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.

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.

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.

Dr. Oz and the new bioenergy therapies

On January 6, 2010, Dr. Oz endorsed Reiki on his show as something all Americans should try in the coming year as part of their health care regimen. And now he is endorsing Dr. Issam Nemeh, a former anasthesiologist turned acupuncturist who helps people heal by praying over them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the show on Reiki caused a fellow doctor to write that Dr. Oz has "gone over to the dark side", abandoning sound medical principles in favour of promoting woo-woo. But has he really?

Reiki and its cousin Therapeutic Touch have been gaining increasing acceptance in hospitals as "adjunctive therapies", or as therapies that can help patients navigate their hospital experience with greater ease and comfort. Reiki and TT have been shown to reduce pain and anxiety and to speed recovery from surgery and other hospital procedures. In current practice Reiki and Therapeutic Touch complement orthodox medicine as nurses complement doctors.

Healers such as Dr. Issam Nemeh who pray over patients also complement medical practice by adding a spiritual element and offering comfort. And if it so happens that in a number of these cases a miracle, or a spontaneous remission, occurs, in what way can that be construed as harmful, either to the patient or to the medical profession? You could say that Dr. Nemeh complements the work of other physicians as a chaplain would, although he seems to be rather more successful at healing than your average chaplain.

In a radio interview on WDOK radio Dr. Oz spoke of being impressed with Dr. Nemeh's sincerity, and of considering that sincerity as being more important than results. Dr. Oz is eminently practical: from this practical perspective if something can help a patient along a healing journey, as for instance Reiki in the operating room, then that something should be made available and not be discounted because it's not part of the orthodox or accepted medical route. At the same time, his position is that he would not send a patient with lung cancer to Dr. Nemeh to be cured solely by prayer. Prayer, like Reiki, is adjunctive.

But now there are energy therapies coming up on the horizon that go beyond being merely adjunctive to orthodox medicine and its standardized toolkit of drugs, surgery and radiation.

Dr. Larry Dossey, author of numerous books on alternative medicine, speaks of there being three "Eras" in medicine. Era I is "mechanical medicine", or the traditional medical practices that treat the body as a biochemical machine. Era II is "mind-body medicine" that recognizes the importance of psychology and practices such as meditation in creating well-being. Era III medicine is "non-local" or "consciousness based", which would be where Reiki and Dr. Nemeh fit in.

In describing Era III medicine Dr. Dossey proposes that

consciousness is not confined to one's individual body. Nonlocal mind -- mind that is boundless and unlimited -- is the hallmark of Era III. An individual's mind may affect not just his or her body, but the body of another person at a distance, even when that distant individual is unaware of the effort. You can think of Era II as illustrating the personal effects of consciousness and Era III as illustrating the transpersonal effects of the mind.

In Era III medicine the mind or consciousness of one person can heal the body of another.

In Dr. Dossey's view these three "medicines" will coexist peacefully for the benefit of patients and humankind. But it is my opinion that in this future of peaceful coexistence doctors may have stop relegating energy medicine into an adjunctive role to drugs and surgery. The new energy therapies are on their way to being powerful enough entirely on their own. Dr. Bengston, for instance, insists on patients being under a doctor's care while receiving energy treatment, but sees his therapy as a stand-alone proposition and speaks of chemotherapy and radiation as being hindrances to its effectiveness. The Domancic Method also works with physicians, and views them as being essential for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients, but sees their chief role as providing diagnosis, not treatment. In Era III medicine doctor and energy healer work as equal partners.

I wonder how the doctors critical of Dr. Oz's endorsement of Reiki would feel about that proposition. Here is my message to some of them: An Open Letter to Oncologists.

Postscript: Here is a video on the Domancic Method:

Dr. Bernie Siegel interviews on Mind Health Matters

Dr. Bernie Siegel is a physician and the author of the best-selling Love, Medicine and Miracles. His radio show Mind Health Matters on HealthyLife.net radio network airs at 9 am PT (12 am ET) on the first Tuesday of every month and an archive of his most recent interviews is available online. Each of these is well worth listening to:

Jan. 4/11 - Bill Bengston, author of The Energy Cure

Dec. 7/10 - Laurie Nadel, co-author of Happiness Genes

Sept. 7/10 - Ivan Rados, author of The Role of Consciousness in Healing

Ivan Rados cured himself of kidneys stones using meditation, Laurie Nadel experienced a miraculous healing from ovarian cancer through Reiki and prayer, and Bill Bengston has cured hundreds of mice of fatal cancers in laboratory experiments using energy healing.

Bill Bengston speaks on Youtube about his research on energy healing and cancer

Click here for a five-part talk in which Bill Bengston describes his cancer research and discusses its implications. If you want to get to the "meat and potatoes" part of the talk and skip the preliminaries, start at ca 6 minutes 25 seconds.

Further commentary on Bill Bengston's Chasing the Cure

Dr. Bengston and Ms. Fraser call their book Chasing the Cure a memoir. But it also contains a teaching supplement which has excited some chatter among publicists on the web. Here are some examples:

The book is about Bengston's ability to cure various forms of cancer and purports 'to pass on his healing ability to others'. (Quill & Quire Industry News June 2009)

The content is not only detailing the magical effect of this therapy, but also to provide the reader with a self-learning method, because the doctor emphasized that this treatment does not need to have special expertise or skills can be achieved. (Chinese literary agency website, translation by Google)

These statements rest on four astonishing mouse experiments performed by Dr. Bengston in the 1970s in which 29 out of 33 mice (87.9%) remitted from a normally fatal breast cancer as a result of an energy healing method which Dr. Bengston helped develop apprenticing with a New York psychic. In the first experiment Dr. Bengston cured five out of five mice. In three experiments that followed skeptical volunteers taught by Dr. Bengston appeared also to be able to cure cancerous mice (with the exception of three mice which died).

Dr. Bengston at first believed that these results meant that his method was teachable. But later he expressed caution about drawing the conclusion that he had shown unequivocally that the skeptical volunteers had been taught to heal. He recognizes the possibility that he himself might have inadvertently cured the mice by proxy or somehow contributed to their cure -- which would not be a far-fetched notion given that he can demonstrably heal mice from hundreds of miles away, and that in his experiments even the on-site controls, which are meant to die, recover to full life-span cures, due to an intriguing phenomenon Dr. Bengston calls "resonance".

Looking at the experiments a scientist might say that there is a "suggestion that the method is teachable", and know that "suggestion" does not mean "certainty". But everyday folks (including publicists) all too easily seem jump to the conclusion that if Dr. Bengston could apparenly teach skeptical, inexperienced volunteers to cure cancer in mice, then pretty much anyone could learn to use his method to easily cure cancer in people. This leap of logic at the moment is premature.

My solution would be to say that the experimental results appear to have been replicated using skeptical volunteers, but that further study is needed to verify and understand those results. I would be concerned about drowning the fledgling possibilities of Dr. Bengston's promising method in overwhelming expectations of near-100% success rates.

A personal postscript

In my own experience (= 6 Bengston workshops + 3 follow-up "alumni" events) there is what appears to be a partial transmission of ability, which in some cases has led to partial results such as apparent and sometimes significant anomalies in the progression of cancer and even a case of temporary remission that was termed a "miracle" by the patient's own physician. We were not able to reproduce with people the notable success rates achieved with mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments, but we did see results that would justify using the method to improve and extend the life of cancer sufferers.

Workshops participants I spoke to, particularly reiki practitioners, said that they experienced a noticeable increase in their healing ability. In my own experience this increased ability peaked right after the workshop and then seemed to trail off somewhat with the passage of time, while still remaining higher than it had been before. How lasting the effect is would be a good area for research. For instance, would the students who apparently healed the mice in Dr. Bengston's experiments have been able to cure another batch a few months later, without any further involvement from Dr. Bengston? On the whole I believe that if Dr. Bengston were to spend some time researching the effects of his teaching methodology on the brainwave activity of his students, success rates could be improved.

Dr. Bengston says he "juices up" the participants in his workshops, which to my mind seems comparable to Reiki attunements and Buddhist transmissions. It is not clear how much of the healing ability gained in his workshops is due to the "juicing" and how much is due to the technique he teaches. I would see that as another fruitful area for research. Is the technique effective in and of itself, or does it simply act as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense) to allow the student to access memory of the workshop experience? Could someone other than Dr. Bengston teach the technique and achieve an increase in the healing ability of students? Could students learn the technique through written instructions alone and demonstrate increased healing ability? All these questions await answers.

Again based on my experience I would say that the single-weekend workshop format has ultimately proven to be not quite sufficient. In another location Dr. Bengston employed a 4-week format similar to the 6-week format that he had used to teach the skeptical volunteers in his experiments, but I do not know with what results. Since Dr. Bengston spent years apprenticing with the New York psychic from whom he learned to heal, in my opinion it might be worthwhile for him to take his cues from the likes of the Barbara Brennan school and develop an intensive, long-term energy-healing program to duplicate his own experience for the benefit of students. In the absence of such a program the workshops remain a good introduction to the method, but in my opinion more is needed.

I remain awe-struck by the healing ability that Dr. Bengston has shown in ten experiments in five different labs, producing near-100% rates of full-life-span cure in mice injected with a cancer that is normally 100% fatal. It would be an incomparable gift to be able to extend these success rates to human cancers on a large scale, and an even greater gift to put this ability into the hands of others.