"Iatrogenic disease": the view from up close

Here is a frightening statistic: an article published in the year 2000 in the Journal of the American Medical Association calculated "that between 230,000 and 284,000 deaths occur each year in the US due to iatrogenic causes, or physician error, making this number three in the leading causes of death for all Americans."* That's a quarter million Americans dying each year due to hospital mix-ups, adverse drug reactions from prescriptions drugs, hospital-acquired infections and botched surgeries. Quite a number to swallow: the equivalent of about five hundred 747s crashing every year, killing all passengers on board. And this number does not even included those are not killed by the error, but "only" maimed.

[Now you can also read "Iatrogenic disease - Part 2"]
My mother was only 51 when she died a few short hours after her first radiation treatment for a recurrence of breast cancer. Her tests showed her to be cancer free when her oncologist, whom she said she "trusted with her life", suggested "prophylactic radiation". She was on Tamoxifen, implicated in causing blood clots, and had to have the radiation rescheduled because her chest cavity had been "mismeasured". A second such mismeasurement could have led to radiation burns in her lungs, edema, and death. Yet there was no inquest into her unexpected and untimely death.

The mother of a friend of mine has had repeated, and devastating, experiences with iatrogenic disease. She was already suffering from Alzheimer's when she was diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of lung cancer. Her doctors were 99% sure she had this cancer and recommended surgery. So deadly was the cancer believed to be that they recommended against doing a biopsy. She had the "cancerous" lung removed. She then went into full-blown dementia as a result of the stress of this horribly invasive surgery. When the lung was sent to the lab, it turned out that what the doctors believed to have been cancer was in fact scar tissue from a bout of pneumonia. There was no cancer.

Fast forward a few years. Once again a doctor saw something he suspected to be cancer; this time skin cancer. He proposed doing multiple biopsies. The woman's daughter raised objections, which the doctor overrode. Two days after the biopsies were done, the elderly patient became septic. No antibiotic seemed able kill the bacteria raging through her system. By the time the infection was finally brought under control, the patient had lost the will to live and passed away.

Not all these patients die; some are "merely" maimed for life. While they don't become part of the statistics on medical error causing death, these instances cost untold amounts of money to an already overburdened system. First there is the cost of the initial, often unnecessary, intervention, then there is the cost of trying to fix the mistake, and then there is, in the case of younger patients, the economic loss when the victim becomes so disabled that he or she is no longer able to work.

And more important than cost is the burden of suffering, borne largely by the elderly. In my mother's case the judgment of a doctor ended up costing her her life, but at least her death was quick and relatively painless. My friend's mother's case became a textbook example of what Bill Bengston bluntly calls "torturing [the elderly] on the way out."

Simply put, what is the benefit of doing a biopsy for basal cell carcinoma on an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer's? What is the benefit of doing a double mastectomy on an 86-year-old patient with a slow-growing cancer who then dies of a stroke less than a year later? How many painful procedures should the elderly have to endure? Shouldn't we ask, how necessary is this? Shouldn't we do a humane cost/benefit analysis as in "how much suffering is this going to cause? how likely is this to harm/benefit the patient?" This is a discussion that should take place in every single case, possibly in the presence of a medical ethicist or a professional who specializes in elder care. Many doctors are way too "intervention happy". If the only tool you have is a hammer, then you see everything as a nail. If intervention is the only tool in your toolkit, that's all you will do. Family members can also buy into the medical mystique and believe that more intervention is better, until their loved one comes to harm. In many cases palliation and alternative therapies offer better outcomes.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 showed that lung cancer patients who received palliative care along with conventional treatment lived longer and had better quality of life than patients who received conventional cancer treatment alone. The study "showed that people who received the palliative support services were less likely to choose aggressive, and often futile, measures to prolong their lives." In contrast I recently heard a doctor say in an interview on CBC that he sees more and more advanced cancer patients going from chemotherapy straight to the ER, and then from there to the morgue, as many doctors prescribe more and more aggressive treatments. This is definitely "torturing them on the way out", and it's questionable how necessary it is.

Obviously no doctor or other medical professional does a procedure with an intent to injure. But the truth of the matter is that cookie-cutter medical protocols applied or mis-applied to unique human bodies will result in at least some of them being harmed when things go wrong. Should we continue to accept this "collateral damage" as part of the business of practicing medicine in North America?

Postscript Sept. 26: And now see this NBC article, which estimates that only about one percent of events that cause harm to patients are reported by hospitals and asks why patients themselves are reluctant to report medical errors.

And also this: The Drugs Don't Work, an alarming expose of how drugs are approved.

And now the medical perspective:

Bioenergy therapies and mainstream medicine

Two news items came my way recently offering encouragement that bioenergy therapies are gaining acceptance in the mainstream.

The first was a headline in Science News proclaiming that "Touch Therapy Helps Reduce Pain, Nausea in Cancer Patients, Study Suggests". The study, conducted by the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center and involving 159 patients, showed that Jin Shin Jyutsu, a form of acupressure similar to shiatsu, lessened the side effects of treatment, with patients reporting significant decreases in stress, pain, and nausea.

The second news item came from the Columbia University Department of Surgery no less, announcing that Dr. Sheldon Marc Feldman, Chief of the Division of Breast Surgery in New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, would be participating in an upcoming Reiki conference. Dr. Feldman (like his famous colleague Dr. Mehmet Oz before him) introduced healers into the operating room and has seen first hand the benefits that Reiki offers to his breast cancer patients.

This is huge news. I've been advocating for this kind of integrative approach for the benefit of patients for a while now (see my "Open Letter to Oncologists", posted last November).

Cats and the Domancic Method of Energy Healing

The last time I wrote about cats and energy healing, I raised the ire of some skeptics on Twitter, who proceeded to poke fun at me about the cosmetic effects of the treatment not offering any kind of proof for the efficacy of energy healing. This time I have something more concrete to offer: two cats, one with a case of hyper-thyroidism and the other with uncontrollable diabetes due to a benign pituitary tumour.

I treated both cats with the Domancic Method. Cat number one, the one with hyper-thyroidism, doesn't like energy healing. Aim it her way, and she'll be gone in a flash. Her response to the Domancic Method was interesting, to say the least. She growled. The first session she started growling the moment I began. She bristled and growled like a dog but stayed put. The second session she started growling a little later. The third, she didn't begin growling until towards the end, and the fourth, she didn't growl at all. What amazed me was that she stayed put. She didn't like it, but didn't run away, even though she had the option.

Two weeks after the fourth session, her owner called me to tell me that her thyroid had normalized. All her symptoms (over-vocalizing, excessive grooming, not eating) cleared. The improvement was lasting.

Cat number two apparently developed diabetes, which could not be controlled with insulin. His blood sugar was all over the place. I tried the Domancic diabetes protocol on him, and it didn't work. Although this would not in the least surprise the skeptics, it surprised me: Domancic protocols are usually quite effective on pets. Then the cat's vet finally came up with a diagnosis: the irregular blood sugar was caused by a benign pituitary tumour. She said the only way to control the condition would be radiation, which the cat's owner opted not to do. I then switched the cat to the Domancic protocol for tumours, and four series of treatments later, his blood sugar stabilized. This was about two months ago and it's still holding.

Years ago I worked on a cat that had a brain tumour that affected her nasal passages and caused her to sound like Darth Vader as she breathed. I treated her with the Bengston Method. After every treatment her breathing was normal for about three days. It quite amazed me. Animals don't do "placebo effect". If something works on them, it's not because they have some kind of magical belief in its effectiveness but because it really works.

An update about the Domancic Method

Zoran Hochstatter, Zdenko Domancic's authorized representative in the West, has been quite busy in the three years since I first learned the method from him. He has taught students in the U.S., in London, England, and in Toronto, Canada. He has authorized a level-3 student in Toronto and another in London to hold Domancic clinics. He has also written a book entitled Three Chairs about the method and is now working with Dr. Craig Oster, an 18-year ALS survivor and supporter of alternative healing, who has a website called The Healers that is a veritable who-is-who of the future of healing.

This is what Dr. Oster had to say about his experience with the Domancic Method:

The world needs to know that IT IS ABSOLUTELY NONSENSE & FALSEHOOD TO CLAIM THAT PEOPLE DIAGNOSED WITH ALS DIAGNOSIS MAY NOT HAVE REMARKABLE IMPROVEMENTS!

My work with Zoran this week using the Domancic Method of Bioenergy Therapy has been remarkable, with improved speech and my breathing best over the last 3 1/2 years.

"Has cancer been misunderstood?"

I just ran across a brilliant article entitled "Has Cancer Been Completely Misunderstood?" It cites a relatively recent hypothesis which postulates that cancer cells are not random genetic mutations, but evolutionary throwbacks to a time when cells were undifferentiated and when the only available survival response for a colony of cells was unchecked growth. According to the researchers,

Cancer is not a random bunch of selfish rogue cells behaving badly, but a highly-efficient pre-programmed response to stress, honed by a long period of evolution.

In short, if you stress the human organism sufficiently, you will awaken primal genetic programming that causes cancer to develop in individual cells as a survival adaptation. This programming developed about a billion years ago, at a time when the earth was experiencing much harsher environmental conditions than we have today, so these cells can survive in low-oxygen environments and ultimately thumb their noses at anything medicine can throw at them in the way of chemotherapy or radiation.

This new hypothesis completely reverses the current view of cancer. Rather than being an unhealthy occurrence within a healthy body, it is an archaic survival response to conditions that threaten the body, i.e., an effort to reestablish health. The author of the article concludes

we need to shift our thinking away from the view that cancer is something unnatural that happens to us, to one where we see that cancer is something natural our body does to survive unnatural conditions. Change and improve those conditions, and you do more to change cancer than [by] attacking it as if you were fighting a war against an enemy.

As my summary is quite sketchy, I heartily recommend reading the article in full.

What cats teach us about energy healing

It has now happened twice. The first time I just thought it was strange. The second time I began to ponder what it meant.

Some years ago I was visiting my hairdresser and she asked me to treat her cat. The poor cat was suffering from kidney failure. It was all skin and bones, its fur dull, scraggly and matted. It looked like one very sick pussycat.

I treated the cat on the couch, with my hairdresser sitting on the other side. Both of us watched, dumbfounded, as during the treatment the cat's fur began to change, to puff out, to grow smooth and shiny, and gradually return to "normal".

When the cat had enough, it jumped off the couch (something it hadn't been able to do) and walked away.

The story didn't have a happy ending, because the very next day the cat was euthanized. The appointment had already been made, the owners didn't want the cat to suffer, they didn't really believe in "energy healing", and they didn't want to wait.

I filed the experience away for further reference, and the reference came last week, when I was asked to treat another cat in kidney failure.

I told the owners about the my experience with the previous cat and said that one of the effects might be that the fur would puff out and look normal again. It began to happen during the treatment, but not as dramatically as before. The cat slept for the rest of the day and then the day following was unable to walk. The owners had the vet on emergency standby but were willing to wait 48 hours.

At last report the cat seemed to be better and was lying in the sun, her fur sleek and soft and shiny, with a cowlick that had not been there before. (Postscript April 21: also, ever since the treatment, she has not been peeing blood, which I would consider to be a good sign.)

Some conclusions

Cats don't do "placebo effect". And fur puffing out is a clear sign of something physical going on.

Everyone assumes that a sick animal's fur is matted because it has stopped grooming itself. But neither one of these cats did a single lick of grooming during its treatment. The difference between healthy sleek fur and sickly matted fur seems to be, at least to some extent, energetic. To me this would seem to constitute some kind of proof that energy healing definitely does something.

Some questions about publicizing the Bengston Method

I just ran across an FAQ posted by Equilibrium Energy concerning the Bengston Method and I could not help but notice this paragraph:

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Bengston and the therapists he has trained successfully treated people with many types of cancer—bone, pancreatic, breast, brain, rectal, lymphatic, stomach, leukemia—as well as other diseases, all using this hands-on technique that is painless, noninvasive and has no unpleasant side effects. To Dr. Bengston’s knowledge, no person he has healed ever experienced a recurrence.

The reason I noticed it is because it's very close to a paragraph in the introduction to Bill Bengston's book The Energy Cure (also published as Chasing the Cure in Canada and Heilen aus dem Nichts in Germany) which reads

Over the past 30 years I’ve cured bone cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, rectal cancer, lymphatic cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia, all using hands-on techniques which are painless, noninvasive and have no unpleasant side effects. To my knowledge, no person I’ve healed has ever experienced a reoccurrence.

What has been added is the clear suggestion that the therapists Dr. Bengston has trained over the past three decades have been as successful as he is at treating these deadly cancers. [Note May 11th: I have now been advised in a comment that Dr. Bengston himself says this claim represents a misunderstanding of his work and is not accurate.]

I cannot comment on Dr. Bengston's successes, but I can certainly comment on the experiences of at least some of his therapists, since I and my colleagues have been among their number after six Toronto workshops in 2007 and 2008.

As I have pointed out several times in this blog, our experiences with the Bengston Method did not include successful cures of documented cancers. We have palliated, ameliorated, arguably extended life spans, but we did not cure any fully documented cancers. Does that translate into "successful treatment"? Coming to Toronto in 2007 Dr. Bengston never claimed that he has ever successfully taught anyone to cure cancer in humans. He only claimed that the skeptical students he trained for his experiments went on to cure transplanted breast cancer in mice (and even then he added that he could not be sure that it was his method that was responsible for the cures). I have not heard him claim otherwise in any of the interviews that I've listened to since then—but maybe I missed something.

Here is what he said about teaching healing in a talk he gave to his colleagues at the Society of Scientific Exploration. The relevant bit begins at 1 min. 9 secs.



I wish and hope for the sake of cancer sufferers everywhere that the authors of this FAQ are encountering greater success than we have in obtaining fully documented cancer cures using the Bengston Method—and given Sheldrake's morphic field theory ("the bigger the field, the bigger the effect") it could even be possible. But in publicizing the method I wish they would give us their own clinical experience and their own proof, limiting claims to what they can show to be true now. I'd be more than impressed if I were to read that in the past two years they've been able to cure X, Y, Z cancers and have the documentation to prove it. There is no need to go back 35 years.

Most people have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around the idea that Dr. Bengston has been curing the most terrifying cancers humanity has seen for 30-plus years. It is doubtful that raising the credibility bar by suggesting that his students have been doing likewise will help the cause. Even I'm left scratching my head wondering where this came from.

A cautionary tale

In the summer of 2008 we treated a stage-4 pancreatic cancer patient who we were told was on his deathbed. After we began treating him he miraculously rallied and was eventually discharged to go home. He stopped taking morphine five days after his first treatment. His jaundice reversed. He was able to get out of bed, walk to the park, go shopping, spend weekends at the cottage. He started thinking that he might even go back to work. Six weeks after we began treating him his blood values were nearly normal, but in the four weeks after that he developed septicemia and then suddenly died.

A few months later I found some promotional material on the internet relating to two workshops Dr. Bengston held that fall. In it the promoter excitedly proclaimed that our deceased patient was alive and well and back at work, fully recovered from his stage-4 pancreatic cancer. This claim was made a mere three weeks after our patient had passed away.

I don't believe that the person who wrote the promotional material meant to deceive anyone. I believe it was a case of "broken telephone" syndrome—someone acting on outdated information, not bothering to check with the source. In this way all information is suspect, except information that one is able to verify. I can't help but wonder whether our pancreatic cancer patient forms part of the 35 years of successes that this FAQ alludes to.

So please feel free to ask many, many questions and do not rest with the answer unless you've assured yourself that the person you are talking to is not basing their evidence on hearsay. And don't necessarily accept the answer "because Dr. Bengston says so" on face value either, because it could be that he is being misquoted. Inadvertently, of course.

"Appropriating" the teacher's experience

I know first hand the dangers of appropriating one's teacher's experiences and treating them as one's own. This is commonplace in energy healing. Many people assume that because a Richard Bartlett, a Bill Bengston, or an Eric Pearl can move mountains, taking a few workshops with them will enable anyone to do likewise. Yes, a few people can. Many cannot. So when I read in this FAQ that Dr. Bengston recommends eight treatments spaced one week apart, I ask whether that means that in the authors' experience eight treatments spaced one week apart are sufficient to cure particular cancers. In Dr. Bengston's talks "dose response" still sounds like an open question and in our experience different patients had different treatment requirements (we could treat a small tumour once a week, but when we switched a pancreatic cancer patient from five treatments a week to two or three, it shifted the equilibrium in favour of the cancer and his condition worsened). Or when I read that aggressive cancers respond quickly I have to ask whether that is also the authors' experience or they are merely repeating what Dr. Bengston says in his seminars. Have they tried and succeeded curing leukemia, brain and pancreatic cancer in a handful of treatments? The same goes for how tumours react and how the method works. I don't believe Dr. Bengston himself claims to know for certain how exactly what he does works—as any good scientist he only postulates and then tests hypotheses. I've never heard him say that the "energy hyper-cycles tumours out of the body"—he even questions whether what does the healing is in fact "energy".

I'd be curious to know the answers to these questions.

Postscript

A friend to whom I showed this post said that she would be hesitant to add to the morphic field of doubt concerning energy healing but thought that the questions I raise are reasonable. I try to walk a fine line in this blog between being enthusiastic and supportive of energy healing but also being level-headed about it. I probably more often than not fall over on the side of enthusiasm. And while I am enthusiastic about the future prospects of some of the methods I learned, including the Bengston Method, I would be leery about promoting them to cancer patients and care-givers as reliable cures. I don't think we are there yet. But I could be wrong.