diseases in a relatively large percentage of people? Apparently we cannot count on our doctors either. Perhaps all of us might want to adopt the disclaimer used by the mutual fund industry: "past performance does not guarantee future results".

In related news, GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, has just been fined a record-setting $3 billion, yes billion, for fraudulent practices in marketing nine drugs, including Avandia and Paxil. These practices included marketing drugs for off-label use, meaning uses for which the drug was never tested, approved, or intended. The response of the pharmaceutical industry has been to prepare "an appeal to the Supreme Court to receive a ruling that permits off-label marketing as Constitutionally protected free speech under the First Amendment." The mind boggles.

The $3billion fine follows closely on the heels of a $750million legal settlement (announced October 26th) levied against GlaxoSmithKline for knowingly selling substandard and contaminated products manufactured in a plant in Puerto Rico that "for years was rife with contamination". Caveat emptor ("let the buyer beware").

Postscript February 25, 2012: This is why I was asked to sign the waiver. Mind-blowing statistic: at least 75% of doctors are sued at some point during their medical career.

Postscript April 16, 2012: Johnson & Johnson fined $1.2 billion for fraudulent marketing of Risperdal.

Dr. Mercola interviews Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez about Steve Jobs and other celebrity cancer patients

Click here for the interview.

And here is a link to the transcript, because sometimes Dr. Gonzalez is a little difficult to understand. Here is a short excerpt:

Conventional doctors can fail and still be considered heroes...

There’s a very eminent oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who treated Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney’s wife, who had metastatic breast cancer. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. There’s no evidence in the history of the world that bone marrow transplant helps metastatic breast cancer. None whatsoever, and it’s a deadly procedure – 10 to 30 percent of women who get it would die from the procedure. He gave it to her, and she died. Then he treated ..., who used to be editor of ... She had metastatic ovarian cancer. He gave her chemo; it didn’t work. He gave her a bone marrow transplant. It didn’t work; she died!

What did the New York Times do? They have a second-page major article about this hero oncologist who’s been working day and night against such odds to keep these wonderful gifts to the world alive. But they’re dead. He didn’t succeed. He gave them therapies that could not, in a thousand years, be of cancer significance.

DM: Are there any ethics or panels that need to approve those procedures before they’re implemented?

DG: There are ethics panels for the likes of you and me. When you’re a celebrity oncology star, you make the rules as you go along... These oncologists can pretty much do whatever they want, and they’re lauded for doing it. They’re considered heroes. They’re considered heroes for using this desperate, expensive, terribly toxic therapy. In fact the more toxic, the more heroic the doctor is perceived. The press loves them... If you stand outside of the back door of Sloan-Kettering, you see the bodies coming out every day. Conventional oncologists lose patients every day, and no one says they’re murdering anybody... Patrick Swayze’s doctors have been lauded as heroes; no one came out and said that the Stanford oncology team are sleazy quacks making money and taking advantage of their victims... [But] if you’re an alternative practitioner and succeed, you’re still considered a sleazy quack. So it’s a very interesting dynamic that has absolutely nothing to do with scientific validity, objectivity, or evaluation of data – it has nothing to do with that at all. It's almost a religious fervor... Conventional academic medicine is the last religion left in America.

Here is a Dr. Whittaker cited by Dr. Mercola on the same subject in a different article:

What is lost in the unemotional statistic of 500,000 cancer deaths per year is how those people died... In my opinion, conventional cancer therapy is so toxic and dehumanizing that I fear it far more than I fear death from cancer. We know that conventional therapy doesn't work -- if it did, you would not fear cancer any more than you fear pneumonia. It is the utter lack of certainty as to the outcome of conventional treatment that virtually screams for more freedom of choice in the area of cancer therapy. Yet most so-called alternative therapies regardless of potential or proven benefit, are outlawed, which forces patients to submit to the failures that we know don't work, because there's no other choice.

Taking a passive role with today's conventional therapy is terribly dangerous. Recently Jackie Kennedy, after a "courageous fight," succumbed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - or did she? Her early demise, attributed to the cancer, was a shock to cancer specialists worldwide, and brought into question the real cause of her death. She had been given an unproved protocol of very high-dose chemotherapy. The drugs alone could easily have caused her death - and this would not be unusual. There are numerous cases of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths from chemotherapy.

And to show that Dr. Gonzalez and Dr. Whittaker are not just blowing hot air, here is a study about the effectiveness of chemotherapy published in the prestigious journal Clinical Oncology (Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. "The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies." Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol). 2004;16(8): 549-60). Their results:

The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.

Their conclusions:

As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.

To this I would like to add my own story. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1983. She had a mastectomy and was prescribed Tamoxifen. Two years later she had a small recurrence at the site of the mastectomy scar and was given a full work-up to see whether the cancer had metastasized. It had not. All the same, her oncologist prescribed what he called "prophylactic" radiation, just to be on the safe side.

I had a very bad feeling about the radiation and begged her to reconsider, and she told me "I would trust this doctor with my life". She died five hours after her first radiation treatment. We never found out what killed her, but one thing's for sure, it was not cancer -- more likely its treatment. We were too numb with grief to make a fuss and as accepting of the sanctity of the medical establishment as she was. But imagine if she had died with the same suddenness and the same lack of explanation in the hands of an alternative healthcare practitioner like Dr. Mercola. It would have immediately raised suspicions. There would have likely been an inquest; perhaps charges would have been laid. Certainly an effort would have been made by the authorities to shut the practitioner down to protect the public.

Whether it was misapplied radiation or deadly side-effects from Tamoxifen, the end result was that my mother died years before she should have, a few months before her 52nd birthday. One consolation was that she did not have to suffer through the "best practices" that oncology has to offer and we did not have to watch her throw up and lose her hair and then waste away to nothing at the end. One thing she told me after her mastectomy was that morphine did not so much take the pain away as make you not care that you were in pain. Please, let's find a better way.

Bill Bengston at the Toronto Energy Psychology Conference (ACEP)

On October 22nd, almost three years to the day since our last Toronto workshop, Bill Bengston returns to Canada to give a talk entitled "Lessons from the Lab: Energy Healing Experiments on Cancer." This will be an exciting opportunity to find out what new discoveries he has made in the meantime and whether any more strides have been made towards moving the method from the lab to successful application in real life.

Approximately 35 years ago Bill Bengston did an experiment in which he cured laboratory mice of cancer. He then followed up this experiment with three others in which skeptical volunteers who learned a method he developed were also apparently able to cure the mice of cancer. Nothing much was heard of these experiments until the year 2000, when he described them in a paper in the journal of the Society of Scientific Exploration. Since then other experiments followed, in one of which Bill explored why the control mice in his experiments were also cured, and explained why the remission of the control mice did not nullify the results of the experiments and what bearing that has on drug research in general. He published his findings in another paper entitled "Resonance, Placebo Effects, and Type II Errors: Some Implications from Healing Research for Experimental Methods".

Other interesting experiments Bill participated in include fMRI studies to see how his brain functions while he heals, what happens to the brains of the subjects who receive healing from him, and how the healing affects geomagnetic probes.

My own personal interest has been in the clinical application of the method. Starting in July 2007, Bill Bengston and I organized a series of workshops in Toronto to see if the success of the skeptical volunteers with the sick mice could be translated into successful treatment of cancer by practitioners in real world situations. After six workshops over almost a year and a half we found that while students could obtain noticeably anomalous results, such as increased survival and the abatement or reversal of some symptoms, we did not see any cures by them, unassisted, of documented cancers in people.

As early as 2008 Bill raised the question whether healing could be taught in an article for Larry Dossey's Explore magazine. He is still wrestling with the question, although he has taught many workshops since then in other locations. I would be curious to know whether these later workshops produced meaningful results. What we would be looking for, and what I would hope to see, is a meaningful number of cancer remissions reported by a number of practitioners. One or two remissions would not be statistically significant; a dozen or more would be, although it's hard to know where to draw the line. Bill's own observation has been that healing ability, like musical talent, is distributed on a curve, with a few Mozarts who are able to achieve spectacular results surrounded by many others with varying degrees of lesser ability. Significantly he has also raised the possibility that he may have healed the mice in his experiments himself, using the skeptical volunteers as his proxy. Due to a phenomenon he calls resonance, bonding the mice and their healers, it cannot be known with any certainty who did the healing.

The clinician in me would like to see Bill take the next step and begin to study the effects of dissemination. One man being able to cure cancer is an anomaly, and to study his brain and the effects he is able to produce on fMRIs and geomagnetic probes has value in that it adds to our store of knowledge about energy healing, but it does not directly translate into anyone being cured of cancer in the real world. That same man being able to disseminate what he knows in an effective way is revolutionary.

What needs to happen next, in my view, is to study not Bill's brain and Bill's effects, but the brain activity and effectiveness of his students. Do they produce the same brainwaves? The same "resonance" with patients? Just as there is a minimum dose response among the mice, is there a minimum study time or exposure to Bill needed to create a student able to reproduce Bill's success? Skeptical students who participated in a six-week program with Bill were able to heal cancerous mice; students who learned the method in weekend workshops were (to my knowledge) not able to cure documented cancers in people; but that is not to say they would not have been able to cure mice had they been given the opportunity, or that the students who cured the mice would also have been able to cure people. Much is unknown -- a great deal needs to be investigated further.

Bruce Lipton on "The Power of Consciousness"

Bruce Lipton is a scientist with a life-long interest in the life of cells. He is a proponent of epigenetics, a new way of looking at the influence of genetics that suggests that lifestyle affects DNA. He has essentially found that if you put cells in a poor environment they deteriorate and if you then put them in a nourishing environment, they recover and flourish. He says that we are all essentially giant petri dishes covered in skin, and how we nourish our cells determines how healthy we are. The blood is the medium which nourishes our cells, and the chemicals in our blood are determined by how we live. That includes not only what we eat and how much we exercise, but also the chemicals created by stressful living. Dr. Lipton believes that to say that we are genetically predisposed to get certain kinds of cancer because of our family history unnecessarily makes us into victims of our genetics. "Epigenetics" means we don't have to be.

Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers

Anita Moorjani is a cancer survivor who had a remarkable NDE experience. She returned from near-death and organ failure to experience a full cure from lymphoma. During her NDE she had a number of insights that I feel are quite pertinent for energy healers, especially those who deal with cancer patients. Here is a selection.

Anita Moorjani on time and choices:

Time seems to have a completely different meaning on [the other] side. What I felt was that all possibilities exist simultaneously – it just depends which one you choose. Sort of like being in an elevator, where all the floors of a building exist, but you can choose which floor to get off on. So if all the future possibilities exist for me to choose from, then I assume all the past scenarios exist too. So depending which future possibility I choose, that will also determine which past automatically comes with it (I chose life, so it affected the past, choosing the appropriate test result for the organ function).

Anita Moorjani on awareness and possibilities:

[I]magine there is a huge warehouse, which is dark, and you live in this warehouse with one flashlight. Everything you know about this warehouse is seen through the light of this one small flashlight. Whenever you want to look for something, you may or may not find it, but it does not mean the thing does not exist. It is there, but you just haven’t flashed your light on it. You can only see what your light is focused on. Then one day, someone flicks on a lightswitch, and for the first time, you can see the whole warehouse. The vastness of it is almost overwhelming, you can’t see all the way to the end, and you know there is more than what you can see. But you do see how all the products are lined up on all the shelves, and you notice just how many different things there are in the warehouse which you never noticed, never even conceived having existed, yet they do, simultaneously with the things you know existed (those are the things your flashlight had been able to find). Then, even when the light switch goes back off, nothing can take away the understanding and clarity of your experience. Even though you are back to one flashlight, you now know how to look for things.

Anita Moorjani on energy and cancer:

I saw all people as “energy”, and depending where our energy level was, that was the world we created for ourselves. The understanding I gained from this was that if cancer was not in our “energy”, then it was not in our reality. If feeling good about ourselves was in our energy, then our reality would be positive. If cancer was in our energy, then even if we eradicated it with modern medicine, it would soon come back. But if we cleared it from our energy, the physical body would soon follow. None of us are as “real” or physical as we think we are. From what I saw, it looked like we are energy first, and physical is only a result of expressing our energy. And we can change our physical reality if we change our energy. (Some people have mentioned I use the term “Vibration”). For me, personally, I was made to feel that in order to keep my energy/vibration level up, I only had to live in the moment, enjoy every moment of life, and use each moment to elevate the next moment (which then elevates my future). It is in that moment of elevating your energy level that you can change your future (like my test results). It sounds very simplistic, but it felt very deep when I was experiencing the understanding of it.

Read the full article here or read another post here.

Here are some questions that these quotes raise for me:

Can an energy healer effectively facilitate the removal of "cancer" from a client's energy field? Will that result in a "cure"?

If the healer succeeds in this, but the client does not change his or her life and energy patterns and belief systems, can the cancer reappear in the energy field and subsequently in the body?

Is changing one's life and energy patterns and belief systems to bring them into line with these universal truths sufficient in and of itself to create healing?

Is it more useful to treat a client or to teach the client to heal him or herself?

Is it possible to go back to the seed moment when the cancer began and choose a different outcome? Is this something the cancer sufferer needs to do for him or herself, or can a practitioner do it from the outside?

Please feel free to add your own questions -- or answers.

Read also Anatomy of a Miracle.

Postscript March 13, 2012: And now here is a link to fantastic audio interview with Anita and Wayne Dyer.

Dr. Wayne Dyer on receiving treatment for his leukemia from John of God

A thought-provoking interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer:




"There are no previous lives. There are only parallel lives. Everything is happening at once. And that when you begin to assume the feeling of a wish that you would like to have fulfilled, which is what I did with this leukemia, it isn't just like an intellectual exercise where you say 'I am well and I live from that perspective', it's like you begin to feel that in your body and you experience the feeling of it and you assume the feeling of whatever wish you would like to have and you assume that it is already fulfilled." - Wayne Dyer.

I thank Upswing for the link.

Postscript, March 13, 2012: If you liked the interview, this one is also very good: Wayne Dyer and Anita Moorjani on the Aware Show.

Postscript August 29, 2015: The Dyer family has announced that Dr. Wayne Dyer passed away in his sleep last night. He was 75 years old. Rest in peace, Dr. Dyer.

Dr. Dyer's family wishes it to be known that he did not have leukemia at the time of his death.

Problems "hyper-cycling"?

I was recently contacted by a reader who said that he had difficulties getting into "hyper-cycling" mode and was asking for help. ("Hyper-cycling" is when you take Bill Bengston's image cycling sequence to what seems like impossible speeds. Listeners of the CDs and attendees of the workshops will know what I am speaking about here.)

I am not sure that anyone who merely reads the book or listens to the CDs can attain the speeds required for "hyper-cycling". But the good news is that hyper-cycling may not be necessary to activate healing.

In a relatively recent interview with Dean Radin of IONS Dr. Bengston mentions that he also heard from readers who had problems attaining the speeds required for what he calls "hyper-cycling", but who also said that they were still able to get healing effects.

I would say that worrying about not being good enough at "hyper-cycling" will get in the way of healing far more than not being able to "hyper-cycle". Even Dr. Bengston now theorizes that the ability to heal could be our birthright and that technique may in fact be secondary.

I was recently chatting with a neighbour who had had surgery done on her hand to correct a dislocated thumb. This neighbour is particularly sensitive to energy and as we were chatting she suddenly asked me if I was working on her thumb. I wasn't consciously doing any such thing and I asked what made her think that I was. She said she could feel energies surging through her thumb and things "moving around".

The upshot is that I wasn't doing anything, I wasn't healing her in any way, but the thumb needed healing, was asking for it, I was an open conduit, and voila, the energy flowed -- without any conscious decision or even awareness on my part. The lesson here is that the "healer" is in fact not doing any "healing". You, as "the healer," are "hanging out" to a far greater degree than you think is possible while the "healee's" body or energy field converses with the Universe. BTW this reminds me of the experiment Bill Bengston describes in which he "hung out" with his head in an fMRI while envelopes containing hairs from sick animals were dropped into his hand. When the envelopes contained hairs, his brain reacted. When empty control envelopes were placed in his hand, his brain went lah-di-dah. He had no conscious idea which envelopes contained hairs and which did not.

So the point is, don't worry, be happy, and let the healing begin, whether or not you can "hyper-cycle".

Here is a description by Dr. Bengston of how he taught the skeptical volunteers in his experiments to cycle. And now here is a link to a visual cycling aid by reader Vic Smyth.

An explosion of information about alternative cancer treatments

Lynn McTaggart, editor of the website "What Doctors Don't Tell You," has put together a teleseminar series entitled Your Blueprint for Beating Cancer. Six speakers are featured, among them Dr. Patrick Kingsley and Dr. Bernie Siegel (author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles). The series will consist of six downloadable interviews, each costing $39. The full program can be had for $177. It offers dietary suggestions, a supplement program, suggestions for lifestyle changes, plus contact information given for healing professionals. In her videotaped introduction Lynn McTaggart calls it "a blueprint for what you should do to improve your chances of survival".

Also received, a link to a new feature-length movie entitled Cancer is Curable Now. This movie features a different set of experts from the ones interviewed by Lynn McTaggart, including Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. The movie can be downloaded here for $19.97, or ordered here as a DVD.

These two programs follow on the heels of the movie about Dr. Burzynski, Cancer is Big Business, freely available for viewing on Youtube.

Using qi gong visualisation for cancer

Exciting news: a reader named John Hill wrote to me to say that he used qi gong visualisation to treat his 93-year-old mother, who had terminal stage-4 cancer. Six months later she was cancer free. He described what he did as an

entanglement in a synchronistic dance where every day during my Qigong practice, part of the practice would be holding my 93 yr. old cancer-diseased mother in an energy ball, with energy passing from one hand, thru her to the other, circulating around, while cycling the visualizations thru my mind as my mother's cancer cells slowly disappeared. Not a cause and effect relationship - a synchronistic dance, like kids playing in a play-pen........

He also sent me a document describing his visualisations and generously agreed that they could be published in this blog. So without further ado, here they are:

MEDICAL QIGONG/TAICHI PRACTICE FOR UNIFYING WITH
THE COSMOS AND HEALING OF SERIOUS ILLNESS

All is based on “Watching the Breath” – standing feet parallel shoulder width apart, knees flexed, pelvis tucked under, most of the weight on balls of the feet, sinking into the earth, breathing abdominally thru the nose, tongue touching top of the mouth, eyes staring straight ahead in a general gaze, not on anything in particular. Best in a comfortable spot or in nature, gazing into a pleasant view. The breathing builds like a slow river, deep and relaxed, allowing thoughts “to fly” and happen, observing them and your mind/body/spirit (if you believe spirit). The thoughts tend to break-up as you pay attention to the breathing, leaving you in a state of peace, turning-on your immune system. Anywhere from a minute to ½ hr.

This state of peace accompanying “Watching the Breath” is called “The peace that passes all understanding” in Christianity. It resonates as brain Alpha waves, with the peace accompanied by alertness. Also called “the meditative state”, it has been shown by many scientific studies on meditators from TM, Yoga, Qigong/TaiChi, Sufi, etc. to enhance immune response. Most notably among the hundreds of scientific forays into measuring the effect of “meditative intent” on physical matter, the most exhaustive is “Conscious Acts of Creation” by Wm. Tiller, and the most impressive are Dr. Wm. Bengston’s controlled experiments healing mice of cancer at 5 universities, as detailed in “Chasing the Cure”.

Since we are always breathing, we always have the opportunity to “Watch the Breath”, making it possible to use our intent to change our cells. Greatly increasing the potential for cellular change is to combine visualization with our intent, especially if the visualization matches what is actually happening in Nature. For example, The Standard Model of Particle Physics tells us that a hydrogen atom is less than .0001% matter – it’s volume is the Vacuum Space, or Vacuum Energy, with more potential energy than all the matter in the universe. Put simply, all matter arises from the Vacuum Space, and on an atomic level, pops in-and-out of the Vacuum Space – the fuzz on an out of tune TV screen are electrons popping in and out of the Vacuum Space. Tiller theorizes in “Conscious Acts of Creation” that the “Spirit World” and the “Vacuum Space” are the same, meaning that the “Big Bang” issued from the Vacuum/Spirit World.

From Tiller’s model, our consciousness, especially the part associated with Spirit/Vacuum Space, can powerfully influence the atoms popping in and out of the molecules that comprise our cells. When we add the notion of Quantum Physics, that time is only a marker, really non-existant as a physical entity, we then have access to the full health range of our cells, for our whole life range.

So if, for example, I have cancer (which we all do), I should be able to enter the meditative state, and influence how the atoms popping in and out of the vacuum space appear in molecules that support my cancer cells. My intent should be able to change this cancer game plan with little effort!!!

But how???

By utilizing “watching the breath” with intent and visualization.

1) Make a general practice of viewing your breathing as a bellows, inhaling sustenance into your skin pores and lungs, the exhale driving this sustenance in bellows fashion to all your cells while exiting toxins from your pores and lungs.
2) In your extended meditative sessions, picture your consciousness as the center of a sphere and practice Macroscopic/Microscopic visualization:

Macroscopic – Hold the general intent that you are the Center of the Universe, your breathing goes infinitely in/out to the ends of creation, including all centers – the hollow center of a seed, the Big Bang, you as a tiny dot in your mother’s womb, the consciousness center of everyone past/future on the planet, every living thing growing from a dot to full growth, etc. Hold this macroscopic intention in a free-floating relaxed manner. As in all these meditative efforts, our minds will tend to drift from the intent – that’s fine, in fact this drifting adds to the ground covered, as long as you allow yourself to come back to your original intent/visualization. While existing as Center, also include the center of each cell, molecule, and atom of your body. Since you are breathing love from the center of creation to the infinite ends of creation, you are also breathing this love from the center of each cell in your body throughout the universe that is your body/mind/spirit. Your universe is also your mom and dad making love at your beginning through all things you have and will experience – all these things are visible from the center of your sphere.

Microscopic – Hold the general intent that your body, etc. is expanding to fill the entire universe, your atoms infinitely spread apart, so that the Andromeda Galaxy could be a tiny part of, say, your spleen. You are breathing in the Vacuum/Spirit Space, and your intent upholds all matter popping in and out of the Vacuum Space, the galaxies, all life, etc. You are breathing love thru everything that ever did or will exist, as the atoms pop in/out of the Vacuum supporting these things of past/present/future.

YOU ARE WASHING IT ALL WITH LOVE, even the atoms of everyone you ever knew or will know. This love to your universe, delivered thru your bellows breathing and your intent/visualization can influence the way your atoms pop in-out of the Vacuum Space, especially with time not existing, you both have/don’t have cancer, with the “don’t have” part gaining supremacy in your universe.

Thank you, John, for this beautiful contribution.

More about Bennett Mayrick?

I just finished reading Leigh Fortson's Embrace, Release, Heal, a compilation of stories from cancer survivors who had been given death sentences by their doctors and managed to heal anyway with the help of alternative and integrative healers.

Chapter Five describes "Jeff", who had an aggressive form of multiple myeloma that after a series of horrific treatments left him in a wheelchair. With the cancer in his spine he was finally offered a last-ditch experimental treatment that would have most likely paralyzed him. When he refused he was told by his doctors to go home and put his affairs in order.

He then went for his last haircut and his hairdresser suggested to him that he consider visiting a spiritualist named Ben, who lived on a mesa. Ben said to Jeff, "You go home and decide if they can tell you that you’re going to die. If you determine that the answer is no, then come back and see me."

Jeff thought about it and decided that "no one else can tell you when you’re going to die."

Ben taught Jeff a meditation and visualization technique to clean up his spine. He told Jeff "You’ve got to be able to go outside your body and then come back into the parts that need work. You can go there, to the part that needs work, and make the changes."

In his visualizations Jeff saw his spine as a hallway. He first saw it as being "full of all kinds of horrible-looking liquid and nasty-looking fish, as if I were underwater." He worked on cleaning up the hallway for about half an hour, three or four times every day. Over time, he saw less and less gunk. Eventually "the liquid was all cleaned up".

The next time Jeff went to see his oncologist, the doctor told him there was something wrong with his labtests. He simply refused to believe that Jeff was free of cancer. A mere six weeks elapsed from the time Jeff was sent home to die to the time his cancer disappeared. Twenty years later he is still alive. He says that Ben taught him that:

‘Every day, every second, your body is recreating itself on a cellular level. That cell, at some point, determines whether it’s going to be a good cell or a bad cell. You just need to coach that cell into being a good cell.’

I have reason to believe that the Ben who treated Jeff in the early 1990s was the same Ben Bill Bengston met in the early 1970s. The chronology fits. Both Bens could cure cancer, both Bens lived in the desert, both Bens seemed to be the same age, and both Bens passed away about 8 years ago. I was very moved to find this story. The most exciting part for me was that here was a first-hand account, from a patient's perspective, that showed the evolution of Ben's healing abilities from twenty years before. In the 1970s he was not yet able to heal cancer patients who had been subjected to radiation and chemo. By the 1990s he seemed to have transcended that barrier. His technique seems to have also evolved so he was able able to teach the patient to heal himself. Embrace, Release, Heal is full of such positive stories, and well worth reading.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

It seems that what Ben taught Jeff was how to go into "the gap" and heal himself from there ...

A "must-read" for every cancer patient and care-giver (Anita Moorjani NDE)

Anita Moorjani had lymphoma. After years of battling the disease, she came to the end of the road. She was rushed to hospital, unable to move, and her husband was told that she was dying. And yet she lived through the experience.

This is how the story begins:

I had cancer (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma), and on this morning, I could not move. My husband rushed me to hospital, where, after doing scans, they diagnosed me with grade 4B lymphoma (the highest grade). The senior oncologist looked at my report and told my husband that it was too late, and that my organs were now shutting down. I only had 36 hours to live....

Anita returned from the brink of dying, and brought back knowledge on how to heal and how to stay healthy. After her near death experience her organs returned to normal functioning and her cancer disappeared. The message she imparts is that her healing experience need not be unique.

Here is her tale, in print. And here is an interview. I thank Upswing for the links.

Highlights: Anita describes herself as having been very fearful of cancer, and feeling that this fear contributed to the development of her disease. She describes cancer as an emotional illness. Two important lessons she learned in her NDE were to live fearlessly and to love herself. She realized that we are all far greater in consciousness than our limited minds, bodies and egos allow us to perceive. When we die we lose these restrictions and experience a realization of our true purpose.

I was shown how illnesses start on an energetic level before they become physical. If I chose to go into life, the cancer would be gone from my energy, and my physical body would catch up very quickly. I then understood that when people have medical treatments for illnesses, it rids the illness only from their body but not from their energy so the illness returns. I realized if I went back, it would be with a very healthy energy. Then the physical body would catch up to the energetic conditions very quickly and permanently. I was given the understanding that this applies to anything, not only illnesses — physical conditions, psychological conditions, etc. I was “shown” that everything going on in our lives was dependant on this energy around us, created by us. Nothing was solid — we created our surroundings, our conditions, etc. depending where this “energy” was at. The clarity I received around how we get what we do was phenomenal! It’s all about where we are energetically. I was made to feel that I was going to see “proof” of this first hand if I returned back to my body.

Much of what Anita Moorjani says about consciousness echoes what I learned from my meditation teacher. The only difference is that Anita Moorjani speaks about an individual consciousness that is part of the whole but somehow still conscious of its uniqueness, whereas according to the Tibetan meditation tradition individual consciousness merges into the whole after death the way a drop of water merges into the ocean. It may be that people who experience NDEs return before the final merging. At any rate, I found Anita's description of her experience deeply moving. Here is another excerpt from the interview:

NDERF: Can you elaborate a little more on how you now live your life, while being able to see “beyond the illusion?”

AM: One of the problems I have is that language is just so limited and inadequate in trying to explain what I am saying. It’s so easy to misunderstand and misinterpret the true feelings being conveyed.

First of all, to me, suffering is an illusion. And I wish there was a better word to use, because when I had cancer, and people would tell me it’s only an illusion, I would get even more frustrated. The feeling that comes is: “if it’s only an illusion, then why does it feel so real to ME???” and “So, how do I break thru the illusion??” So sometimes I hesitate to use the word illusion when others are suffering. It can cause more frustration. But right now, it is the only word I can think of to explain what it is I am trying to say.

When I was sick, I had thought that maybe the “illusion” is ... something that can only be viewed from the other realm, and while in this realm, we are “bound” to the illusion. I thought that as long as we are in this realm, it always remains “reality” to us. I never would have believed it possible to be able to see thru the “illusion” and still be able to come back and express life in the physical. But in order to do that, and come back and live life in the physical again, I had to be prepared to view life completely differently from others. Perhaps for some people, the thought of doing that is harder. It’s easier not to come back, than to live in a world of people who don’t view life this way...

The way I view life now, nothing exists in this world until we bring it into our consciousness/awareness. Nothing exists until we express it, either as an individual or as a collective. The more awareness we draw to something, the more real it becomes in the physical. As a collective, we are probably inadvertently creating our physical reality by default, unknowingly. But as individuals, we always have the choice to create differently than what is being created “out there”...

If I still saw the world through 3D eyes, putting physical before consciousness, then I would have to take the doctors’ words at face value when they said that it is medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to pass through the host body in such a short time without killing it. And it is also medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to just “disappear” just like that, without passing through the host body. And if I had to wait for the scientists to have proof FIRST, before I discovered that my consciousness overrides ANYTHING physical, then I would still have cancer!

Update August 30: Anita Moorjani has now written a book entitled Dying to Be Me.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

Related link: Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, NDE survivor and healer

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, a scientist who had a near-death experience after a domestic accident and spontaneously developed the ability to heal. I thank Upswing for the link.

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's successful cancer cure?

This is not energy healing, but an alternative medical approach to treating cancer that seems to get better results than standard treatment. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his son and colleague, Dr. Gregory Burzynski, are interviewed by Dr. Mercola:




And now see the the movie on Dr. Burzynski's struggles with the Texas Medical Board, the FDA and the American Cancer Society, who, according to the film maker, tried to shut him down and bankrupt and jail him, while at the same time the U.S. government was trying to patent his discoveries:



And here is a commentary on the movie by Jennifer Hawke, a "mama and an MD".

And now a website with testimonials: www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. On the right hand side you will see a list of names and cancers, and as you click on each name, a testimonial will come up.

Update, Dec. 24: I've received some criticism for this post from people who pointed out to me that what Dr. Burzynski does is not in any way related to energy healing, the topic of this blog. People have also told me that Dr. Burzynski is highly controversial and that the movie is little more than an "infomercial" for his clinic. I have no way of evaluating the correctness of either Dr. Burzynski's position or the criticisms leveled against him. My position on the matter is that people should have a right to choose their own treatment, and that no government or agency should step in to deprive them of this right by making sure that only orthodox treatments (some of which have proven to be dismal failures) are available to them.

Embrace, Release, Heal: an inspiring look at healing from cancer

Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson is now available for purchase from Sounds True. This book is a must-read for anyone and everyone who has had reason to visit my blog, everyone who suffers from cancer, has a loved one with cancer, or just fears it based on the statistics that are regularly produced to scare us. IMHO it should be sold as a companion volume to The Emperor of All Maladies, which has much information to offer but little hope. Dr. Mukherjee should be gifted with a copy of this book.

Here is a link to the foreword and the introduction, and here is an excerpt in Leigh Fortson's own words:

I include here both my own [story] and the stories of other people who’ve had cancer. Most were told they would die. They didn’t. After exhausting what conventional medicine had to offer, they walked away from the grisly prognosis and found another way. Some call it a miracle. I’ve come to believe it’s just the way things work when we get out of our own way. These stories will help inspire you to see the infinite possibilities that may be available to you, but that your doctor will likely dismiss. They reflect the truth that cancer can be effectively treated physically, emotionally, and spiritually through a different, more life-affirming paradigm than conventional medicine traditionally offers. These stories demonstrate why the conversation around cancer must be changed. If nothing else, I urge you to read all of them. Simply put, they are good medicine.

Many readers of this book share my view of how valuable it is. Here is a link to some reader reviews on Amazon.

And here is Tami Simon interviewing Leigh Fortson about the book on Sounds True.

What I've learned from 12 years of energy healing

Some thoughts on healing offered for your perusal. Please feel free to argue with me and to present your own thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

Just because you will it, it won't necessarily happen

Helping someone heal is not about willpower. It's about an elusive quantity known as "intent". You somehow get the ball rolling and then both you and your client simply watch the healing "happen". This is the hardest thing for fledgling energy healers to learn. Every healing method emphasizes the necessity for "getting out of the way" and offers techniques to accomplish this, but few students get what it really means. The best analogy comes from Matrix Energetics: it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. The pebble is your intent. You won't get any ripples (effects) until you let go.

If you are unsuccessful at healing, you need to see how you get in the way and also take a look at how your client gets in the way. For instance, if you see your client frowning with concentration trying to direct the energy to a specific location in his body, he is not in the right mindspace for healing. You too get in the way by "trying", i.e, by making an effort. What Yoda said about "the Force" also applies to energy healing: "do or do not; there is no try".

Cancer patients find it very difficult to want things for themselves -- and this may be a significant factor in their disease

For a while we required cancer patients to participate in their healing by doing a process called "cycling". By "cycling" here I mean "image cycling", which requires a list of at least 20 things that a person wants that do not involve others, creating images of them, and then flashing the images rapidly in front of the mind's eye like a super-fast slide show.

We quickly discovered that most cancer patients have extraordinary difficulty creating such a list. Many cancer patients tend to put the needs of others before their own, especially those of their loved ones, and so have a problem with "selfishly" wanting things for themselves. The possibility has been raised that there is a correlation between this devaluing of one's own needs and developing cancer. I discuss this in greater detail in my post The mind is a powerful thing -- part 2.

I have often been surprised (and frustrated) to see my clients using the increased energy they feel after our sessions not for their own healing, but for doing things for their families. My exhortation that at least for the duration of their illness they need to become selfish and look after their own needs first invariably falls on deaf ears. E.g., a client who above all needed to rest exhausted himself by driving his child to a birthday party hundreds of kilometres away in order not to disappoint her. Another client with stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver painted his house and reorganized the garage so his family would not have to worry about these details after he was gone.

As a corollary to this there seems to be a need to go on with an appearance of normalcy for the sake of loved ones as long as possible, i.e., to just carry on as normal until carrying on is no longer an option. But since "carrying on as normal" was what contributed to the cancer in the first place, what may be required is change. (Dr. Cunningham of the Healing Journey program found a link between "patients making definite psychological shifts towards greater self-definition and self-reliance" and long-term cancer survival.)

We have seen some patients who lived in the shadow of much stronger partners, or recently lost such a partner to an illness, and did not know how to cope. Others had come to a point in their lives where they felt completely derailed and had no clue how to get back on track, or the energy to make the effort. All these people had extraordinary difficulty simply wanting things for themselves -- even knowing what to want. One practitioner told me that she can pretty well gauge a client's prognosis by his or her ability to learn to want.

Cancer patients have been operating for a long time on low energy reserves

Many cancer patients hardly seem to breathe, and are used to operating on a very low energy setting. Many of them have been burning the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle, and expending far more life energy than they've been taking in, for a very long time. When they find their energy levels raised through breathing practices or energy treatments, many of them feel uncomfortable with this unfamiliar sensation and immediately rush off to dissipate what they perceive as excess energy. The refrain will be "I felt so good that I had to do a 40 km bike ride" or "after our session I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and did weights for an hour." Then of course once the energy runs out, as it invariably does, they crash. I don't quite know how to handle this, because exhortations "not to overdo things" have been about as effective as asking the client to become a bit more selfish in the interest of his or her own healing.

Animals and people heal differently

Animals heal faster than people. Whether it is an issue of metabolism, body size, or lack of a belief system that would interfere with the effectiveness of the healing, animals are a lot more able to respond to energy healing than people. My best patient to date has been a mutt named Bo, whom I treated ostensibly on his deathbed on two separate occasions 6 months apart. The first time his owners told me they thought he had cancer, the second time that he ate something poisonous. Both times he recovered, and he is still around, a normal, healthy dog. I wish for all our sakes that human clients were as responsive.

Animals healing differently from people in fact may not only be true for energy healing, but for healing in general, and it plays havoc with research. A 2004 article in Fortune magazine pointed to this effect as the reason so much promising cancer research turns out to be disappointing when transposed from mice to humans. Substances that heal transplanted human cancer in mice do not necessarily affect cancer in humans. We are similar to our animal cousins in many ways, but we are also much more complex. I suspect that this added complexity has to do with the complicated psyches produced by our complicated brains.

Sometimes miracles do happen

Every energy healing modality has stories of miraculous healings, which people tend to dismiss as being only anecdotal. In our group we've seen our share of miracles, the mutt named Bo only one among them. There was also the girl whose lung abscess and scoliosis cleared up within three weeks of our group beginning to treat her and a stage-4 pancreatic patient whose jaundice reversed.

The question from my perspective is what preconditions produce miracles and how we can re-create them on a regular basis. (I suspect that once we understand the miracle well enough to make it a daily occurrence, it ceases being a miracle and becomes the new science of the day.)

But the technique that produces miracles for the teacher may not work as effectively for the student

I discussed this in earlier posts as the dilution effect. Essentially if everyone who has to date taken an energy healing workshop from any of the great lights in the field were now able to duplicate the teacher's ability to heal, we would have little need for doctors and hospitals. Unfortunately most people go to workshops, diligently learn the technique, practice a little, get so-so results, then quit, or go on to learn another technique in another workshop.

The issue from my perspective is that the techniques being taught in these workshops may in fact have very little to do with the teacher's success in healing. I will take an example from physical medicine to illustrate what I mean.

Earlier this year I noticed, through the agency of the WYDDTY website, the stellar work of Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who is reputed never to have lost a cancer patient. I read the transcripts of an interview with him and discovered that what he did to treat people was no different from the treatments offered at many alternative cancer clinics, of which few will match his stellar track record. So what is different about Dr. Kingsley's treatments? I submit that it may be Dr. Kingsley himself, and what he adds to the healing through his own personality, belief systems, and energetic interactions with patients.

Another doctor in the U.S., the now famous Dr. Issam Nemeh, discovered that his patients fared better than the patients of other anaesthesiologists because he prayed for them. He firmly believes that the agency of his healing ability is prayer. It may be so -- but many others, in fact most others, pray with much lesser effect. So what is the difference? What does Dr. Issam Nemeh do/have that others who also pray don't? And could he teach others to pray as successfully as he does?

After 20-odd workshops I've come to the conclusion that the best way to learn from a teacher is to hang around with him or her for months or years on end, and to absorb not only his or her technique but the mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi that lurks behind it. I suspect that the technique offered is more often than not a sleight of hand that hides the real magic happening behind the scenes while you are busy looking somewhere else.

Is fighting cancer the right strategy?

My attention has lately been riveted by posters on the subway shouting "Join the fight!" and asking "Who are you fighting for?"

These posters are funded by the Canadian Cancer Society and they invite you to visit a website called "fightback.ca". On the website you are informed that "April is the month to fight back" and that "every three minutes another Canadian is faced with fighting cancer". The Society invites you to buy a daffodil in April to show your support, because the daffodil "is a symbol of strength and courage. A symbol of life. It says we will not give up. It says we will fight back. It says we will beat cancer. Join the fight."


We have been fighting cancer for a long time, with dubious results. Forty years ago President Nixon officially declared war on cancer, making "the conquest of cancer a national crusade." Thirty-seven years later, in 2008, a headline appeared in Newsweek: We fought cancer and cancer won. The thoughtful, well-researched article attached to this headline suggests that "After billions spent on research and decades of hit-or-miss treatments, it's time to rethink the war on cancer."

Indeed it is, not only because the war is being lost on multiple fronts, but also because it is being fought in and over the bodies of millions of cancer sufferers, who often end up as collateral damage. According to Ms. Begley, the author of the Newsweek article, the investment of two-hundred billion dollars in cancer research since 1971 has produced an estimated 1.5 million scientific papers, but no reduction in overall cancer deaths.

Most of the scientific studies funded by the campaign to beat cancer have had little or no impact on the lives of cancer patients in the real world. "Indeed, it is possible (and common)," Ms. Begley writes, "for cancer researchers to achieve extraordinary acclaim and success, measured by grants, awards, professorships and papers in leading journals, without ever helping a single patient gain a single extra day of life." Many exciting scientific findings turn out to be "interesting but irrelevant to patients," so perhaps throwing more money at more scientific research on the minutiae of cancer is not the right and only answer.

Cancer is a disease with many facets, and it morphs to find its way around the "weapons" thrown at it by science. "Just as cancer cells develop resistance to standard chemo drugs, so they are finding ways to elude the new targeted drugs such as Avastin, Gleevec and Herceptin," writes Ms. Begley. If one route to their proliferation is blocked, they will find another. According to oncologist George Demetri, "By the time there are 10 cancer cells, you probably have eight different cancers. And there are different pathways in each of the cells." That's how complex cancer is.

I would like to propose that what we want to do is not wage war on cancer, but find ways of "waging peace" with it. By that I mean we should not try to eradicate these rogue cells by every deadly means at our disposal -- often causing irreversible damage to the patient receiving the so-called treatment -- but instead aim to bring them back into alignment with the body. When we are waging war on them, they clearly outsmart us, and have been outsmarting us for decades. But what would happen if we spent our research dollars on "waging peace" instead? "Waging peace" is what energy healing therapies do.

Update Jan. 16, 2012: Also read my posts "Anatomy of a miracle", "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?", "Open letter to oncologists", "Using qi gong visualisations for cancer patients", and "Radical love and cancer".

The New "New Kid on the Block"

A while ago I referred to the Domancic Method as "the new kid on the block". After three years on the North American continent it has gained traction, with regular clinics through the Bioenergy Life Project, the brainchild of Zoran Hochstatter, who brought the method to America and the U.K. The method is easy to learn and straightforward, and practitioners report good results with many conditions, including frozen shoulder, thyroid irregularities, and even some cancers. It has no religious connotations of any sort and it successfully removes the mystique from energy healing.

The new "new kid on the block", somewhat awkwardly named the "Russian Organ Regeneration Method" (a.k.a. the "New Knowledge"), does the exact opposite. It hails, as you would guess from the name, from Russia, and its originators call themselves "spiritual scientists". The method has a non-denominational religious, or if you like, spiritual bend, in that it seems to work through a series of meditations that sound very much like prayer.

ROR is grounded in the recognition that we are all one with "All That There Is" and therefore co-creators of our reality. There are a series of videos on the method on Youtube in which people give testimonials of having regrown lost teeth and also internal organs that had been surgically removed. It may sound "far out", but having now attended a workshop on it with a friend, I wonder (along with my friend) whether what the Russians do is similar to what Dr. Issam Nemeh does quite successfully in his healing services in the U.S.: a sort of targeted prayer.

The Russian method was translated into German and then taught in English-language workshops in Mount Shasta and Thailand. The Thailand group also included some Australians. I thought this was highly symbolic of our new united world: a Russian method being taught by Germans to Australians and Americans in the far east. You can't get much more international than that. BTW the method is not only being translated, but also transposed, and going forward it may also be renamed. It will be interesting to track its evolution. My reading of the method is that its core concepts are quite powerful and that it will go a long way if those core concepts can be retained in translation. If you want to know more, take a look at the Organ Regeneration discussion group on Facebook.