Healing cancer in the lab - can it be done without a healer?

This talk was recorded for the 2015 Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of water. Dr. Bengston talks about in vivo experiments using mice and a variety of cancers and an in vitro experiment with leukemia cells.

A note on Dr. Wayne Dyer's passing

The last couple of days my stats have been through the roof with people landing on my blog after searching for Dr. Wayne Dyer on Google. What seemed to arouse the most interest in relation to this blog was whether Dr. Dyer had died of leukemia. As a result of a Facebook posting I was directed to, I am now able to relay that his death was related to something to do with his heart and that he did not have leukemia at the time of his death.

In memoriam Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez

Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, the controversial cancer doctor who appeared in Suzanne Somers' book, Knockout, has died of an apparent heart attack in his home on July 21st. A full obituary, with details of his life and career, is given here. The site also contains a comprehensive video interview, in which Dr. Gonzalez talks about his training, his mentors and his work, and describes in detail what inspired him to treat cancer as an alternative physician.

Making assumptions - Part 2 (also continues the theme of cats and energy healing)

In "Making assumptions" we visited with Truffle, an elderly feline whose newly developed habit of not finding the litter box was attributed to old age and decline, instead of a bladder infection that needed medical attention.

More recently Truffle experienced breathing difficulties. The next morning her owner took her to the vet, and the vet said "your cat is dying" and offered to euthanize Truffle right on the spot. He detected a heart murmur and diagnosed heart and lung insufficiency, and essentially predicted progressive organ failure. He warned Truffle's owner that if she had to rely on an emergency vet for euthanasia over the weekend, she'd be paying upwards of $800. If she availed herself of his services, however, while he was available, she'd be paying a lot less.

Truffle's owner declined, mostly because she wanted to consult with her husband. So she made an appointment for Truffle's final visit with the vet for the next morning. This would allow Truffle's "family and friends" to say the appropriate goodbyes.

Truffle's admiring circle of family and friends, however, includes some enthusiastic energy healers. Over the course of the afternoon she received plenty of tearful goodbyes as well as Reiki and applications of the Domancic Method. The next morning her owners took her to the vet -- and then brought her home, very much alive still.

The Truffle is still with us. Her breathing difficulties appear to have resolved. She can now find the litter box, at least most of the time. She can climb up to her favourite sleeping spot on the third floor and jump up on the bed to claim it. She is thoroughly enjoying her new geriatric cat food. She may be old and declining, but she is still enjoying life.

Postscript January 4, 2016: the old girl is still trundling along six months later, looking forward to celebrating her 19th birthday.

Postscript April 26, 2016: Still trundling along.

Postscript May 10, 2016: Rest in peace, Truffle.

Mind blown - Reiki at the Mayo Clinic

Periodically I check my standing on Google, entering the search term "energy healing cancer." I am pleased to see that this blog remains near the top of the first page. Today's search, however, turned up something else I found interesting: "Energy therapies offered at the Mayo Clinic". Yes, the Mayo Clinic is offering Reiki and Healing Touch to support the healing of cancer patients and cancer survivors. The site explains that

For people living with cancer, the healing energy of Reiki and Health Touch can be used to provide relief from conditions such as fatigue, stress, pain, anxiety and side effects of cancer treatments.

It also says that "energy therapies work in harmony with standard medical care and treatment" and that "Reiki promotes relaxation and enhances healing within the body." Way to go, Mayo Clinic.

Making assumptions

My friends Stephen and Alison have an elderly cat named Truffle. Truffle is 18 and a half, a Methuselah in cat years, and blind as a bat. Not too long ago Truffle started peeing in the kitchen. Someone would go down for breakfast in the morning or arrive home at the end of the day and find a puddle in the kitchen. The inescapable conclusion was that because of her advanced age Truffle was becoming disoriented in addition to being blind, and could no longer find the litter box.

Wrong. What Truffle was desperately signaling by peeing the kitchen was that she had a bladder infection. Because everyone came to the wrong conclusion, the problem was only flagged when she stopped peeing altogether and needed emergency veterinary care.

The same kinds of assumptions are made about elderly humans. Since there is an expectation that their health, mental acuity and quality of life will invariably decline before they die, solutions to their problems are often missed. It could be that the culprit behind their confusion or poor balance or forgetfulness is their medication or their insufficient diet, but that is often not investigated, even though a small tweak in dosage, a different medicine, or some supplements and fresh fruits and vegetables could make all the difference.

Illnesses are treated the same. It is assumed that once you have an illness, especially one decreed to be fatal, all your pain and discomfort can be attributed to it. Several years ago some colleagues and I treated a pancreatic cancer patient who responded with an astonishing turn-around from being on his deathbed to reversing his jaundice and being released from the hospital. Even though he went home to receive outpatient care and continued to improve (being able to get out of bed, walk around the house, go up and down the stairs, walk to the park, go grocery shopping, spend weekends at the cottage) the expectation was that he would eventually decline and die. Because of this expectation, his multitude of healthcare providers all missed the clues of the impending septicemia which in the end killed him.

A friend of mine who is an MD tells an interesting story from his days as a resident. He was on his neurology rotation and he was asked to go down to admitting and take a history on a woman who was about to be admitted to the neurology department because she kept falling down. When he got to the waiting room, my friend found a very large woman sitting in a chair holding her hugely swollen knee. After she complained to him that her knee was giving out on her and causing her to fall, it didn't take him long to discover that she had a torn ligament. My friend then logically sent her to orthopedics and got into big trouble with his supervisor for not playing along with the assumption that her problem was neurological.

It can take some powerful advocacy to get the right kind of care for the right condition in the face of mistaken assumptions.

Report says there will be a 40% increase in cancer patients by 2030

According to a report cited by the Globe and Mail, Canada's hospitals will see an increase of 40% a year in the number of cancer patients they treat by 2030. The article claims that

By the year 2030, an average of 277,000 new cancer cases are expected to be logged every year, up from nearly 200,000 this year and about 155,000 a decade ago, according to Canadian Cancer Statistics 2015, an annual summary of cancer figures and projections published Wednesday by the Canadian Cancer Society, Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The difficulty for the medical system will be how to deal with the sheer number of new cancer cases, driven by an aging population of baby boomers. A particular difficulty will be what to do with those patients who are too frail and elderly to endure the usual highly toxic and debilitating cancer protocols. The article and the report recommend advance planning, with "more oncologists, specially trained nurses, diagnostic services, cancer centres, cancer therapies and palliative care."

If I may beat my little drum here, what the system needs, in particular for those frail elderly patients whom chemotherapy would devastate, if not kill outright, is more specially trained energy healers. As I've pointed out in this blog many times over, energy treatments trump conventional ones for giving patients peace of mind, quality of life, and even added time. They are less taxing on the patient and less expensive to deliver. Perhaps by 2030 someone in a position to change things in the healthcare system will figure this out, for all our benefits.

Iatrogenic disease - part 4

This is a topic that just keeps giving. This morning's haul is an article in the National Post, entitled "Inside Canada’s secret world of medical error: ‘There is a lot of lying, there’s a lot of cover-up’." It was published in January, but I just ran across it. It begins with a story containing a shocking verbal image: a woman whose eyeball literally pops out her eye socket because botched eye surgery caused a build-up of blood behind her eye. The same woman had a few months earlier mistakenly received a hernia operation instead of having a cyst removed from one of her ovaries. She is in continuing pain from the unremoved cyst and she now has a prosthetic eye.

The article continues with a litany of other hospital errors before citing a frightening statistic: 13% of people coming into hospital in Canada will experience some kind of adverse event, and that includes the possibility of iatrogenic death. A 2004 study showed that 7.5% of adult patients entering hospital, or approximately 185,000 Canadians a year, experienced a serious adverse event. The percentage for children was higher at 9.2%. Up to 23,000 people a year die in Canada as a result of preventable hospital error. According to Hugh McLeod, chief executive of the Canadian Safety Institute, "With the pace, the increase of new technology, new drugs, new approaches … the probability of risk and incident has grown."

If you have a strong stomach, read the article in its entirety. It will inspire you to do everything in your power to stay out of hospital.

Interesting talk by Dr. Bengston, recorded in November 2014

This is the talk Dr. Bengston gave at the Leadership Energy Summit Asia 2014.

He discusses his experiments, his thoughts on whether what he does is actually "energy healing," the role of will vs. intention in healing, the rate at which healing occurs, bonding with human subjects, whether healing can be taught, and what his technique works on. Interesting talk.

For those who are not familiar with Dr. Bengston, almost 100% of the mice in his experiments were cured of a cancer known to be 100% fatal.

Iatrogenic disease - Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 I discussed instances where medical (mis)treatment resulted in patient harm. In this post I will discuss a case of potential harm not due to mistreatment but to inadequate information being given to the patient.

An elderly gentleman I know, who is closing in on 90 years of age (89 this year), was recently diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer. He had surgery to remove a tumour and was informed by his oncologist that without further treatment he had a 44% chance of recurrence in 5 years. Because the elderly patient was not fit to withstand the rigours of intravenous chemotherapy, his doctor recommended a six-month course of Capecitabine, which would reduce the likelihood of recurrence to 29%. Capecitabine comes in pill form, and the patient would be taking two pills a day, two weeks on, one week off. The side effects are said to be diarrhea, fatigue and pain in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet.

An internet search of Capecitabine turns up an interesting discussion on CancerCompass, a terrific resource for both patients and care givers on all forms of cancer. While many entries are positive, there is an extremely alarming one (please note that Xeloda is another name for Capecitabine):

We have lost our Mom. She was an active 73 year old with stage 3 colon cancer. She went into the hospital to begin a combination of Xeloda and radiation therapy. Three days later, she's dead! She grew increasingly "sick" immediately following the very first pill of Xeloda. We thought it was an allergic reaction. She worsened every hour and finally on day 3, passed away. We were shocked. Apparently, she was never tested for an enzyme that is crucial to this medicine working. The doctor told us that he has had another patient who had some difficulty with Xeloda and the lack of this enzyme, so isn't there a test for DPD(deficiency) levels? I have checked the web, and Roche does document the need to test for DPD (long chemical name) before administration of Xeloda. In fact, if you lack this enzyme, Xeloda is CONTRA-INDICATED.

No one mentioned to my elderly acquaintance the need to test for this enzyme. Is it the case that his doctors don't know about DPD or that they don't care? Another poster in the discussion wrote about asking the oncologist for this test and being refused because it was expensive, and because the deficiency is supposed to be relatively rare. However, DPD deficiency apparently accounts for 43% of high toxicity reactions to Capecitabine, which clearly can result in significant suffering and death. My elderly acquaintance is going to ask for the DPD test, but he shouldn't have needed the internet to tell him what he trusted his doctor to know.

Why am I bringing this up on a blog about bioenergy healing and cancer? Because I believe, and I have said so in many instances on this blog, that in certain cases patients would do better with various forms of energy healing to boost well-being and immunity than with debilitating chemotherapy which is detrimental to both. An 89-year-old man with a 44%/5-year chance of recurrence which a chemo drug would only reduce by 15% is probably one of them. And need I comment on the irresponsibility of doctors who throw the decision on him without even recommending a crucial test that might prevent him dying from the cure?

Energy healing is real, scientific experiment shows

A recent blog post from Indiana University reveals that healing energy can be measured using a geomagnetometer (also known as a gaussmeter). The experimenter was inspired by two previous studies that had shown magnetic field variations near the hands of trained healers. In this case, however, the changes in the magnetic field did not occur in the vicinity of the healer, but near the recipients of the healing, a cage of mice with cancerous tumours. The magnetic field changes appeared "in waves that resembled symmetrical 'chirp waves,' with a decrease in frequency of the oscillations followed by an increase in frequency," in effect going from random noise to organized wave activity, and then back to random noise again. When the same experiment was repeated with the healer over 600 miles away, the same oscillations appeared during the healings. The experimenter concluded that "the magnetic field activity observed during distant healing was identical to that observed during hands-on healing (on-site), suggesting a common mechanism for both types of healing." The treated mice recovered.

Another first-hand story of Bennett Mayrick

A reader named Susan has sent me the story of her own first-person encounter with Bennett Mayrick. Since first-hand accounts of Bennett Mayrick are few and far between, I am delighted to include this one in my blog.

My experience with Bennett is not extensive but I took a class taught by him somewhere in Manhattan with my mother and my aunt who were interested in all things paranormal, metaphysical and healing-oriented.

I remember Bennett well. Tall, swarthy, with long hair, he was kind of a swashbuckling healer/psychic and, as we all sat around a large conference table, he lectured and taught. Notes were taken but I don't remember much more--these were the seventies and I was a teen.

During one session, he asked us all to think of something that had been chronically bothering us physically. I was the youngest at the table and was in good shape but actually did have a chronic pain in my right shoulder blade. It was a constant nerve pain that a doctor had assumed came from years of carrying heavy books on that side and was told there was nothing to be done. It was the kind of pain that nagged on a moderate level through out the day and I was anxious to be rid of it.

Bennett walked around the table laying hands on each of us ... some had headaches and he placed his hand on their foreheads, etc. When my turn came, I directed his large hand to the spot on my back and he placed it there for no more than several minutes during which I felt discernible warmth emanating from it. That spot, which had bothered me for years, never ever hurt again. Poof--it was gone right there and then. Needless to say, even though I had been brought up to strongly believe in "faith" healing, I was very impressed and delighted. This was, of course, the highlight of the "seminar."

Susan's experience echoes Bill Bengston's story of the vanishing of his back pain after Bennett Mayrick put his hand on it. What is impressive in both these stories is that the pain, which until then had been chronic, never returned.

Thank you, Susan.

Most cancer caused by "bad luck"?

Recently there was a spate of headlines in the mainstream news media trumpeting a new study that claimed that most cancer was caused by "bad luck" rather than genetics or poor lifestyle. This came as very disheartening news to anyone trying to use diet, exercise, and supplementation to decrease their chances of developing cancer. But the headlines need elaboration, because once again the mainstream media overlooked some important details in their eagerness to deliver a sensational story.

The study was in fact a statistical exercise, measuring cancer incidence in various tissue types. It was found that the more often cells divided in a particular tissue, the greater the likelihood was that something might go wrong and result in cancer. The study authors have now pointed out that the correlation is comparable to the greater likelihood of getting into an accident on a long road trip than a short one by virtue of spending more time in the car. They insist that to say that most cancer is a result of "bad luck" is to misunderstand their findings. In their statement they write "We want to stress that cancer is caused by a combination of many factors." (For more detail, read the article on medscape.com).

It is simply common sense that the more a cell divides, the greater the chances are that something might go awry. That is why the longer a person lives, the more likely they are statistically to develop cancer. But if you read George Johnson's Cancer Chronicles, you'll came away surprised at how many things have to derail before cancer actually takes hold. There has to be a cascade of things that go wrong, and at each juncture the body has defense mechanisms at its disposal. It also makes sense that the healthier the body is, and the stronger those defense mechanisms are, the more it will be able to overcome the effects of "bad luck" cell divisions. So rather than feel helpless and disheartened by the headlines and reach for a second piece of chocolate cake because "doctors say that lifestyle doesn't matter," just keep carrying on with the healthy diet and the exercise.

Here is Chris Wark's take on the "most cancer is bad luck" hype in his blog, Chris Beat Cancer.