A breakthrough ...

A few days ago I had the opportunity to visit with the oncology team of a large local hospital to tell them about the bioenergy work that we do. A friend of mine who was formerly a nurse told me that this was huge: that it was a miracle in the first place that they let me in through the door, yet another miracle that they let me speak, and a bigger miracle still that they listened to me. Only a few years ago this meeting could not have transpired.

The reaction to what I had to say was mixed, with some doctors appearing more open to the concept of energy healing than others. One person spoke for many when he commented that at the very least we meant well and did not take advantage of vulnerable people. A young woman doctor dismissed Bill's paper on his initial four experiments -- in which 29 out of 33 mice recovered to full life-span cure from a cancer which no mouse had ever survived before -- as "meaningless" because of the small number of mice involved. (There was no comment to my response that now he is up to 10 experiments and over 200 mice, of which only 4 had died.) Another doctor commented that Mischa's 10-week remission, during which he quite literally got up from his deathbed and went home and did normal things like grocery shopping and going to the cottage, might have just been "the normal course of his disease". But others were clearly listening with a more open mind and some even seemed to come from the point of view that integrative medicine was not a bad thing so long as the patient's best interest was served.

What garnered the most positive response (at least judging by body language) was my summary of some of Jim Oschmann's ideas from Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis, e.g., his comment that it has been shown that the energy coming of out healers' hands cycles through all the frequencies that human tissue needs to jumpstart healing and his theory that healers concentrate the Schuman Resonance, which are extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves, and pass it out through their palms. He also believes that we are all hardwired to give and receive energy healing. This clearly excited my audience and brought on the question whether anyone can learn energy healing, to which I said yes, everyone can, but to varying degrees.

In hindsight, I could have cut my teeth as a public speaker on something easier than trying to sell bioenergy healing to a bunch of skeptical doctors, but I did have fun, even if it was a bit stressful. And kudos to Mischa's doctor, who not only had the courage to invite me but also convinced her colleagues that I may be worth listening to, and thereby maybe initiated a fruitful dialogue on the nature of healing between "us" and "them". In fact kudos to all the medical staff who came for being there!

Why we need a paradigm change

I received a phone call a few days ago about someone just diagnosed with stage-4 cancer. The cancer was advanced enough to require hospitalization for fluid drainage. Some kind of surgical intervention was being contemplated, to be followed by chemotherapy.

We all know how this kind of story usually unfolds. The patient will suffer greatly through chemo and then will probably die. At this stage chemo is a long shot. But it is being done because there are no other options.

Or rather it is believed that there are no other options. The person who phoned me had heard of the work we do and wanted to know more details. He then passed on the information to the family of the person who had just received the diagnosis. And the family then declined to contact me.

In terms of odds, the outcome we could have provided would have been likely better than the outcome of the orthodox medical treatment. Even if the person died in the end, there would have been less net suffering with energy healing than with the chemotherapy option, as energy healing alleviates suffering and chemotherapy often adds to it in spades. And even if you think of what we do as a long shot, how is it any less certain than what is being done to this patient right now, given the advanced stage of the cancer and the odds of cure through traditional means?

Current cancer treatments involve a lot of trauma, and a lot of drama. There is no drama in energy healing. It's kind of mundane. Nothing much happens, except that, in the case of the Bengston work, the patient feels mostly okay and is able to get on with life in a much more normal way than if he or she were receiving conventional treatments. But people are primed to think of cancer in dramatic terms. Cancer sufferers are expected to suffer heroically, as they do in the movies and on TV. And here is the paradigm shift that needs to happen: why should they?