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.

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?

A description of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments

This comes from the EEG Info newsletter. The author, whose name is not posted, is summarizing a presentation made by Bill at an ISSSEEM conference:

[I]t is timely to discuss the following experimental results, which were presented by William Bengston. His research topic was the issue of whether energy healing could be taught. The healing technique was the laying-on of hands. So Bengston taught a number of initially non-believing students in the techniques that he wanted used, which were to take an hour a day for a month. The technique was to be used on mice that had been injected with lethal doses of mammary adenocarcinoma. This dose is well-known to be 100% fatal, and in fact no mouse ever survived longer than 27 days under the challenge of such an injection.

The mice indeed developed the tumors, as expected, but then the tumors took a surprising course. They blackened and ulcerated, and then were resorbed. The mice went on to live a full lifespan. In fact, subsequent trials with the lethal elixir did not even elicit tumor formation. Lifetime immunity to this kind of cancer seemed to have been conferred. The experimental mice survived the challenge at the rate of 88% out of some 33 mice involved in a number of separate trials. The trials were run in different universities, by different groups of students. Looking just at these data, one would be tempted to conclude that first of all there is merit to the “laying on of hands;” secondly, that the skill can be taught; and finally, that even belief in the so-called “treatment” is not required. But this is not the end of the story.

It turns out that the controls did just about as well, responding at a 70% rate despite not having had the benefit of the laying on of hands. There were replications with another strain of tumor that is equally fatal, with similar results. But now Bengston was running into a curious snag. When he approached the same groups of researchers about doing replications, he was rebuffed. After all, the first time they agreed to do the experiment it was a matter of proving that Bengston was nuts. They were perfectly happy to cooperate in doing that. On the other hand, if they agreed to do a second similar experiment, it would just prove that they were nuts! Thus the enterprise of science protects itself from deviance.

Bengston reluctantly concluded that his carefully done experiment did not answer the question about whether healing techniques could be taught to the naive, since there was no significant treatment interaction, but it left him with the dilemma of explaining the results obtained with the controls. He is postulating that a kind of herd immunity was acquired by the group of mice that had once shared a common bond, a kind of resonant bond. It’s not like the data can be readily explained away. All of the mice did grow the tumors, after all, at least in the first administration. And the tumors are known to be 100% fatal. So there is clearly a need for an explanation. Finally, there was the fact that the experiment had in fact been done “triple-blind.” On their own initiative the students had established yet a third control group, unbeknownst to Bengston, so if Bengston was somehow intervening with the controls surreptitiously, this third group would be unaffected. They were healed as well! This is doubly ironic, since the students were the real experimental animals here rather than the mice. So we actually had a case of the experimental animals running a blinded, controlled experiment on the experimenter. That may be a first. Other experiments were ongoing in the same universities in which groups of mice were continuing to succumb to the tumor-kindling procedure as expected. Something was causing these particular groups of mice to respond differently from all the others. And they have done so now in six [now ten] independent trials.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 2 -- Healing Others

This is offered for your information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice and services of a qualified physician. Please read the previous post (part 1) before proceeding with any of the practice in part 2. Please treat the information you read here as any set of instructions you would read in a book. Use it with full awareness that you are responsible for your own health and your own level of comfort in applying what you read. This particular post refers to generic energy healing, not energy healing specific to cancer. It is not a description of the Bengston method.

Having done the exercises in part 1, you may now be sensitized to feeling energy coming from your hands. One purpose to the exercises was to make you aware of this energy, which in fact is always there and available to be called upon. As I said before, we Westerners tend to "live" in our heads, and particularly in our analytical left brains. We are unable to feel the energy because we are insensitive to it; and because we don't feel it, we do not believe that it exists. The energy exercises allow the awareness to move from our head into our body and therefore increase our sensitivity.

There are two places in particular where the awareness needs to reside to allow us to do healing. One is what the Chinese call the dan tien (and the Japanese call hara): the area just below your belly button. This is one of the main storage areas for chi. It is also the place where the martial artist's spirit shout comes from, greatly increasing his or her power. It is here that you store up life energy doing the Qi Gong exercise that is called "standing like a tree". To maintain awareness of the dan tien or hara, it is important to practice breathing into the area on a fairly regular basis.

The second place the awareness needs to reside for effectiveness in healing is the heart. That probably needs little explanation. After all, most of us intuitively know that all healing is love.

An experiment

I hope you will now join me in an experiment. On the right side of this blog you will find the photo of a hand. It is an unremarkable, un-Photoshopped image, but it has been set up so one might feel energy coming through it. My inspiration for doing this came from a Dutch website that a few years ago posted a "Reiki hand" and invited people to test if they could feel anything coming from it. Another website in Vancouver posted a photo of the founder of Reiki, Dr. Mikao Usui, and claimed that you would receive Reiki if you looked at the image. I found energy coming from both images. I asked a couple of people, one a healer, the other a "regular guy" who is also a skeptic, to tell me if they felt anything coming from this image and they both told me that they did. So now it's your turn, if you choose to check it out.

Hold one hand over the image, then the other, each for just a few seconds. Run each hand over the screen to feel if there is any difference between the areas where the image of the hand is, and where it isn't. You can call up a larger image by clicking on it. You could also try closing your eyes and just sitting in front of it, and seeing if you feel anything different. Your feedback is welcome whether you feel anything or not.

Now comes the weird part. In the best of all possible worlds as it exists in my imagination, this hand is a portal for you to receive the kind of attunement that would happen if you attended an actual energy healing course. If you wish to try this out, hold each hand, one at a time, over the image for a longer period than 30 seconds. You may feel how long you need to do this. It may help if you set the intention that you wish to become a healer.

Putting it all together

This is how you do energy healing:

1) Begin by setting up a positive flow of energy. By positive flow I mean that you feel the energy coming in through your feet, your brow or your crown, and then feel it coming out of your palms. Use the energy sensitizing exercises described in part 1 if you need to.

2) Set up your intent. State in your mind that you wish to be a clear healing channel for the benefit of the person you are treating. If you are religious, and wish to do "laying on of hands" in a Christian context, this would be a good time to pray and to ask for the love of Jesus to come through you.

3) Establish a connection with the person you are treating by placing your hands on them (on the shoulders if they are sitting or on the solar plexus if they are lying down). Ask again for the energy to flow through you to them. Remind yourself that the source from which the energy flows knows what kind of healing is needed -- or, if you are not comfortable with the idea of energy that knows what needs to be done, just trust in the "healee's" body intelligence.

4) Keep the positive energy flow going by using your intent or your breath. One way of doing this is to remind yourself that you are drawing the energy through your brow/hara/feet on the in-breath, and sending it out through your palm on the out-breath.

5) This is very important: get out of the way! You are not doing anything. You are just a channel facilitating a flow of healing energy to a person who needs it. The energy doesn't come from you; it comes through you. As a side benefit you too will receive a healing at the same time.

6) You could intend to link up with all the healers in the world. This is a variation on the idea of the Buddhist "sangha". When Buddhists meditate, they ask the "sangha", Buddhist meditators everywhere, to join in and help them. Similarly, you could ask all the healers in the world to help you.

One way to fail is to let the left brain get into the act. The left brain will begin to ask questions such as "am I doing this right?" and "what on earth am I doing here?". Or it will make statements such as "this is absurd", "this could not possibly work" and/or "this doesn't make any sense", etc.

Another way to fail is to want it too much to happen. The ego can get involved just as easily as the left brain. The ego will say "I am doing this". You are not doing anything. You are just hanging out. The ego can also get involved in very sneaky ways, e.g., by trying to direct the energy.

So how do we get the left brain and the ego out of the equation? One way is through focusing on breathing. There is a whole energy healing method based on this, Richard Gordon's Quantum Touch. If you want to learn more about doing this, read his book of the same name. Richard's breathing exercises also teach you how to strengthen the energy flow.

Another way is to keep the brain busy with other tasks. Bill Bengston's method excels at this. A description of how he keeps the brain busy can be found in his "Methods" paper in the spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine [and now his books Chasing the Cure and The Energy Cure]. Bill's method of keeping the brain busy also helps strengthen the energy flow.

In our practice groups we have tried several methods in addition to Bill's. One was meditative breathing. If you are an active meditator, this may work for you. Another is to instruct your brain to make up spontaneous images of happy and beautiful things. My brain can generate quite a collage of people laughing, dancing, and interacting in gorgeous natural surroundings. I see mothers and babies, colourful swirling dancers, oceans, mountains, and trees. Sometimes I see colourful, symmetrical geometric designs spreading from a single point into infinity. Bill's method has advantages over this, and I recommend taking one of his workshops to learn it. By the way, the Domancic folk also recommend entertaining your brain with beautiful images, to which they also add rock music. Their general idea is to be happy while you work at healing: they suggest that both the healee and the practitioner "go to the beach" in their minds during the treatment.

We have found that asking "what needs to happen here?", then remaining open for an answer that may or may not come, takes the healing to a higher level. You need patience, trust, and stillness to do this.

The best attitude for both healer and "healee" to have is a kind of open-minded, non-judgmental curiosity that expects nothing and welcomes everything.

Where to put your hands

Different modalities have different ways of going about this. Reiki has set hand positions, which you will find described and illustrated in most Reiki books. Reiki hand positions essentially follow the chakras. You work down the front and then up the back, placing your hand on each chakra for about 3 minutes.

Quantum Touch begins with generic hand positions and then goes on to "sandwiching" the area that needs to be treated. You will find this described in Richard Gordon's book.

Bill also has a few generic hand positions, such as shoulders and the solar plexus, and then instructs his students to put their hands where they are guided to.

If after "taking" this course you find your hands moving independently of your will, e.g. making spirals, or waving over the body, or making other movements of their own, then congratulations, that means we've been eminently successful, and you have now entered the Twilight Zone.

One caution about hand positions: be respectful of people's comfort zones about being touched. Always ask before you do it. And it obviously doesn't need to be said that there are certain places you should never place your hands, unless the person you are treating is your partner, and you have their permission to do it.

Feedback and caveats

The person you are treating may feel warmth, heat, coolness, electricity, magnetism, or nothing. It's helpful to have feedback, especially if you are new at this. Don't get discouraged if the person you are treating feels nothing at first. Focus on your end of things (positive flow, breathing, getting out of the way) and something may happen.

I would suggest starting with small things like cuts, scrapes, sprains, sore backs, and minor sports injuries. Pets are also great candidates, whatever their ailment. I personally have never been very successful with colds and headaches, although if I wake up in the middle of the night with a burning throat, which usually indicates the onset of a cold, I can usually prevent the cold by putting my hands on my throat for a while and letting the energy run. I have, however, been very successful with injuries. Individual talents can vary.

You can work effectively with people who are skeptical about the concept of healing energy, but I would not recommend treating people who are out to prove to you that it cannot possibly work. Their attitude will simply block the flow of energy and discourage you.

If at any point either you or the person you are treating become uncomfortable with the treatment, stop immediately. Energy healing cannot do harm, but people's levels of comfort about doing or receiving it vary, and must be respected.

After doing a treatment, always wash your hands in cold water and intend to cut the energetic connection between yourself and the person you've been treating. This will prevent you from picking up their symptoms.

Please do not ever diagnose, or prevent a person from seeing a doctor or from carrying out the doctor's instructions.

Follow up

To become better at this, you need to practice, practice, practice. Keep doing the qi gong exercises described in part 1 and refining your energy flow. Practice getting out the way (it's the hardest thing to learn). The more you can get out of the way after setting the intention to become a clear channel, the more effective you will be.

If this "introductory course" has whetted your appetite to learn more, find a course in energy healing near you. If you live in southern Ontario, and you are curious about what we are doing, feel free to contact me. You can also contact me, wherever you live, if you have any questions or feedback.

Energy Healing 101 - A free online "introductory course" - Part 1 - Healing Self

This is being offered for your information only, and it is not in any way intended to replace the services and advice of a qualified physician. This section focuses on basics and "healing self". For healing others, see Part 2.

Introduction

Energy healing is actually quite easy to learn. Most courses begin with a history of the technique being taught, followed by preparation to receive the "teaching", instruction in the technique, one or several "attunements" (which the participants may or may not be told about), instruction on how to apply the method, and finally ethical considerations on using the method, which chiefly boil down to "thou shalt not advise the client not to seek orthodox medical care" and "make no claims of being able to heal anything".

This techique has no history, as it does not rely on any single school of teaching. But I will give some basic "science" that should make all this much easier to learn.

Biologist James Oschman discovered the existence of "energy healing" after he hurt his back through years of bending over microscopes and an energy healer fixed it. Oschman then asked himself "what is this, how does it work, and why haven't I heard about it?" and went on to devote his time as a scientist to studying the phenomenon.

In his book Energy Healing: The Scientific Basis Oschman proposes that we, humans, arrived on this planet as a species hardwired to be able to perform and receive energy healing. I am no scientist, and I may be hopelessly mangling his argument, but from what I understand Oschman suggests that energy healers first concentrate the earth's extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fluctuations (called the Schuman Resonance), possibly through their pineal gland, and then emit this energy out through their hands. The energy has been measured, and has been shown to be more powerful than expected. (link to Oschman chapter)

Oschman's hypothesis seems to be confirmed by some of Bill Bengston's mouse experiments, in which geomagnetic probes set around the cages of sick mice he was healing showed that the earth's geomagnetic micropulsations, which normally show up as a random pattern of spikes, became a visibly organized series of waves (referred to as "negative entropy") at the times the mice were receiving healing.

What you need to take away from the above is that a lot of people, including some scientists with impressive academic credentials, believe that being able to heal through bioenergy is an innate human ability. So essentially you are not so much learning something new here as having something awakened in you that is already there.

I have noticed that children readily feel the energy (and react to it with joy and a sense of discovery) but that adults tend to be less able to feel it. In fact a young man I watched growing up from the time he was a child still felt it at the age of 9 or 10, but lost the ability by the time he hit puberty. My sense of it is that we Westerners tend to live in our heads, except when we are pursuing pleasure, and even within our heads we tend to favour our left brains. The ability to sense bioenergy is in the domain of the body and the right brain, so no wonder most of us are not aware of it.

Preparation

I propose to begin with some sensitizing and energizing exercises that come from Qi Gong, a Chinese form of healing that is the great-grand-daddy of most energy healing modalities. In China of old, as in China today, longevity was much prized. The ancient Daoists, to whom we owe the beginnings of Chinese medicine, worked out numerous exercises designed to heal the body and to prevent disease. They believed that human beings did not only take in nourishment through food and water, but also from the earth and from the sky, as trees do. In fact the most basic Qi Gong exercise you can learn and practice is called "Standing like a tree". (link: see second video).

The first exercise
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, with your spine straight and all your joints slightly bent. As you breathe in, circle your arms up, and as you breathe out slowly bring your hands towards your crown as if your were pulling down the air you gathered up above you and then gently lower your hands in front of you as if you were washing your front with the air. Next open your arms wide at chest level as you reach out and slowly gather the air in front of you and bring it into your heart; and again lower your hands and wash your torso with the air you gathered. Next bend down, open your arms wide, and scoop up the air from around your feet, bringing your hands towards your lower abdomen. Finally, rest your hands on your lower abdomen and concentrate on breathing into your belly for a few breaths. Your intention as you do this exercise is to gather in the life energy (chi or qi) from all around you, above, in front, and below.

Repeat this a few times.

A somewhat more complex version of this exercise can be viewed on the Guo Lin Chi Gong website (the sixth video from the top, entitled "Three Part Gathering").


The second exercise
Stand in the same posture: legs shoulder-width apart, spine straight, joints slightly bent. This time hold your arms at belly button level, as if you were holding a child's ball in front of your abdomen. The fingers and wrists, like all other joints, should be soft. Now imagine that you are growing deep roots into the earth. To use another metaphor, imagine that the earth is a giant battery charger, and you've just plugged yourself into it. You are going deep enough to get past all the pollution to the primal earth. As you breathe in, bring earth energy up through your roots, up your legs, up your spine, up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let the energy roll down your front to gather into your hands. Again, breathe in, bring the energy up to the top of your head, and as you breathe out, let it roll down and gather in your hands.

After a few breaths you may begin to feel something in your hands -- warmth, or buzzing, or magnetism, or electricity. That is chi or qi (ki in Japanese), or life energy.

Lift this energy up (or if you don't feel it, lift up the imaginary ball you are holding), over your stomach, your chest, and your neck; wash your face with it, wash your eyes, massage the top of your head; then push the energy in through your crown, and, breathing out, slowly lower you hands. The general idea is to feel the energy filling you up as you breathe out and lower your hands. You could visualize it as a white or golden energy, and you could visualize the stale energy that it is pushing out through your feet as gray or brown.

Repeat this a few times.

If you still don't feel energy coming from your hands, then clap your hands together vigorously, and rub your palms against each other. Do it three times. Now hold your hands 6 to 8 inches apart and see what you feel. If you feel an energy ball, you can now use it to energize any part of your body that is unwell or injured.

These are great exercises to do even if you do not intend on learning how to do energy healing. The Chinese believe that most illness is caused by stuck energy. Keep the energy moving, and you'll improve your chances of keeping illness at bay.

I will now post this, as there is sufficient information to begin. Please read Part Two to find out you how can take this ability to sense energy and apply it to healing others.

Bioenergy and Cancer Web Resources

Here is the practical stuff I promised. It is offered for your information only. Please note that none of this is meant to be used to replace standard medical care by your physician.

Aside from the Bengston Method, which is covered in earlier posts on this blog, one other bioenergy healing modality I know of that speaks of taking on cancer is the Domancic Method. While Bill Bengston focuses on cancer, saying that his method works on other illnesses as well, the Domancic Method (www.healingbioenergy.com) deals with a broad range of illnesses, and cancer, particularly breast cancer, is mentioned as just one of them. The video on the website briefly describes a case of breast cancer that shrank by half in a 4-day course of treatment. For people seeking practitioners, the same problem applies to the Domancic Method as to the Bengston Method: there are relatively few practitioners in North America, and most of them are quite new. Practitioners are not advised to try to treat metastatic cancer until they have at least one year of consistent practice under their belt. (Update Nov. 2011 - there now some Domancic practitioners with sufficient experience - consult info@healingbioenergy.com for practitioners in the U.S. or overseas, or contact me for names of practitioners in Toronto.)

Three other methods that have been known to affect cancer occasionally are Quantum Touch, Matrix Energetics, and Reiki. An earlier incarnation of the Quantum Touch website had a story by an MD who used Quantum Touch on a patient with breast cancer after the patient refused all other forms of therapy. The tumour shrank significantly in one session. I notice that the story is no longer on the website -- I wonder whether the MD got into trouble for posting it or for using an unorthodox therapy on a patient, or the patient's situation changed. If you troll the message board, you will not find many mentions of cancer cures.

Richard Bartlett, the founder of Matrix Energetics (www.matrixenergetics.com), has said that he does not like to attempt to heal cancer, because a) he does not believe in illness and healing, and b) cancer has too much "consensus reality" around it. Once a cancer has been CT-scanned, MRI-ed, and biopsied into full reality, its existence has solidified to the point where it is difficult to shift. There have only been reports of sporadic successes with ME involving cancer. It might be worth a try, but only with an open mind, and with no expectations of success. (Update Nov. 2011 - an associate of Dr. Bartlett's, Dr. Hector Garcia, is anecdotally reputed to be able to treat cancer.)

Reiki is an excellent modality to apply in conjunction with orthodox medical care. It eases the anxiety, side effects, and pain associated with cancer treatment. Patients receiving Reiki have been known to "sail through" radiation and chemotherapy. On occasion Reiki too has been known to make cancer vanish, but its chief benefit in most cases is to create a better treatment outcome. It has particular application in palliative care where it helps the patient on many levels -- including the emotional and the spiritual. It can also help family members cope with the stress of dealing with the serious illness of a loved one.

The great-grand-daddy of all forms of energy healing is Qi Gong. Qi Gong hails from China, and its roots are shrouded by the mists of time. It's related to Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, and to Tai Chi. In China of old, as in China now, longevity was much prized. Many exercises were developed to maintain health and to promote long life. There exist Qi Gong exercises particularly aimed at curing cancer. The Qi Gong Institute has published a scientific overview of the use of Qi Gong in the treatment of cancer (link).

One set of such Qi Gong exercises was developed by a woman called Guo Lin, who reportedly cured herself of cancer using Qi Gong. All Guo Lin instructors in China are former cancer patients. There is a highly informative website on Guo Lin Qi Gong, including free videos of the exercises. The use of these exercises for cancer patients is recommended alongside conventional Western cancer treatments including radiation and chemotherapy.

I have now tried out the exercises and I was astonished at their energetic effect. I would recommend them to cancer sufferers for the increase in energy levels that they can bring about, even if their curative effects turn out to be exaggerated.

Update, Nov. 2011: I received a beautiful qi gong meditation from a reader, John Hill, who says he used it to heal his 93-year-old mom of stage-4 cancer. Here is the link.

I will edit and update this post as I find new information.

Practical challenges -- part 3 -- and some partial successes

Some practical challenges, or maybe I should say frustrations ....

1) You begin to treat someone who has incurable cancer. Over a few weeks the condition begins to improve, at which point the doctor pricks up his ears and decides that the patient now has a fighting chance and should go for last ditch experimental chemotherapy. You can't say to the patient "don't go for experimental chemotherapy", but once the person starts getting chemo, you are pretty much done. You can't continue treatment during chemotherapy, and your effectiveness is limited afterwards by the damage that the chemo has caused. Altogether I'm not sure whether the patient will be better off.

2) We are now looking at three cases where the MRI shows soft, new tissue around or under the tumour. The doctors can't figure out what this tissue is. We think it has something to do with our treatment, but we don't know. It seems consistent with how Bill describes the treatment working, but there is no experimental evidence of any sort to back it up.

3) Someone is looking at cancer surgery a few months down the road. They know about what we do. They wait until the 11th hour and then ask us to treat it. Why wait that long? Because they don't believe that what we do will work, and they don't want to make a long-term commitment and then have the disappointment of failure. But just on the off-chance that it might work magically, they'll try it at the last minute. Failure is almost guaranteed ....

4) We ran out of time with two cases of breast cancer. The good news is that in both cases the original option was a mastectomy, and the actual surgery that happened was a lumpectomy. But once a diagnosis has been confirmed, doctors are highly reluctant to re-test. MRIs are expensive and biopsies are invasive, and cancer is not expected to diminish or to go away on its own. So it is entirely possible to encounter a hypothetical scenario in which a tissue biopsy after the mastectomy turns up no cancer. This would be very much a good news/bad news scenario. No cancer is good news, but .... We have a to find a way to work in concert with the medical establishment. (PS: In both cases we found out that we did affect the cancer. In one case the affected tissue was less extensive than what was shown in the original MRI; in the other the cancer was found to be a lot less aggressive than the biopsy indicated.)

Practical challenges -- part 2

My one beef with the Bengston bioenergy healing method is the very real possibility that you can take a workshop, learn this wonderful thing that purportedly can be used to heal cancer, and then be set loose, with no follow-up and no supervision, to play. And chances are you won't have a clue what you are doing.

Bill reminds me of the man who used to own the keelboat sailing club where I was a member many years ago. This man had grown up around boats and everything about sailing was as easy and natural to him as walking or eating a sandwich. He just assumed that everyone else was the same way. We could do things with his boats no other owner would dream of allowing people to do. We took them out in storms, in fog, in six to ten foot waves. Heck, we were doing a sailing marathon the night the tail end of Hurricane Andrew came through town. We certainly learned how to sail in all conditions, but quite often we nearly killed ourselves doing it, and I recall at least one occasion where we almost sank a boat. At any rate, the reason Bill reminds me of this man is that healing comes so naturally to him that he imagines that once you learn his technique, it will be just as easy for you.

I would, however, like to put forward, ever so tentatively, the idea that it is not the same thing to go forth and play with boats as it is to go forth and play with cancer. Cancer is a teensy bit more serious than that. So a little bit of supervision would be good thing. Here in Toronto we have our monthly practice groups, which Bill for a while attended by speaker phone. This follow-up was very valuable. Now there are a number of us who know the method well enough to offer help or advice, but we could still use some supervision. I know of another location where there seems to be a similar kind of follow-up, but in another city they have set up "healing teams", which to me sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind. In the early days Bill was happy to offer his time to help or give advice, but I can see that as the workshops proliferate, this would be logistically more and more difficult to do.

The problem is that each and every one of us practicing the method has to reinvent the wheel. Things happen, and we have no clue what they mean, because we have never seen them before. Whereas if there were a body of learning, or evidence, that we could turn to, such as a textbook, we could say "aha, this is what this means -- this type of tumour often gets bigger before it becomes consumed." Or, "aha, this type of labtest result has been seen with this kind of cancer before". But instead, we grope around in the dark with no idea of what's happening.

For instance, with our pancreatic cancer patient, who had a ten week remission that included the reversal of most of the life threatening symptoms of his cancer, and a return to near-normal kidney and liver function (which is huge), we found that while he was getting better, which presumably meant that the cancer was going away, the tumours did not diminish at all -- in fact, they grew. So how is it possible that his body was behaving as if the cancer were in remission while it was still there? A skeptical MD acquaintance of mine, who followed the case, interpreted it like this: "That is amazing! The body is encapsulating the malignancy to protect itself!" There is a distinct possibility that what we are doing is counteracting the malignancy of the cancer by prompting the body recognize the tumour as something foreign and harmful, and barricade it for self-protection, so it can then deal with it in its own good time. Do we know this for a fact? No. Has anyone studied it? No. Does it need to be studied? You bet. Because when the patient then goes for a CT-scan or an MRI, all that will show is that the tumour has gotten bigger. But we will not know how the tumour has changed in composition, and what kind of tissue there is around it. There will just be a huge panic because clearly the tumour is growing, followed by loud calls for allopathic interventions such as radiation and chemo, and how can you blame anyone for reacting like that? What manner of reassurance can we offer, with no body of evidence to explain what's happening?

That is why I say we are dealing with something experimental here. A lot more work needs to be done. I hope someone comes forward to offer Bill the wherewithal to do the (many) experiments that need to be carried out. It might be also helpful for people from the various centres where there have been workshops to hook up to compare notes. That is one of the reasons for having this blog -- to give some of our experiences, and to hear back from others who also do the work.

In the meantime, if you go out to play on a boat in a windstorm, be careful, wear a life jacket, and have a good sail.

Here are some relevant links: Practical Challenges, Part 1, How effective is Bengston bioenergy?, Case study #2, Case study #1

Dose response

We had some bad news yesterday. One of our clients has had some negative test results. This client has an aggressive cancer for which the only available treatment is palliative chemotherapy and radiation when the cancer gets bad enough to interfere with quality of life. So far our patient's quality life has been near-normal, but the test results gave us all a bit of a jolt.

This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.

This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?

Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.

Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).

Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.

Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.

"Resonance" vs "technique"

The factual statements come from Bill's papers and talks. The speculation based on them is mine and is put forth for consideration and debate.

Bill Bengston has shown the ability in experiments to heal mice of cancer from up to 1000 miles away. He also says that he has cured mice of whose existence he was not aware, when it was the unstated intention of his research partners to include those mice in the experiment.

When Bill published his first mouse paper in 2000 he was very enthusiastic about having proven that skeptical volunteers could be taught the method. But by the time he published his "Resonance" paper in 2007, along with the companion "Methods" paper, outlining the technique through which he taught the skeptical volunteers, he was more restrained. Then followed "Can healing be taught?" in which he stated that he had in fact not proven to his own satisfaction that he had taught his skeptical volunteers how to heal.

The fly in the ointment (and also the great marvel of it all) is "resonance". In the original experiments it was found that not only did the treated group get better, but so did mice in the control group if someone involved in the healing part of the experiment so much as looked at them. The pattern was that when reports came in of a mouse in the control group having died, someone would look in on them to see what the surviving ones looked like. After that visit the control mice all began to exhibit the same symptoms as the treated mice and then proceeded to remit to full cure. In later experiments every single mouse was cured, except for the ones that were sent to a distant lab whose location was unknown to Bill.

In the minds of orthodox researchers this means that "nothing happened". The whole point of experimental design is to have a group that receives treatment and a control group that doesn't. What proves that the treatment works is that the first group gets better and the second one doesn't. If both groups get better, the experiment is considered a failure. In this case, however, that would lead to a false result because in fact all the mice should have died.

Bill addresses the problem in his "Resonance" paper, published in the spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. As I understand it, what happens is that all the treatment subjects get bonded, whichever group they happen to be in, so when one group gets treated, so does the other, by proxy. Every time a mouse gets treated, so do all the others, unless they get somehow pulled out of resonance by, say, being shipped out of town, or by being treated by a self-conscious biologist.

"Resonance" not only complicates experimental design, it also muddles the issue of teachability. Not only do the mice bond, so do the healers. The way Bill puts the difficulty is to say that so long as even one person learns the method, all the mice could still be healed, and it would be unclear which particular skeptical volunteer was responsible for doing the actual healing. But I would say that "resonance" taken to its logical conclusion means that it is unnecessary for any of the volunteers to learn anything at all. If Bill can heal mice from 1000 miles away, and heal nearby mice of whose existence he doesn't know, would it not be a piece of cake for him, quite unintentionally, to heal mice being treated by his students, just by desiring to see the experiment succeed? Just a question. And here is another: what kind of experimental design would you need to rule these factors out? How do you rule out the experimenter's mind as a factor, when that mind is known to have a range of 1000 miles?

(BTW those of us who took workshops with Bill would say we definitely learned something.)

"Resonance" in workshops and other interesting places

(Speculation alert!)
We have all experienced "resonance" at places like big family gatherings, historic events like the recent U.S. election, or football or hockey games where the home town team is winning big. We suddenly become bonded into a group whole where the group becomes more important than the "I". We feel as one. We shout as one. We do the wave. We leave the confines of this little shell that is our ego and become part of a much larger whole, and it feels damn good. It lasts for a little while, and then it's over. We go back to being our normal little selves and forget about the feeling, though I suspect some part of us continues to hanker for it.

When you go to an event such as a healing workshop or a mass-market self-help event like a Tony Robbins or a Journey seminar, chances are you will also find "resonance" at work. Many of these people are masters at preparing the field for it energetically. Some do it ahead of time, others unabashedly do it right on the spot. Recently I attended a Matrix Energetics evening with Richard Bartlett. Richard danced in, in a Hawaiian shirt and a fedora, to the tune of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets". When he reached the podium he sat down on a massage table and continued swaying and dancing as he charged the room. And you could feel it. It felt absolutely marvelous, an energy that made you want to sing and dance, going straight to your heart. Non-commercial folk like the monks of the Dalai Lama do it too, in a more sacred way. The last time I saw His Holiness, they turned Toronto's 50,000 seat Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) into what definitely felt like a small, quiet temple (but you had to get there early).

Bill is more discrete than Richard Bartlett. He doesn't dance in (although he might in some of his American venues -- you never know). He would probably be more partial to Bob Dylan than Elton John. But he does create resonance -- and likely he does it while teaching people his mental imaging technique. It's as if having everyone in the room concentrating on the same task gives him the switch he needs. It took me a while to catch on to what was happening. I, like everyone else, was so focused on the technique that nothing else entered my mind. But after a couple of workshops I had the luxury of just watching and feeling, and I began to notice what was going on around me. It is particularly noticeable on the second day, in the form of a wonderful sense of common purpose and camaraderie. By the time the day comes to an end, we are all reluctant to leave.

And now here come the questions. What part does Bill's mental imaging technique play in the creation of resonance? Which is more important to the teaching of healing, the technique or the resonance? Are they equally important? Could Bill teach people to heal through resonance just by having them do, say, vocal exercises in unison?

Next question: which is more important to the production of a healing effect: being able to reproduce the technique or being able to get into resonance? Are they both necessary? Does one aid in the creation of the other? (I do know of someone who rates themselves quite proficient at the technique but gives a very low rating to its healing effectiveness. That would suggest an inability to get into a resonant healing state, while still doing the technique as instructed, though perhaps not well enough.)

And another one: Is the mental imaging technique the thing that allows one to become "resonant" when one is doing healing all by one's little lonesome, without the benefit of others resonating along? (As I wrote this down I had an image of one resonating all by one's little lonesome as a bell that somehow starts reverberating by itself from the inside out.)

At any rate I suspect that anything you hear or read about "resonance" is pretty much the tip of the iceberg. We ain't heard or seen nothing yet, and we definitely don't have all the answers. And that "we" I suspect includes Bill himself.

My theory is that Bill, his friend Ben, Richard Bartlett, Erik Perl et al. are all "gateways". Something has come through to them; and through them, whatever it is, it can come through to the rest of us. IMHO what we are looking at is nothing less than the next stage of the evolution of the human mind. The trick is for all these gentlemen to remember that being a gateway is a gift rather than a personal achievement, and that one does not own the passage or the energy that comes through it. And that then to go on to market one's gift like a set of Ginsu knives is to invite a proverbial karmic kick in the shin. And likewise for the rest of us the trick is to remember, when we are in the presence of the gateway, to be grateful to the source where the energy comes from, whatever that Source may be.

Love, bioenergy, and miracles

The problem with all the cases presented below is that none of them constitute proof of anything.

These are the strange ones, the cases where things happen that ought not be happening and for which there is (or so we believe anyway) no current scientific explanation.

The allopathic take on these cases would be "nothing was really wrong in the first place, therefore nothing really happened."

Case one, multiple tumours disappearing between the MRI and the follow-up pre-biopsy ultrasound. The multiple tumours were confirmed by MRI (and were believed to be a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been treated with surgery), but after treatment by us, could no longer be detected. There was one single treatment event.

Case two, the "get-well blanket". In this case the very elderly parent of someone I know was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer. There had been severe weight loss, which prompted the medical team to look for some kind of cancer, which then was found through a CT-scan and then confirmed by an X-ray. A second opinion was sought, which corroborated the initial diagnosis. When I first heard about this situation, it was through a group of women who were knitting what they called a "get-well blanket" for the afflicted parent. Everyone was supposed to knit a few rows and put their good wishes and prayers into their efforts. I was asked to "do my stuff" on the blanket in addition to knitting a few rows. I did "my stuff" with no conviction that it would work. (This is called "healing by proxy". Experiments have shown that substances such as water, cotton and wood shavings hold healing energy and can be used instead of direct hands-on treatment. This blanket was acrylic, so I had no high hopes for it.) The parent went for surgery and the lung was excised, but the subsequent biopsy found no trace of cancer. After the surgery to remove the non-cancerous lung, the weight-loss that had caused the suspicion of cancer in the first place reversed. Was this a tragic medical error, or a medical miracle?

Case three, Bo, the miracle dog. Twice Bo was on his "death bed". Twice he was treated, twice he recovered (the first time after bleeding through the nose for two days). He is still fine. There was no diagnosis, but there were symptoms of severe illness (refusal to eat, severe weight loss, weakness, and the second time, inability to get up). There were two single hands-on treatments, five months apart, and no treatment of any other kind.

Case four, the incredible exploding suspected melanoma. Melanoma was suspected, a biopsy scheduled, three treatments given (in which the recipient felt energy and pain). After the third treatment the melanoma swelled, exploded, drained "ugly black stuff", then healed over. By the time the scheduled biopsy was to be done, there was nothing there to biopsy. The medical take on the "ugly black stuff" draining was that it was simply "not possible".

The common thread in all four cases was that there had been no biopsy to confirm the cancer. This would lead some people to say that there had been no cancer in the first place. But other people, including some physicists, have different thoughts on the subject. Anyone who has seen the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? will be familiar with the concept of quantum possibilities. Physicist Russell Targ (following William Braud) suggests that healers can go back in time to the "seed moment" of when a disease manifests and alter the pathway of the disease. The more "set in reality" the disease is, the more difficult it is to affect it. Richard Bartlett of Matrix Energetics speaks of the difficulty of going against "consensus reality" and his own reluctance to take on cancer because of the weight of "consensus reality" around it. A positive biopsy sets the cancer in stone and makes it more difficult to treat. But until such time as it is "set in stone", quantum possibilities continue to exist.

Bengston bioenergy and other modalities

A little discussed or understood aspect of Bengston bioenergy is the possible energy transfer that occurs during the workshops. (People who can "see" energy report that they can actually observe this happening.) Reiki folk call this transfer an "attunement" and it is what Reiki teaching is based on. It also occurs in Buddhism, allowing the teacher to take the student to higher levels of understanding. This energy transfer in the workshops makes me wonder whether any of these methods could be effectively learned through written instructions alone.

Before I ever met Bill I was already what is called a "Reiki master", which simply means that I've been attuned to teach Reiki to others. When I met Bill he very generously shared the energy with me and described his technique. When I returned home, attuned to the energy but less than proficient at the technique, I found that my energy treatments had changed. I also found that whenever I encountered or taught another Reiki practitioner, the energy would readily flow to them. They too found that their treatments changed, even though they, like me, were not at all proficient at the actual technique.

As a practitioner of a number of modalities, I find that they all seem to have different energy signatures, or different "frequencies". I have had clients who could, for instance, tell the difference between Reiki and Quantum Touch. They told me that Reiki felt light, diffuse and ethereal, while QT had weight and warmth. Medical qi gong (or chi gung) in turn produces an energy that can feel heavy and magnetic, like a million minuscule ball-bearings rolling around inside one's body.

Bill says that what he accesses is "source energy", and that other modalities (and even religious experiences) use various filters to access the same energy. The use of different filters would explain the difference in "frequencies".

At a recent workshop we had a number of participants who also do "shamanic journeying". Shamanic journeying, taught by Sandra Ingerman, who has also written a book of the same title, is based on age-old shamanic practices designed to contact helpers in the spirit world. It is the oldest form of "medicine" in the world. One of the practices is called (among other things) "calling in the ancestors" and it involves the generation of spontaneous sound. At the workshop attended by the "shamanic journeyers" we were practicing Bill's technique on one another when suddenly spontanous sound arose, grew, and built to a beautiful crescendo before diminishing into silence. The spontaneous sounding has since happened in some of our practice evenings as well.

It makes sense that something that comes from the "source energy" would have affinity with all energy practices. I am looking forward to the on-going journey of finding out what else is possible.

Teaching bioenergy healing and chasing the American Dream

So let's say you have discovered you are a healer and that you have a method to teach. How do you now go on to disseminate it?

If you are altruistic and not overly ambitious, you can teach a number of people to do it, and a number of people to teach it, and let them loose. This would be the "trickle down" model, where the originator teaches the method to several people, who then go on to teach several others, and so on and so forth. You, the original teacher, would not benefit financially from the teaching done by the others; you also don't get to control how your method is disseminated.

If you want to make some money and exercise a certain level of control, you can use the "pyramid" model, where the originator teaches several others, whom he then authorizes to teach, who then also teach and authorize others, and so on and so forth. Here there is an effort at creating a central authority and a portion of each teacher's income is funnelled back to you, the originator. This guarantees a certain level of income, especially if the method is widely taught.

If you wanted to make lots of money, you would go for the "American mass-market self-help seminar" model, where the originator teaches ever larger groups with the aid of authorized helpers, until the groups get so big as to be unmanageable, at which point a number of the helpers split off and start teaching their own authorized or unauthorized versions. With this model most of the income goes back to the originator, who then gets to buy expensive sports cars and real estate and then chiefly uses his talent to live the American dream.

The problem with all three models is that teaching gets more and more diluted the farther away it gets from the original teacher and the larger the group is that is being taught. (It could be argued that this may be true of all healing models -- after all, Jesus taught the apostles how to heal, and what happened after that? You hear of very little healing going on in the Bible after Jesus, and successful "laying on of hands" did not seem to pass down through the generations of Christians that followed.)

With the current systems, Reiki follows the "trickle down" model, Quantum Touch the "pyramid" model, and Matrix Energetics and Reconnective Healing the "self-help seminar" model. All four produce practitioners of varying qualities.

Bill likes to say that healing talent, like musical talent, is distributed unevenly in the population. Some people are Mozarts, others are like the tone deaf kid down the block playing Chopsticks on the piano, and most people fall somewhere in between. If you teach enough people, the reasoning goes, you will get a few Mozarts. So the trick is to go for volume. And of course volume benefits the teacher, especially with the "self-help seminar" model. If you do a few weekend workshops with 300 people each at $325 a pop, that can translate into some serious money. You can tell yourself that everyone will get something for their money, and it's really not your responsibility to make sure that they really get the method, as there are too many of them. That's what your helpers are for. Your helpers get to attend the workshop for free, so you don't have to pay them anything, but you also don't really know how good they are. A number of people will walk away satisfied and a number of people will feel stymied and confused, but then that's the way most things are. The truly important thing, this being America, is to entertain them, and to give them something to take home. And you are doing good, because you are after all teaching them something that could awaken those potential Mozarts -- however few of them there may be.

Most of the systems produce books (and now DVDs) to promote the teachings. There are many Reiki books out there, most of which say "this can't be learned from a book, go find a reputable teacher in your area". Quantum Touch has a book that says it teaches the method, which is indeed very easy to follow, and claims that a number of people have learned the method from the book alone. Books from teachers who follow the "mass-market self-help seminar" model focus on how the teacher found the method. They also claim that some people have learned the healing technique, pretty much by osmosis, just by reading the book. The purpose of most of these books is to put the teacher's name out there, to get the bodies into the workshops. (Of course the sale of books and DVDs also generates a certain income.)

What's wrong with this picture? Lack of accountability, that's what. When you go to your local MD and see his or her diploma from X University, you know that your doctor has gone through a rigorous program of instruction and testing that guarantees a certain minimum level of competence. Your basic energy healer's certificate guarantees no such thing. Mostly it guarantees that he or she was a warm body at a workshop for which he or she paid a certain amount of money. This is why it's so hard to get any respect as an energy healer, unless you are known for producing results.

Quantum Touch and Matrix try to get around this by requiring practitioners to attend a minimum number of workshops and put in a minimum number of hours of practice. But the practice is unsupervised, the hours self-reported, and there is an assumption made that a minimum number of workshops attended will guarantee competence. There is no testing of candidates.

After the first Bengston workshop we held, someone asked me if they could now add the certification to their list of modalities. That made me think. Here we were teaching a method that purportedly cured cancer. The people who came to the workshop, which at that point was only 1 day long, had had at best a few hours of instruction in a method that Bill had been practicing for 35 years. They would now go out there and claim that they "did" the Bengston method, people with cancer would come to them for healing, and how could I even begin to guarantee that they could actually do anything? The conclusion I came to is that no one should be certified as a practitioner in the method, let alone as a teacher, without producing at least one documented cancer cure.

There is, by the way, another teaching model. It's the model practiced by actual schools, where there are multiple teaching levels, extensive supervision, and testing and mentorship programs. If we are going to take energy healing seriously, that's where we should be headed.

Deconstructing the hype

When we first started doing workshops with Bill, we were very cautious about how he was presented. There were to be no extravagant claims to be made on his behalf. My efforts at advertising reflected this caution, simply inviting people to meet Bill, professor of sociology, researcher, energy healer, who in a series of experiments had brought 87.9% of mice injected with a fatal form of cancer to full life-span remission, using a new form of bioenergy healing. No claims were made that could not be backed up by Bill's research.

Later on as we began using the method, I added our own experiences, e.g., the prolapsed uterus, the healed knee, the efforts by psychotherapists to use the method in their practices. We remained grounded in facts and realities; only claims that could proven; no hyperbole.

Recently a flyer came to my hands from another city, a flashy, neon affair proclaiming the "Bengston Mind Technique" and exhorting the reader to get "ready for a world without dis-ease". This is what I read:

What if there were a simple documented method —
that implodes cancerous tumors and heals a variety of
physical and psychological conditions including clinical
depression and severe psychiatric conditions — are
you ready to learn it and add it to your practice?

It then proceeded to add, among other things, that Bill had taught MD's and other healthcare professionals and that he was a featured speaker on Mehmet Oz's show on Oprah and Friends. People who signed up for the workshop being promoted would receive a free MP3 download of his lecture on his experiments and also a copy of the "famous mouse papers". A graphic of two mice toasting over a hunk of cheese could also be noted. (The presence of the two mice made me hope that Bill had not actually seen this, as my own efforts to introduce a tiny photo of a mouse into one of my early flyers had been summarily overruled.)

Here is the deconstruction:

The method is extensively documented to implode cancerous tumours, in mice.

In workshops Bill speaks of one person he healed of clinical depression using this method. A psychoanalyst in South Africa reported good results with a client with obsessive compulsive disorder. Locally someone else found that it helped someone with OCD and two others who suffered from anxiety, but that a number of patients were resistant to the method because it fell too far outside their expectations of what psychotherapy should be. Some psychotherapists reported using it on themselves to handle their own levels of anxiety and to prepare themselves for sessions, but did not feel comfortable offering it to their patients. It is too early to say that the method heals "severe psychiatric conditions".

Bill also says that the method appears simple but almost everybody gets it wrong at first and requires much correction. He even says it would be arrogant of him to assume that people will get it in one weekend, because much practice is required. Which takes me to the related point that, IMHO, no one should be putting on Bill Bengston workshops who is not prepared to do follow-up in the form of regular practice sessions, including, at least for a while, on-going consultation with Bill. The purpose of these organized practice sessions is to provide further instruction and support. I invite you to read previous entries for my experiences with the method to see what kind of learning curve can be involved.

How about What if there were a method, documented to implode cancerous tumours in mice, anecdotally reported to cure cancer and other ailments in some people, and shown to be of benefit in some psychiatric conditions? That would be more like it.

In our locality Bill has taught a small number of MD's and "other healthcare professionals" who were drawn to see him speak out of curiosity after reading the "famous mouse papers", and elsewhere he has given talks. He was interviewed in September by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who invited Bill on his show after I sent him the same "famous mouse papers". The "mouse papers" are indeed quite amazing, and getting more famous all the time. The interview aired in November.

The teachability of the method is so far established only for curing mice (although Bill, ever the researcher, questioned whether his experiments constituted adequate proof in his "Can Healing Be Taught?" paper in Explore magazine). When it comes to showing that the method can be taught effectively enough for people to cure other people of cancer, it's early days yet. Nothing is effectively proven, only suggested. Until such time as there are at least half a dozen documented human cancer cures produced by people Bill taught, there can be no hype. When these cancer cures are produced, there will be no hype, because by then the "hype" will be the new reality. Then we can go to town on the advertising.

So how can you learn Bill's method?

If you are new to this blog: Bill Bengston's claim to fame is a series of experiments with laboratory mice in which he cured a significantly large percentage of the mice of a normally fatal form of cancer using a new method of bioenergy healing. In some of the experiments he used "skeptical volunteers" to whom he taught the method to do the healing. The question is whether the technique can be taught to be successfully applied to people as well. There have been a number of workshops to teach the method. For the results, see my post below, entitled "So how effective is Bengston Bioenergy?"

Can you learn Bill's method by reading about it?

When Bill published his "Resonance" article in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in the spring of 2007, he also published a companion article describing how he taught his "skeptical volunteers" to heal the mice. His detailed instructions are sandwiched between a caveat that says that it is logically possible that the healing the students produced had nothing to do with the techniques described and another that states that no one he knows of has actually learned the technique from written instructions. He ends by inviting readers to reproduce his experiments with mice to see if his results can be replicated and offering to go teach them in person.

There is a reason for Bill's caution. He doesn't yet know exactly what part the technique plays in the actual healing. Following the instructions might not in itself be sufficient to produce a healing effect. There might actually be an energy transfer, as there is in Reiki and Buddhism, that opens up a necessary pathway in the student and that requires some form of mental contact between teacher and student. The technique might simply be a tool to allow this energy transfer to take place and an anchor (in the NLP sense of the word) to help the student practice.

Can you learn Bill's method in a workshop?

Maybe. We've certainly been trying to teach people. Bill says in the workshops that the technique is complex enough that it would be arrogant of him to assume that you'll be able to get it all in one go. His "skeptical volunteers" needed six sessions spaced out over six weeks to "get it". A workshop followed by practice sessions (as we've been doing) or taking several workshops might do the trick. I would think that the learning progresses by degrees. As you get more exposure to Bill and the technique, your knowledge and your ability to heal would deepen. This is not unique to Bill's method -- it's true of anything you're trying to learn.

There are some people who already have an ability to heal that they may or may not be aware of. Such people would either discover their ability or find it enhanced just by attending a single workshop and by being exposed to the energy Bill carries and learning his method. One such person recently said that learning the technique has allowed her to be able to do healing work even when she wasn't "in the mood".

So what's the best way to learn?

Here is what Bill writes in the "Methods" article:

Finally, it must be emphasized once again that all training of the volunteer healers in these experiments took place in group settings and lasted for an average of 6 weeks. Furthermore, the techniques were molded to the idiosyncrasies of each of volunteer. However simple the techniques appear to be, every individual misinterpreted the instructions and needed correction and much practice.

I note that this generous 6-week format would also allow for repeated energy transfers along with a good deal of individual attention that is difficult to arrange in a weekend workshop involving dozens of people.

Clearly a longer course or a mentorship program would be the best way to go. It would be grand to get funding for an institute where on-going teaching and experimentation could be carried out. In the meantime other formats could be tried, such as courses lasting perhaps four or five days or mentoring via computer link-up.

The practical challenges of working with Bengston Bioenergy

So here you are: you've taken your first Bill Bengston workshop, you had a great time, you're raring to go, but you have no clue whether you actually "got it".

You have been taught an energy healing method that purports to fix cancer. Not just headaches and wonky knees, but cancer. Are you going to run out there and put your hands on the next person you find who says they have the big "C"?

Judging by our experiences here over five newbie workshops, the answer is "no". There are very few of us who have taken the workshops who have also had the temerity to offer treatments -- I am one of the few. My two posts below describe some outcomes; and the post below them discusses the effectiveness of the method in our hands to date. I remain hopeful about the method's long-term prospects. We are not yet where Bill is -- I hope that someday we'll get there, in fact I hope for the sake of all present and future cancer sufferers of the world that a lot of us get there fairly soon.

For those of you who are considering trying to treat others, here is my "treatise" on the practical difficulties.

When to treat?
The method is contraindicated while the patient is receiving radiation or chemo, as the two treatments, Bill's and the allopathic one, the one designed to energize and the other to kill, could cancel each other out. But Bill also says that it has been his experience that after someone has received radiation or chemo the technique is no longer as effective as before, and will not bring the patient to full remission. So that leaves one option: to treat the person before conventional treatment is employed. That's all fine and well, but you can't very well tell someone not to have conventional treatment. That would be highly irresponsible. So that leaves you the window between diagnosis and treatment, which is not a very long time.

How long will it take?
Dilemma number two: we have no clue. It could be quick or it could be slow. In our experience the time between diagnosis and treatment has not been long enough. It could work in that short a time, but going by our current experience chances are it won't.

How do I know it's working?
There's another rub. According to Bill in some cases the tumour will shrink, but in others it will grow to a critical mass before it "implodes". Some people feel the energy during treatment, others don't. Some people feel energized by the energy, others feel exhausted. Some people bounce off the walls, others develop cold symptoms. Some have pain during treatment or after. Some experience all of the above at various points. Blood test results can be all over the map too: sometimes they get worse, sometimes they get better (though the overall trajectory should point towards "better"). So everything is "good". Tumour getting smaller? That's good. Tumour's getting bigger? That's good too: it's getting ready to implode. You have pain? That's good. No pain? That's good too. Cold symptoms? That's excellent: that sounds like a healing crisis! It's not difficult to see why it's hard to get credibility as an energy healer.

So how do you know it's working? The answer is you don't. Not really, not until something actually changes for the better. People will often have an increased sense of well being and will, based on that, be willing to trust you. But what if the next time they go for a check-up, they find out the tumour is bigger? That's when trust flies out the window, and that's when you begin to doubt yourself. In fact it has been known to happen that trust flies out the window even when the next test shows the tumour is better. Just by getting into an allopathic environment the patient can begin to doubt you, as it is perfectly their right and prerogative to do.

This is the problem with energy therapies of all stripes: there just hasn't been enough research to know what's going on.

So how do we get around these challenges?
One way to get around these challenges is to start with animals. One of my first patients was a cat with brain cancer. The cancer had invaded its nasal passages, so the poor thing sounded like Darth Vader. After I treated it, it breathed normally for about three days, so clearly something had happened. Cats have no preconceptions; the treatment will work or not work on its own merits. I didn't get to treat the cat often enough, only about once every two weeks, and eventually it died. But the last time I treated it, it jumped up on the sofa and put its paw on my arm as if to say "thank you". That was nice.

Another patient was a dog, a big white mutt called Bo. When I saw Bo in the springtime, he was clearly on his last legs. His owners thought he had some kind of cancer but didn't have money for the vet. I briefly treated Bo. In the middle of the summer his owners told me that after I treated him he bled from the nose for two days, then started eating again. The second time I saw Bo was in the fall, and this time he was really on his last legs, not even getting up from his doggie bed. Another treatment, and he was better again. I last spoke to the owners New Year's Day, 2009, and Bo was at that point a happy, healthy mutt.

Another way, and you have to be brave for this one, is to take on the incurable cancers, the ones where the conventional treatments are known not to work. But that makes for a steep learning curve, and you could find yourself attending funerals. You also have to be willing to put in the time. Serious cancers take daily treatment. And there is no way you can charge for your time, not if you can't guarantee that you know what you are doing. These are the cases where it's impossible not to get emotionally involved. You feel for the patient, you feel for the family; you root for them, you grieve with them, you share their joys and their despair. You have to have some ability to establish professional distance, otherwise you could become a basket case -- and I speak from personal experience here.

If you are going to take on these difficult cases, we advise you to work in a team. It's good to have buddies to keep you sane. It's also good to be able to rotate if the patient needs treatment every day. Adding a "Greek chorus" of distance treaters is a great help. This is how I envisage the future of the method: groups treating individuals in a web of shared responsibility.

By the way this is also where the method could most clearly shine. It's with the serious cancers that you can see if it's working most clearly: if the white blood cell count starts dropping, though there is no way it should; if the jaundice reverses; if the person who needed morphine every four hours no longer needs any painkillers at all; if instead of dying, the patient gets out of bed and begins walking again; if the doctor has reason to say "there has been a miracle". This is why we are doing this. We are looking for that miracle.

A third way, if you just want to get your toes wet, but still do some good, is to join or create a group that offers distance healing. I suspect distance healing groups are quite potent. When we were treating our pancreatic cancer patient we had a "standing date" to offer distance healing at 10 p.m. every day. One day I started at 9:52 and then felt a remarkable jump in energy when everyone else came online. The people we treat tell us that they feel the treatment. They feel more peaceful and sleep better, or they feel more calm and energized. Sometimes incredible healings can happen, as with a little boy I will call James, who was in the hospital with severe burns from a household accident. He was supposed to be in the hospital for weeks and weeks but the day after we sent him a distance treatment from one of the workshops he was released to go home, because his burn had unexpectedly scabbed over overnight. An added bonus to doing distance healing is that it feels really, really good.

It's still not about what you want -- case study #2

(Remember: personal details have been changed to protect people's identity.)

Mischa was too young to be dying of pancreatic cancer. Unlike Mileni, he had a loving family around him, who were devastated to be told that he had only days to live. Pancreatic cancer is invariably fatal, but often the end can be delayed with chemo; in his case it came on so fast, and so unexpectedly, that chemo was not really even a viable option, though it was still tried, then quickly abandoned as hopeless. We found out about Mischa through the friend of a friend of someone who came to one of Bill's workshops, and we rushed to his bedside.

I used to have a huge phobia about hospitals and dying, but my earlier experience with Mileni acted as a kind of shock treatment for it, so I had no second thoughts about walking into Mischa's room on the oncology floor of a local hospital. But Mischa's appearance still shocked me. He was yellow and skeletal, and so drugged with painkillers that he was barely conscious. I had to wait for him to be conscious enough to understand me before I could ask for his permission to treat him.

Mischa had stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver and was in a state of imminent liver failure. He had so many tumours on his liver that the word used by his doctor to describe them was "innumerable". Bill told us that he himself had not treated anyone with stage-4 pancreatic cancer (because by the time treatment could be arranged they were usually gone) and that our biggest challenge would be that anyone in Mischa's state would likely have already given himself up for dead. We would be, figuratively speaking, dragging him back from the edge of the grave, and psychologically that could be quite a challenge for him.

Once again we had three treaters, and this time everyone stuck with it. We took turns treating him singly or in pairs, so he received at least an hour and a half of hands-on treatment every day. We also had a "Greek chorus" of people offering distance treatments, with a standing date at 10:00 p.m. as everyone in the group who could take the time joined in to send energy to Mischa. The very first night he woke up, looked at his sister sitting next to him, and said "I feel all this energy -- what do I do with it?"

His body's response was almost immediate. By the very next day something had changed. His legs seemed less swollen and the rash on them began to heal. He became more conscious. By the weekend he was able to stand and eat. He became less yellow and needed less pain medication -- in fact five days after we started treating him he stopped needing pain medication altogether. By then he was also able to walk short distances without assistance. Eight days after we started treatment he was released to go home, and his doctor told him that she considered his survival a miracle.

Upon his return home Mischa continued to improve. Eventually there were walks to the park and back, then trips to the mall, then weekends at the cottage. Six weeks after the beginning of treatment he had bloodtests done and was told that his blood values were all normal or near normal. His jaundice was gone. He was putting on weight. His doctor told him that he had normal liver and kidney function. About two weeks later the medi-port for the delivery of chemo was surgically removed as no longer necessary.

We were ecstatic. We kept telling him that he was making history, and that he would get to go on Oprah to tell his story. Bill followed his improvement with great interest. We were making history, too, validating his technique. We would all go on Oprah together! It was a great to have done this, to have gone into the hospital room of someone beyond hope and brought him back from the brink. The future looked rosy.

But there were signs that all was not well. Mischa started having pain around one of his kidneys. Tests were done for a kidney infection or kidney failure, but all the results came back normal. Then the pain moved to his lower back. Then he became listless and tired and unwilling to eat. We suspected some other kind of infection and suggested the possibility, but because he had no fever that was not taken seriously (energy healers generally speaking are not taken very seriously anyway, and certainly not allowed to diagnose). We were surprised that we could not affect the pain, as often pain relief is one of the first outcomes of our treatment, even when the pain is significant. (In fact the chief reason we suspected an infection was that we had already observed that when it comes to infections, we are not all that effective.)

Mischa died quite suddenly, ten weeks after he had been told he had days to live. He did have an undiagnosed infection. Was it a case of massive bad luck, or a case of us trying to argue with something bigger than ourselves and losing? Was he meant die, and did we interfere with a larger purpose by treating him? If the infection had been discovered sooner and he had been treated with antibiotics in time, would he have survived to full remission? Unfortunately we will never know.

Postscript I had the opportunity to present Mischa's case to a group of oncologists in 2009. When I told them that Mischa had not died of cancer, they looked at me and said, almost in unison, "no cancer patient dies of the cancer". They die of complications their weakened bodies cannot fight off. So maybe Mischa dying of something other than his cancer was not as significant as I thought, but his ten-week remission remains an extraordinary event.

Getting it wrong before getting it right - case study #1

(NB: The personal details of the people in all case studies have been changed to protect their identity.)

Mileni came to us with acute myelogenous leukemia. She had no family here, no husband, no children, only a solicitous group of concerned friends who were quite prepared to help her get through chemo. But Mileni didn't want chemo. She looked at her odds, and having been told by her oncologist that she would need the absolutely most aggressive kind of chemo possible and would likely end up intubated in intensive care for weeks on end, she decided that the odds were not worth it (the 5-year survival rate for her cancer with chemo was 10%, but without chemo, 0%). She was fatalistic: she was willing to try what we did and if it didn't work, she would settle for death with dignity.

Full of confidence after our first seminar with Bill, we decided to treat Mileni. Bill had told us that aggressive cancers remitted quickly, and as acute myelogenous leukemia is one of the most aggressive kinds, we were secretly hopeful for Mileni's speedy recovery. We told her that the treatment was experimental and that because we could not guarantee results we could not accept payment. At first there were three of us treating her, but then it became just me. She received treatment first once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week. In spite of this her blood count continued to worsen, although the treatments seemed to slow her deterioration. About three months after her treatment began, however, her doctor announced that her white blood cell count was now "gravely concerning". This meant that she could at any moment develop a fatal brain haemorrhage. When she left his consulting room to use the bathroom, he made baleful eyes at me and told me that "leukemia patients die in horrible ways". He wanted me to convince her to agree to have chemo.

By this time Mileni had stopped talking to her friends because of their solicitous insistence that they would help her through chemo. She would not hear of it. The very mention of the word "chemo" made her angry and anger made her condition noticeably worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I took her to see Bill, who graciously agreed to see us. After a few days of treatments from Bill she seemed to perk up, and could even be seen doing the occasional pirouette on the lawn. But upon her return home she crashed, and her white blood cell count sky-rocketed. The numbers went from "gravely concerning" to astronomical ("astronomical" was almost five times "gravely concerning"). The numbers would now only rise, we were told, and the white blood cells would spill over into her lymph nodes and her brain. She had bruises because her platelet count was low and a constant fever. I was treating her daily but with little hope.

Then suddenly something happened. One day during treatment I felt something different accompanied by a sudden sense that I had just "got it". And sure enough, the next time Mileni went for her blood test, the white blood cell count was down. Her doctor said it was a lab error. There was another blip up the time after, but then the count decidedly reversed. She was having two bloodtests a week, and with each one the number would go down 15 to 20 per cent. People at the hospital who did not know her history would ask her what kind of chemotherapy she was on, because her body was behaving as if she had been receiving chemo. But unfortunately along with the white blood cells her red blood cells and platelets were also falling. She began receiving transfusions, which only worked for a while, as her body began to react to the blood as if it were a foreign substance. It became a race against time. I had the idea that if all the bad white blood cells were to go, her body would start manufacturing healthy blood cells -- just as with chemo. Mileni by this point had settled for death with dignity but allowed me to have my delusions, and to keep treating her, so long as I kept her company.

When the final crash came I went with her to emergency, where a young doctor shouted at her, as if she were hard of hearing, that she needed to contact her family because she was dying. He helpfully assured her that she would not survive the weekend. But survive she did, with hours of treatment, and then my next act as her healer was to negotiate with the social worker to have her transferred into palliative care. I continued to treat her and I continued to remain hopeful. Surely a miracle would happen and Mileni would walk out of the hospital on her own two feet. On her last day I sat with her until 11 p.m. She died peacefully in her sleep at 2 a.m. Her last blood test the day before showed her white blood cell count as "normal".

Discussion

I was devastated by Mileni's death. I had clearly become too involved with her in the course of her treatment, but I do not know at what point it would have been possible for me to walk away and still be at peace with my conscience. Some people comforted me by saying that I had done something beautiful by sticking with Mileni to the end, and that even though I hadn't cured her, important healing had taken place. There was a big debate in our group about the value of "healing" versus "curing" with the conclusion that without healing no curing could take place. A number of the group who think beyond matters of the body in this life felt that in cosmic terms healing the whole being was far more important than curing the physical body.

From the perspective of practicing Bill's technique my over-involvement with Mileni was not a good thing. It is an important part of the technique for the practitioner to be detached from the outcome. If you care too much, you get in the way. Also, it is not a good idea to treat someone who desires death with dignity. The best candidates for Bill's technique are people who passionately want to live. I think Mileni wanted someone with her who would not pressure her into treatment. I was chiefly there to hold her hand and to ease the process of her dying. It's not what I wanted to happen. The lesson Mileni taught was "it's not about what you want." I am still not sure how well I learned it.

So how effective is Bengston Bioenergy?

The mouse experiments have done wonders in proving that Bill's method works. We know that method cures mice, but the important question is whether it cures people. Anecdotally we have heard that in Bill's hands it does cure people, so the next question is: can the people Bill teaches also cure people the way Bill does after taking his workshops?

We've been doing workshops now for a year and a half, six to date, five for newbies and one workshop for "alumni" who have already taken the introductory one; there have also been several "alumni" evenings with Bill. I've been at every single event as the main organizer. Several people have attended a few as helpers. We also have monthly meetings. We are excited by the potential of the work. But after a year and a half I would have hoped to have more concrete results, or at least a half a dozen documented cures, to show for our labours. Our results have been promising, but not necessarily conclusive.

We have had success with suspected cancers in the testing stages, even some that were strongly suspected, considered to be metastases or recurrences of a prior cancer. The first test would confirm the presence of something worrysome, but the next test would find nothing, or the "something" would just disappear before the biopsy, so no biopsy would be done. From the patient's perspective these are the best-case scenarios because they involve the least amount of suffering, but for those of us trying to prove that the technique works, they don't do much. In the view of orthodox medicine the lump that disappears wasn't cancer in the first place because, by definition, cancer doesn't just "disappear" all by itself without painful, momentous, and destructive intervention.

We have had a bunch of interesting anomalous results. A visible tumour that shrank to less than half its size in two treatments -- then proceeded to just "hang out", still shrinking slowly, for the next six months (it's still there). A lymphoma that was re-diagnosed, first as leukemia, then as a case of lupus. A case of acute myelogenous leukemia where the white blood cell count reversed and a case of stage-4 pancreatic cancer that went into a 10-week remission (these will be the subjects of separate posts as both these patients subsequently died). With non-cancerous conditions we've seen a severely prolapsed uterus return to normal after treatment and knee-replacement surgery cancelled after the patient no longer needed a cane to walk.

Judging from my limited experience I would say that these treatments have a different rhythm and a different way of working from standard medical treatments. The outcome is either inexplicable and mysterious -- things vanishing from one day to the next -- or languidly slow. My preference is for the quick, inexplicable vanishings. With slow you can doubt whether it's working, and so can the patient. It can also take months, and months, and months of treatment. But what we have observed is an increase in the well-being of the person receiving treatment even when the treatment is taking its sweet old time. The results we've observed are different from some of the ones Bill describes where tumours simply shrink as if someone were playing a movie backwards.

The other observation I would make is that all these healings have been done by a handful of people. All of them have other types of energy practices such as Reiki, shamanism, or deep meditation in their background. They have also either attended more than one workshop or have had access to Bill in one-on-one training situations. People who take one of Bill's workshops from scratch, with no other "energy" background, tend to be shy about trying out the technique to begin with, and they also have less access to patients, so we have less of a chance to find out how effectively they could use it. An argument could be made that because they have the method in its purest form, they ought to be the best at it.

So it's exciting and promising, but as yet, no cigar.

I expect the first documented cures will come from Bill's own bailiwick, where there is now also a group, with some people receiving active mentoring from him. This kind of mentoring and participation by the teacher is how Bill learned the technique in the first place, so it would make sense for the method to work best under these conditions.

Postscript Oct. 20, 2011: I have recently heard another cancer healer say that cancer adapts to treatment over time, so the longer the treatment goes on, the less effective it becomes, unless you radically change it up as you go along to keep the cancer "confused". Our experiences treating people seem to confirm this observation. This particular healer, Kurt Peterson, gets around the problem by giving one whopping full-day treatment to knock out the cancer for once and for all. Both Kurt Peterson and Bill appear to be very strong healers; the rest of us here seem to have only managed, by and large, to keep people relatively healthy while slowing the cancer down. It's been helpful, but not quite what I was aiming for.