Sunday, May 23, 2010
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.
Friday, March 26, 2010
The view from the ground -- explaining the "Commentary"
Recently I found out that one of our former "energy" patients had just passed away. He was our second pancreatic cancer patient, and anyone with any kind of medical education or any kind of experience with pancreatic cancer will appreciate the length of his survival from the time of his terminal diagnosis in late July of 2008 to the end of March 2010 (around 20 months). It was in July 2008 that he was told by his doctors, who meant to do a Whipple procedure on him but aborted it when they discovered that his recently discovered cancer had already spread to his liver, that nothing could be done except palliative chemotherapy, "when the time came". Based on the location of his cancer he was expected to die in 7 or 8 months, and to become quickly debilitated by his disease.
He came to see us in August 2008, and we treated him until July 2009, first 5 days a week, up until November, then 2 to 3 times a week when the winter snows set in. Then in the springtime there were sometimes gaps of a week or more when we didn't see him at all because he had been called in to work. I note that in the springtime he was still able to do stints of real work, and to take walks, and to complete jobs around the house. In July 2009, a year after his terminal diagnosis, he took a two-week holiday that involved active outdoor pursuits in a national park. Then when he returned he told us that he had decided to terminate his treatment.
Why? It seems that part of the reason was that he felt that what we were doing wasn't really working for him. No one with medical authority seems to have told him how astonishing it was that he was still walking around, let alone able to do the stuff that he was doing. His doctor was looking at his labtest results, seeing the numbers going up, and saying that it might be time to try palliative chemotherapy. From what we heard it seemed the chief purpose of the chemotherapy would have been to "get the numbers down".
Our patient was hoping for a full cure, basing this hope on the astonishing remission rates of Dr. Bengston's mice and the apparent reproduction of those remissions by the "skeptical volunteers" trained by him. He held on to the hope even though he knew that the treatment was meant to be "experimental" and had not yet been tested in laboratory studies involving people. When the magical results did not materialize, and instead all we could deliver was the more subtle daily magic of keeping him alive and relatively active while the numbers on his labtests inexorably continued moving up -- apparently slowed down but not fully halted or reversed -- he was quietly disappointed in us.
This is what I meant in my previous posts by "partial" transmission and "partial" results. I do not know what would have happened if we had kept on treating him, but the direction of the numbers in his bloodwork seemed to suggest that we were mostly slowing the cancer down while keeping him relatively symptom free.
I should add that our patient was a robust man and that his strong constitution might have contributed to his lengthy survival. Even so, he lived much longer and much more actively than his physicians had expected him to.
A friend of mine who has medical training and reacts with intense scepticism to "woo-woo" stuff like energy healing has pointed out to me that instead of focusing on full cures I should be looking at the value of the added time we have been giving people. An extra year of relatively symptom-free life is an appreciable gift for someone living with an aggressive cancer -- though unquestionably a full cure would be better.
The sad irony is that if our patient had not expected a full cure and had allowed us to continue to treat him, he would have likely lived longer with an improved quality of life. Instead he had chemotherapy, which he said "really kicked his butt"; then after chemotherapy was stopped because it was clearly not helping him, he quickly declined. From the time we stopped treatment to the time he died 7 months elapsed: the exact prognosis he had been given by the medical establishment 20 months before.
Postscript: In answer to those who might say "but that could have been the normal progression of his disease", I note that we have now seen this pattern of longer survival with improved quality of life on several occasions, so this case cannot be so easily dismissed as a fluke. It would seem that energy healing in general, and this method in particular, do have beneficial effects for cancer patients.
He came to see us in August 2008, and we treated him until July 2009, first 5 days a week, up until November, then 2 to 3 times a week when the winter snows set in. Then in the springtime there were sometimes gaps of a week or more when we didn't see him at all because he had been called in to work. I note that in the springtime he was still able to do stints of real work, and to take walks, and to complete jobs around the house. In July 2009, a year after his terminal diagnosis, he took a two-week holiday that involved active outdoor pursuits in a national park. Then when he returned he told us that he had decided to terminate his treatment.
Why? It seems that part of the reason was that he felt that what we were doing wasn't really working for him. No one with medical authority seems to have told him how astonishing it was that he was still walking around, let alone able to do the stuff that he was doing. His doctor was looking at his labtest results, seeing the numbers going up, and saying that it might be time to try palliative chemotherapy. From what we heard it seemed the chief purpose of the chemotherapy would have been to "get the numbers down".
Our patient was hoping for a full cure, basing this hope on the astonishing remission rates of Dr. Bengston's mice and the apparent reproduction of those remissions by the "skeptical volunteers" trained by him. He held on to the hope even though he knew that the treatment was meant to be "experimental" and had not yet been tested in laboratory studies involving people. When the magical results did not materialize, and instead all we could deliver was the more subtle daily magic of keeping him alive and relatively active while the numbers on his labtests inexorably continued moving up -- apparently slowed down but not fully halted or reversed -- he was quietly disappointed in us.
This is what I meant in my previous posts by "partial" transmission and "partial" results. I do not know what would have happened if we had kept on treating him, but the direction of the numbers in his bloodwork seemed to suggest that we were mostly slowing the cancer down while keeping him relatively symptom free.
I should add that our patient was a robust man and that his strong constitution might have contributed to his lengthy survival. Even so, he lived much longer and much more actively than his physicians had expected him to.
A friend of mine who has medical training and reacts with intense scepticism to "woo-woo" stuff like energy healing has pointed out to me that instead of focusing on full cures I should be looking at the value of the added time we have been giving people. An extra year of relatively symptom-free life is an appreciable gift for someone living with an aggressive cancer -- though unquestionably a full cure would be better.
The sad irony is that if our patient had not expected a full cure and had allowed us to continue to treat him, he would have likely lived longer with an improved quality of life. Instead he had chemotherapy, which he said "really kicked his butt"; then after chemotherapy was stopped because it was clearly not helping him, he quickly declined. From the time we stopped treatment to the time he died 7 months elapsed: the exact prognosis he had been given by the medical establishment 20 months before.
Postscript: In answer to those who might say "but that could have been the normal progression of his disease", I note that we have now seen this pattern of longer survival with improved quality of life on several occasions, so this case cannot be so easily dismissed as a fluke. It would seem that energy healing in general, and this method in particular, do have beneficial effects for cancer patients.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
How to teach energy healing "properly"
It could be argued that no one really knows how to teach energy healing "properly". It's too new, too revolutionary for our Western mindsets, and there are too few signposts in our culture on how it could be taught. "Properly" implies acquisition: we know how to teach children how to read so they can read a book and surgeons how to operate so they can reliably remove an appendix or a gallbladder, but how do we teach people to heal?
In an earlier posting I suggested that the way most energy healing modalities likely come into being is through someone who develops the ability spontaneously, most often by accident. Next someone else comes along and says "that's a cool thing that you do. Can you teach me?" and then the two of them put their heads together to figure out how the healing is produced.
The problem is that the method thus developed is, of necessity, only a conscious approximation of what the teacher does unconsciously -- or rather, an attempt to replicate what the teacher doesn't do, in the sense that doing implies conscious action, and nothing is really being "done" here.
This means the method isn't quite it, but it's arguably the next best thing to it -- whatever it is -- and likely better than nothing at all.
Elsewhere I have also suggested that transmission forms a significant part of the teaching. The teacher stands as a gateway for the healing ability, and students can access the ability by being in the teacher's presence. Sometimes, as in Reiki, the teacher does something special to activate the transmission. Sometimes, as in Buddhism, it is sufficient for the teacher and student just to look at one another.
In my opinion it is most likely that method and transmission work together to allow the student to acquire the ability to heal. It would be interesting to know which one is more important and whether one will work in the absence of the other. My best guess is that the method is a means for facilitating the transmission and then acts as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense of the word) to allow the student to access the memory of the transmission.
Yet a third issue I have raised is that the effectiveness of the method decreases as it moves away from the original teacher, as each successive imperfectly taught generation also imperfectly teaches the next. And this is how we go from the original version of, let's say, Reiki, which was reputed to be able to cure serious conditions, to some current Reiki practitioners only being able to generate "a little warmth" and and a sense of well-being through their treatments, but not much more.
At the moment no method of energy healing has a perfect record of teaching students to heal. Students of most methods acquire different ranges of ability depending on a variety of unknown factors. This is as true of Bill Bengston's method as of all the others. But what Bill Bengston has on all the others is that he is the one best situated to tease out through scientific means how the teaching of energy healing works and how it could be made more effective. Given adequate time and resources, and provided that he possesses the will to do so, he is uniquely placed to figure out how to take energy healing into the mainstream and how to make it work.
In an earlier posting I suggested that the way most energy healing modalities likely come into being is through someone who develops the ability spontaneously, most often by accident. Next someone else comes along and says "that's a cool thing that you do. Can you teach me?" and then the two of them put their heads together to figure out how the healing is produced.
The problem is that the method thus developed is, of necessity, only a conscious approximation of what the teacher does unconsciously -- or rather, an attempt to replicate what the teacher doesn't do, in the sense that doing implies conscious action, and nothing is really being "done" here.
This means the method isn't quite it, but it's arguably the next best thing to it -- whatever it is -- and likely better than nothing at all.
Elsewhere I have also suggested that transmission forms a significant part of the teaching. The teacher stands as a gateway for the healing ability, and students can access the ability by being in the teacher's presence. Sometimes, as in Reiki, the teacher does something special to activate the transmission. Sometimes, as in Buddhism, it is sufficient for the teacher and student just to look at one another.
In my opinion it is most likely that method and transmission work together to allow the student to acquire the ability to heal. It would be interesting to know which one is more important and whether one will work in the absence of the other. My best guess is that the method is a means for facilitating the transmission and then acts as an "anchor" (in the NLP sense of the word) to allow the student to access the memory of the transmission.
Yet a third issue I have raised is that the effectiveness of the method decreases as it moves away from the original teacher, as each successive imperfectly taught generation also imperfectly teaches the next. And this is how we go from the original version of, let's say, Reiki, which was reputed to be able to cure serious conditions, to some current Reiki practitioners only being able to generate "a little warmth" and and a sense of well-being through their treatments, but not much more.
At the moment no method of energy healing has a perfect record of teaching students to heal. Students of most methods acquire different ranges of ability depending on a variety of unknown factors. This is as true of Bill Bengston's method as of all the others. But what Bill Bengston has on all the others is that he is the one best situated to tease out through scientific means how the teaching of energy healing works and how it could be made more effective. Given adequate time and resources, and provided that he possesses the will to do so, he is uniquely placed to figure out how to take energy healing into the mainstream and how to make it work.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
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:
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.
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.
Friday, February 5, 2010
William Bengston, Chasing the Cure: A commentary
William Bengston's book Chasing the Cure, co-written with Canadian author Sylvia Fraser, is due to hit bookstores next month. The Canadian publisher of the book has chosen to give it the eye-catching subtitle An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases, which is a change from an earlier subtitle, A Passionate Quest to Prove that Hands-On Healing Can Cure Cancer and Other Diseases.
Is the book about An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases? Certainly (and astonishingly so), if you are a mouse injected with mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712; host strain C3H/HeJ from Jackson Labs) in one of Dr. Bengston's experiments. If you are that mouse, your chances of full life-span remission are nearly one hundred per cent, and you would be in a small but select group, because the mice injected with this cancer are usually doomed to certain death. But if you are a human being looking at a recent cancer diagnosis, it's early days yet: the method has not been tested on people.
While the remission of these mice is of huge and unprecedented significance for cancer research, a treatment cannot be called an effective alternative to the current medical model, until it has shown reliability and replicability in humans. In other words it has to be available to more than a few selected cancer patients, and it has to be proven effective in the hands of more than one or two individual practitioners. Human remissions need to be documented in dozens, if not hundreds, of cases (= reliability), treated not only by Dr. Bengston himself, but also independently by others who have learned his method (= replicability).
Further, scientific minds would want to see controlled studies done in human populations, which may not even be ethically possible, given that participating cancer patients would be required to receive no conventional medical treatment for the study's duration.
I note that a pharmaceutical company would not be allowed to market a drug it has only tested on mice as an "effective alternative for treating cancer" no matter how successful its animal testing has been.
To be fully accurate, the subtitle would have to say An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in Mice and a Potentially Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in People because in the Absence of Documented Human Studies We Can't Really Say So for Sure. Or better yet, since that would clearly take up most of the cover, why not simply add a question mark to the existing title?
The promise of what Dr. Bengston has to offer is that if his ability to affect cancer could be taught, then a relatively easy, inexpensive and side-effect free form of cancer treatment would be in the hands of the many, creating a grass-roots medical revolution. Many years ago, after a series of experiments involving mice and skeptical volunteers, Dr. Bengston believed that he had achieved just that. But since then, he has said in talks and papers that he has not proven to his own satisfaction that he met all the criteria to show that he had indeed taught the volunteers to heal. (See now part two of his talk "Healing and the Mainstream" on Youtube.)
And when it comes to healing people of cancer, we do not yet know with what effectiveness Dr. Bengston's ability can be taught or transferred. The book ends without delving into what happened when in a two-year "sociological experiment" Dr. Bengston tried to teach people to apply his method not to mice but to humans. I was present for the first year and a half of that experiment. Suffice to say that there were questions and practical challenges, as well as what Dr. Bengston would call "interesting" results, including a temporary remission termed "a miracle" by the patient's own physician.
In my opinion there still remains a good deal of work to be done to tease out the full possibilities of this healing method, but Dr. Bengston, with his scientific mindset and his experiments, is uniquely positioned to be able to do just that. Let's hope he takes up the challenge.
Postscript The title of the American edition will be The Energy Cure: One Man's Quest to Unravel the Mystery of Hands-On Healing. That subtitle makes more sense to me, but the word "cure" in the title is open to the same questions and caveats as "effective alternative treatment" would be.
PostscriptThe German edition is now out under the title Heilen aus dem Nichts, or Healing from Nowhere. There is no mention of cancer in the German promotional material on amazon.de, but the method is said to be particularly effective for serious illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis. This is odd, given that the heart of the book is to be found in Dr. Bengston's experiments with cancer in mice, and that in his introduction Dr. Bengston says that with chronic diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis he is only able to alleviate symptoms up to about 50 per cent -- and heart disease is not even mentioned.
Is the book about An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases? Certainly (and astonishingly so), if you are a mouse injected with mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712; host strain C3H/HeJ from Jackson Labs) in one of Dr. Bengston's experiments. If you are that mouse, your chances of full life-span remission are nearly one hundred per cent, and you would be in a small but select group, because the mice injected with this cancer are usually doomed to certain death. But if you are a human being looking at a recent cancer diagnosis, it's early days yet: the method has not been tested on people.
While the remission of these mice is of huge and unprecedented significance for cancer research, a treatment cannot be called an effective alternative to the current medical model, until it has shown reliability and replicability in humans. In other words it has to be available to more than a few selected cancer patients, and it has to be proven effective in the hands of more than one or two individual practitioners. Human remissions need to be documented in dozens, if not hundreds, of cases (= reliability), treated not only by Dr. Bengston himself, but also independently by others who have learned his method (= replicability).
Further, scientific minds would want to see controlled studies done in human populations, which may not even be ethically possible, given that participating cancer patients would be required to receive no conventional medical treatment for the study's duration.
I note that a pharmaceutical company would not be allowed to market a drug it has only tested on mice as an "effective alternative for treating cancer" no matter how successful its animal testing has been.
To be fully accurate, the subtitle would have to say An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in Mice and a Potentially Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in People because in the Absence of Documented Human Studies We Can't Really Say So for Sure. Or better yet, since that would clearly take up most of the cover, why not simply add a question mark to the existing title?
The promise of what Dr. Bengston has to offer is that if his ability to affect cancer could be taught, then a relatively easy, inexpensive and side-effect free form of cancer treatment would be in the hands of the many, creating a grass-roots medical revolution. Many years ago, after a series of experiments involving mice and skeptical volunteers, Dr. Bengston believed that he had achieved just that. But since then, he has said in talks and papers that he has not proven to his own satisfaction that he met all the criteria to show that he had indeed taught the volunteers to heal. (See now part two of his talk "Healing and the Mainstream" on Youtube.)
And when it comes to healing people of cancer, we do not yet know with what effectiveness Dr. Bengston's ability can be taught or transferred. The book ends without delving into what happened when in a two-year "sociological experiment" Dr. Bengston tried to teach people to apply his method not to mice but to humans. I was present for the first year and a half of that experiment. Suffice to say that there were questions and practical challenges, as well as what Dr. Bengston would call "interesting" results, including a temporary remission termed "a miracle" by the patient's own physician.
In my opinion there still remains a good deal of work to be done to tease out the full possibilities of this healing method, but Dr. Bengston, with his scientific mindset and his experiments, is uniquely positioned to be able to do just that. Let's hope he takes up the challenge.
Postscript The title of the American edition will be The Energy Cure: One Man's Quest to Unravel the Mystery of Hands-On Healing. That subtitle makes more sense to me, but the word "cure" in the title is open to the same questions and caveats as "effective alternative treatment" would be.
PostscriptThe German edition is now out under the title Heilen aus dem Nichts, or Healing from Nowhere. There is no mention of cancer in the German promotional material on amazon.de, but the method is said to be particularly effective for serious illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis. This is odd, given that the heart of the book is to be found in Dr. Bengston's experiments with cancer in mice, and that in his introduction Dr. Bengston says that with chronic diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis he is only able to alleviate symptoms up to about 50 per cent -- and heart disease is not even mentioned.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Dr. Bill Bengston on using energy for curing cancer in humans
Healing Humans
The eight hundred pound gorilla in the middle of the room is the question of whether any of this works on people ...
As I noted at the beginning, my experimental work grew out of clinical observations and my frustrations at not being able to isolate what works and why through clinical observation. Certainly people have been taught my techniques and applied them to people with some interesting anecdotal results. But to a researcher anecdotes are simply not enough. At what point will there be enough evidence to do a controlled study on people? I don’t think the question has a clear answer. While my passion is in the lab, I would certainly be open to some clinical trials. But in my experience watching human cancers being treated decades ago, my anecdotal clinical observation was that the most successful remissions were all associated with a lack of conventional treatments whose purpose was to kill cancer cells. When people speak of “complementary medicine,” perhaps the methods I am aware of are not really complementary to the current crop of conventional treatments. If that turns out to be so, then the difficulties of carrying out successful clinical trials are greatly compounded. I don’t yet know how to solve this problem. I do know that it is a problem worth pursuing.
This is excerpted from an article by Dr. William Bengston entitled "Breakthrough: Clues to Healing with Intention" in an e-journal called EdgeScience. If you are curious about some of the anecdotal evidence that exists for the Bengston method, read the early entries of this blog. We certainly would like to see the human clinical trials done that Dr. Bengston refers to, as we believe that the treatment of cancer through energy healing is a grail worth striving for.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Update on June 9th post
On June 9th I wrote about a little tyke we were asked to treat who was suffering from neuroblastoma. It is now four months later and the poor little guy has gone through hell and back, with five courses of aggressive chemo and surgery, with more to follow. The word had gone out that he needed help, and innumerable people have been praying for him and sending him healing energy.
Well, it turns out that with all the treatment he has been receiving, allopathic and alternative, his nasty tumour had shrunk by 97% prior to surgery. The incision surgeons needed to make was half the length they originally thought it would have to be and the surgery was hours shorter than they expected. I was originally concerned about using Bengston bioenergy to treat him because of Dr. Bengston's caveats about mixing his method with allopathic treatment, so I forwarded the call for help to the Therapeutic Touch network, and I've been told that a large number of other people have been using other methods to try and help, including straightforward prayer and Reiki.
The huge shrinkage in the tumour is great news, but I am sorry that he had to suffer as much as he did to get this far. His mom posts pictures of him regularly, and the change in him is heartbreaking. He is a little trooper, but his eyes tell the story of someone who has suffered greatly.
Well, it turns out that with all the treatment he has been receiving, allopathic and alternative, his nasty tumour had shrunk by 97% prior to surgery. The incision surgeons needed to make was half the length they originally thought it would have to be and the surgery was hours shorter than they expected. I was originally concerned about using Bengston bioenergy to treat him because of Dr. Bengston's caveats about mixing his method with allopathic treatment, so I forwarded the call for help to the Therapeutic Touch network, and I've been told that a large number of other people have been using other methods to try and help, including straightforward prayer and Reiki.
The huge shrinkage in the tumour is great news, but I am sorry that he had to suffer as much as he did to get this far. His mom posts pictures of him regularly, and the change in him is heartbreaking. He is a little trooper, but his eyes tell the story of someone who has suffered greatly.
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