And now Richard Bartlett ...

What is going on?

Richard Bartlett is the fourth teacher of energy healing to have died in less than a year, following Zdenko Domancic, Zoran Hochstatter, and, most recently, Bill Bengston. Except for Zdenko, they were all my teachers. They were all charismatic, energetic (at least when I knew them), and in some ways larger than life.

Of all of them, the one closest to my heart was Richard. I went to several of his Matrix Energetics workshops, one each in Toronto, in Phoenix, and in Fort Lauderdale. Richard back in the day was truly a force of nature -- a wild and crazy guy! He was a rock star manqué: he would come into the workshop on the first day, dancing to loud rock music, strumming an air guitar, wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt you can imagine. Then he would sit on a massage table on the stage and condition the room, waving his fingers in a weird way, and suddenly everyone who was tuned in would begin to feel amazing. And I mean really amazing, light as air and full of joy! Then he would begin his stream of consciousness patter to "keep your left brain busy" so your right brain would be free to participate in the magic he unleashed.

At the Fort Lauderdale workshop, I spent about five minutes on the floor feeling like pure light. It was mind-blowing! I didn't want to reconstitute into a body. And the most amazing thing was that Richard didn't do that: my practice partner did. At another workshop we spent two days learning techniques and on the third day Richard said "you don't need any of that." What he next taught was the ME technique I use the most. You put one hand over the (t)issue you are working on, hold the other hand out to the universe, and say "what needs to happen here?," shifting your attention outward and getting out of the way. If you hit the sweet spot, crazy things can happen.

Recently I re-watched a Matrix Energetics promo DVD I had hanging around. Something that I never got before suddenly caught my attention. Richard, talking about his chiropractic training, explained that all techniques worked on someone the first time, less so the second time, and not at all the third time. "Your conditions are the Borg," he said. "They adapt." He said that he was not teaching a technique but creating a state of consciousness in which Matrix would work. That's why he conditioned the room, and that's why people were often not able to reproduce their experiences once they got home: they couldn't reproduce the state. What makes it especially hard is that trying doesn't help -- in fact, trying makes it worse. It's all about letting go. Drop the pebble in the pond and watch the ripples fan out.

BTW, Matrix Energetics peeps out there, did anybody, ever, anywhere get the "two point"? Find a spot that feels stuck, find another spot that feels more stuck, and measure? Did that ever make any sense to anyone?

Godspeed, Richard. You were crazy, wild, complicated, amazing. Earth will miss you. May your next life be one of peace and contentment. You earned it!

Another obituary -- William (Bill) Bengston

Sadly, I have to write another obituary.

Bill Bengston has died.

He passed peacefully in his sleep on April 16th.

I was very sad hearing the news, in part because he never got to complete his life's work, which was developing an affordable, widely accessible, and side-effect-free cancer cure.

Bill and I taught healing workshops together in Toronto in 2007 and 2008. This blog was born out of that work. He then moved on to teach the workshops in the US, and I lost track of him. Every once in a while I checked in online to see his latest talk or find out about his latest experiment. The last one I saw was about "recording" the energy for broadcasting. He was ever curious and always exuded great enthusiasm.

The world will be a poorer and less interesting place without him in it.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Remembering Zoran Hochstatter

I recently learned of the passing of Zoran Hochstatter.

Zoran was a cinematographer who was drawn into the world of energy healing when he made a documentary about the Slovenian healer Zdenko Domancic and became himself a practitioner and teacher.

Back in the late oughts I took three energy healing workshops with Zoran in Toronto and Sarasota. He was then a teacher of the Domancic Method, but later he branched out on his own with a method he called PureBioenergy. A good deal larger than life and a man of strong opinions, he inspired many to learn and practice energy healing. I had huge fun at his workshops and will always remember his ready laugh and his impressive mane of hair.

BTW he was disdainful of Reiki and poked fun at any energy healing modality that wasn't the Domancic Method. I remember that he called my spontaneous way of doing energy healing "your cheecheemeechy." So, to this day, if someone asks me what I do, that's what I call it, and then I remember Zoran.

I am sorry he is gone.

PS: As I was writing this post, I went to check something on the Domancic Method website, and found an obituary for Zdenko! He had also died!

Waxing metaphysical

A few weeks ago I had a eureka moment as I came to the realization that we are not just made of cells, but that our cells are made of atoms, and that each of those atoms is perfect -- every last one of them.

I shared this realization with my (Buddhist) meditation teacher, who then added that every atom is not only perfect, but also conscious, and possessing what she called "Buddha nature," which one might rephrase in non-Buddhist terms as "partaking of the divine perfection of the whole".

So if our atoms are perfect, where does our sickness come from? It seems that imperfection creeps in through less-than-perfect interaction between all these perfect parts. But where does the imperfection of the interactions come from? I thought my teacher might say "karma," but instead she said "conditioned beliefs." "Karma" in this context does not have punitive connotations, but simply means "cause and effect," as in "if you smoke cigarettes, you might get lung cancer." "Conditioned beliefs" in turn are the parameters of your life, the rules you absorbed, beginning the day you were born from the society you were born into, creating the self-chosen prison you live in beyond whose bars you cannot see.

A number of years ago I learned a healing system called "Russian Organ Regeneration," which held that sickness was a deviation from your perfect divine blueprint, and that healing was nothing more than a return to that original blueprint. The divinity that created the blueprint was not only outside you, but also inside you; you were the co-creator of your own blueprint. Your return to health returned a small piece of divine creation to its original perfection, and the task was to return as much of the whole to its original perfection as possible.

But if perfection already underlies the whole, then the task becomes to bring perfection to the relationship of the parts within the whole. Energy healers talk of "harmonizing," Buddhists of "removing obscurations." Dr. Bengston suggests that energy healers provide not energy but information, which teaches the body the interactions it needs to return to healthy functioning. The "Russian Organ Regeneration" folks go back to the time before the initial deviation and from there follow the path of divine perfection, the unfolding of the blueprint as you and God originally intended.

Whatever the case may be, it cannot hurt to embrace the timeless perfection that lives at the core of you. Every one of your atoms is functioning as it should. Every one of them has been around for billions of years. Every one of them is immortal. And beyond that is the something that animates them all, that gives life to their dance, that existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you die, and for the time being, however long that may be, makes you you.

That's worth meditating on.

I need to re-up a post that fills me with positivity and joy

This post is from 2011, and it is about Bill Bengston's teacher, Bennett Mayrick, quite possibly one of the most talented energy healers on the planet. The post describes one of Bennett's incredible healings.

Bill was with Bennett Mayrick for only a short time, at the beginning when Mayrick first discovered his considerable healing abilities. The two then had a falling out and went their separate ways, with Bill gravitating towards research, and Ben, as this post suggests, continuing to grow his talents as a healer. For instance, when Bill worked with Bennett, Bennett could not yet heal cancer in patients who had had chemotherapy or radiation; but twenty years later he apparently could. At the beginning he also practiced what Bill Bengston now teaches as "image cycling"; but twenty years on he seemed to be doing something quite different. I am saddened that he and Bill did not reconnect in his later years, when he had two more decades of experience to draw from, and so much more to teach! But even though he is now gone, he shows us what is possible, and what is possible is mind-blowing.

A recommendation

My apologies -- I haven't written in a while. Not because there is nothing happening in the world of cancer and energy healing, but because my attention has been diverted. I now work with active young seniors who do not need treatment for cancer but have more immediate, movement related problems, such as painful knees and frozen shoulders, which, unlike cancer, can be relatively quickly fixed. I get a great deal of satisfaction from seeing immediate or almost immediate results.

Treating cancer in contrast requires both healer and client to make a long term commitment. There can be immediately noticeable benefits in the form of greater energy, increased peace of mind, and decreased levels of pain. Often there are clinical changes too, which can show up in lab test results. But regular treatments have to continue for a long time, and that requires a special degree of dedication and stamina on the part of the healer, who is dealing not only with the physical but also with the emotional and spiritual needs of a client who is facing a life-threatening illness.

Among the many people I met on my energy healing training journey, the one who has impressed me the most is my friend and colleague Ellen. I first met her twelve years ago in one of William Bengston's early trainings, and we both participated in workshops taught by Zoran Hochstatter, who now teaches PureBioenergy and back then was an authorized instructor of the Domancic Method. Unlike many of our fellow students, Ellen has kept up both her training and her practice. As she has a background in psychotherapy and social work, clients find her manner uniquely helpful and reassuring. Her energy is strong and pure, and when we work together, the synergy feels wonderful.

So I am pleased to post a recommendation from one of her clients, who writes

I first visited Ellen the week before my last round of chemo. I was low on my blood counts and had been delayed a week – my therapist recommended Ellen to help boost those counts. What I didn’t bargain for is how much Ellen’s approach would also boost my spirit. Three-plus cancer-free years later, I continue to visit Ellen monthly to maintain my physical and mental well being. Along the way, she completely healed my “clicking” shoulder from a 20 year old nagging injury and resolved other maladies such as eye floaties/dryness. Importantly, I am healthier than I have ever been and able to approach my visits to the oncologist with confidence because of Ellen’s work. Ellen has enriched my life in ways far beyond physical healing and has taught me about the critical connection between mind and body.

If I ever found myself seriously in need of healing, Ellen would be my first choice, and I don't say that lightly. Her website, worth a visit, is https://healingtransformation.ca.

Post-script to "Bladder Stone Dissolved"

In my previous post I mentioned that M.'s bladder stone was dissolved through a combination of potassium citrate and energy healing treatments. This may lead people to ask whether in fact it was the potassium citrate alone that dissolved the stone. I found a 2009 PubMed paper about the use of potassium citrate for kidney stones that might help to answer this question.

Eight patients were enrolled in the study. Each had at least one kidney stone sized 15 mm or less. The study was divided into two 6-week periods. In the first 6-week period the subjects were told to drink 1500 ml of water a day. In the second 6-week period, they were given potassium citrate and potassium bicarbonate. These were the results:

During the first period of treatment stone burden remained unchanged in all patients. On the contrary after 6 weeks of potassium citrate/bicarbonate treatment, complete stone dissolution was found in three of the patients. In the other five cases a partial dissolution was observed and in two of them complete dissolution of the stone was achieved after prolongation of the treatment for 4 and 6 month[s] respectively.

M., in comparison, had a 25 mm stone, which dissolved in 21 days.

Bladder stone dissolved

A client I will call M. was diagnosed with 2.5 cm (1 inch) bladder stone that was causing him intermittent pain and difficulty in urinating. He was scheduled to have a medical procedure called "transurethral cystolitholapaxy" in January to break up the stone. This procedure consists of

the surgeon insert[ing] a small, rigid tube with a camera at the end (a cystoscope) into your urethra and up into your bladder. The camera is used to help locate the bladder stones. A crushing device, lasers or ultrasound waves transmitted from the cystoscope can be used to break up the stones into smaller fragments, which can be washed out of your bladder with fluids.

The procedure is usually done under local anesthetic and is not painful at the time, but patients can experience discomfort afterwards, and there is also a small risk of infection or injury to the bladder.[source]

Needless to say M. was not keen on having this done. Aside from the issues of physical risk and discomfort, there was also a substantial cost involved. So he scoured the internet for natural solutions, and found a compound called potassium citrate which can help prevent and over time dissolve bladder stones. His doctor advised him, however, that for a stone as large as his, it would take a long time to work, if it worked at all.

M. decided to try the potassium citrate along with energy healing. We did 12 bioenergy sessions in two blocks of six with a break of 10 days in between. Right after the first session he reported easier urination and increased flow, which made him feel a lot better. This continued right up until the ninth session, when he once again began to experience difficulty and complained of frequent, painful urination which produced small amounts of sand residue. After the 12th session he returned to the urologist and asked for an ultrasound.

I will quote the urologist's comment on the ultrasound verbatim. This is what the urologist said:

I am sorry to tell you that there is no bladder stone.

M. was quite pleased and astonished by this, as was I. He has experienced no pain or difficulty urinating since. He is now trying to address the possible underlying causes of his bladder stone through lifestyle changes, so it does not return.

Let's get some clarity on the Bengston Method

Every once in a while I run across a forum discussion on the Bengston Method. The latest one is here. There is usually a predictable pattern as the discussion polarizes between a group of enthusiastic supporters who know next to nothing about the method except what they can find on the internet, and another group that is on principle opposed to anything "woo-woo" and calls Dr. William Bengston, the founder of the method, a charlatan.

So backed by my experiences with both Dr. Bengston and the method, I would like to offer some clarification.

Is he a charlatan?
In response to Dr. Bengston's detractors I will say that I do not believe he is a "charlatan". His mouse experiments are quite convincing, and there have been enough of them to show that there is indeed something anomalous going on. As far as mice go, it's all well and good: Dr. Bengston can demonstrably cure them. He also has visual proof of at least one human cure and might be able to produce testimonials of others. He is, however, very uninterested in treating people, so the claims he makes are not designed to make sick people flock to him as his critics charge.

Propagation, not enrichment?
What Dr. Bengston seems to be focused on is the propagation of his method and this is where things get interesting. Unlike some other teachers of bioenergy healing, he does not appear to be doing what he does to enrich himself. There are no weekly or monthly workshops of hundreds of students paying large sums to attend. He seems to be teaching mainly to see what will happen when people learn the method, and he claims, anecdotally, that some of his students are doing "amazing things".

The key word here is "some". Obviously Dr. Bengston can't keep track of all his students, but because the mouse experiments resulted in near-100% cures, the received wisdom on the internet is that the method is 100% successful. But not so fast: it's only 100% successful if you are a mouse. The track record for human beings is entirely different, because human beings are far more complex than mice. This is also true with conventional treatment: many promising anti-cancer agents that work on mice fail when applied to people. The other issue is transmission: Dr. Bengston may indeed be able to cure people of cancer, but that is no guarantee that the people he teaches will be able to do likewise.

Dr. Bengston claims in his experiments to have successfully taught the method to skeptical volunteers, who then went on to cure mice. He offers a caveat, which is that because of the way the method worked in the experiments (through something he calls "resonant bonding") he could not be sure that it was the volunteers who cured the mice rather than he himself using them as proxies. He will also say that those volunteers never tried their hand at curing humans. But in the rhetoric around the workshops these volunteers are being used as proof that the method can be taught, even though early on Dr. Bengston himself expressed some skepticism about actually "teaching" them.

An on-going sociological experiment?
So in effect Dr. Bengston's workshops seem to be an on-going sociological experiment around healing, belief, and transmission (which is fitting, because Dr. Bengston is a sociologist). The problem is that the people who attend are not going to them in this spirit but with the intent to learn a healing method that they believe is 100% successful in curing cancer. And the result is that we have graduates of these weekend workshops who then go home and post on their websites that they have learned this method, and offer treatments with the statement that Dr. Bengston says eight weekly sessions are sufficient to deal with stage-4 cancer. It's when I see these claims that I begin to see red, because I think they are firmly in the realm of snake oil. We have gone from someone curing mice in the lab over 40 years to someone who took a single weekend workshop and now believes they can reliably cure people, without ever necessarily having cured a single person.

Somewhere in the middle
Attending a workshop, however, is not a waste of time and neither is practicing the method. We found that it had a lot to offer in terms of palliation: patients treated with it had less pain and a much better quality of life, and they also (anecdotally) seemed to live longer than their doctors predicted. But I think it's less than ethical for a student of the method to offer it as something that cures and ditto to use the success of the mouse experiments as proof of efficacy in humans. Call it what it is: something experimental. Tell the truth: the 100% success rate applies to mice, not to people. Don't claim anything you cannot back up: don't say you can cure stage-4 cancer in eight weekly treatments unless you have done it, repeatedly, yourself.

So, as always, the path of truth lies somewhere between the cheerleaders and the detractors. To say that the method is 100% effective without adding "in mice" is to promote a lie; to say that it's worthless is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The best way to describe it is as something potentially helpful, a work in progress, and an intriguing glimpse of what one day might be absolutely possible.

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.