Further commentary on Bill Bengston's Chasing the Cure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A personal postscript

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

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

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

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

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

William Bengston, Chasing the Cure: A commentary

William Bengston's book Chasing the Cure, co-written with Canadian author Sylvia Fraser, is due to hit bookstores next month. The Canadian publisher of the book has chosen to give it the eye-catching subtitle An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases, which is a change from an earlier subtitle, A Passionate Quest to Prove that Hands-On Healing Can Cure Cancer and Other Diseases.

Is the book about An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer and Other Diseases? Certainly (and astonishingly so), if you are a mouse injected with mammary adenocarcinoma (H2712; host strain C3H/HeJ from Jackson Labs) in one of Dr. Bengston's experiments. If you are that mouse, your chances of full life-span remission are nearly one hundred per cent, and you would be in a small but select group, because the mice injected with this cancer are usually doomed to certain death. But if you are a human being looking at a recent cancer diagnosis, it's early days yet: the method has not been tested on people.

While the remission of these mice is of huge and unprecedented significance for cancer research, a treatment cannot be called an effective alternative to the current medical model, until it has shown reliability and replicability in humans. In other words it has to be available to more than a few selected cancer patients, and it has to be proven effective in the hands of more than one or two individual practitioners. Human remissions need to be documented in dozens, if not hundreds, of cases (= reliability), treated not only by Dr. Bengston himself, but also independently by others who have learned his method (= replicability).

Further, scientific minds would want to see controlled studies done in human populations, which may not even be ethically possible, given that participating cancer patients would be required to receive no conventional medical treatment for the study's duration.

I note that a pharmaceutical company would not be allowed to market a drug it has only tested on mice as an "effective alternative for treating cancer" no matter how successful its animal testing has been.

To be fully accurate, the subtitle would have to say An Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in Mice and a Potentially Effective Alternative for Treating Cancer in People because in the Absence of Documented Human Studies We Can't Really Say So for Sure. Or better yet, since that would clearly take up most of the cover, why not simply add a question mark to the existing title?

The promise of what Dr. Bengston has to offer is that if his ability to affect cancer could be taught, then a relatively easy, inexpensive and side-effect free form of cancer treatment would be in the hands of the many, creating a grass-roots medical revolution. Many years ago, after a series of experiments involving mice and skeptical volunteers, Dr. Bengston believed that he had achieved just that. But since then, he has said in talks and papers that he has not proven to his own satisfaction that he met all the criteria to show that he had indeed taught the volunteers to heal. (See now part two of his talk "Healing and the Mainstream" on Youtube.)

And when it comes to healing people of cancer, we do not yet know with what effectiveness Dr. Bengston's ability can be taught or transferred. The book ends without delving into what happened when in a two-year "sociological experiment" Dr. Bengston tried to teach people to apply his method not to mice but to humans. I was present for the first year and a half of that experiment. Suffice to say that there were questions and practical challenges, as well as what Dr. Bengston would call "interesting" results, including a temporary remission termed "a miracle" by the patient's own physician.

In my opinion there still remains a good deal of work to be done to tease out the full possibilities of this healing method, but Dr. Bengston, with his scientific mindset and his experiments, is uniquely positioned to be able to do just that. Let's hope he takes up the challenge.


Postscript The title of the American edition will be The Energy Cure: One Man's Quest to Unravel the Mystery of Hands-On Healing. That subtitle makes more sense to me, but the word "cure" in the title is open to the same questions and caveats as "effective alternative treatment" would be.

PostscriptThe German edition is now out under the title Heilen aus dem Nichts, or Healing from Nowhere. There is no mention of cancer in the German promotional material on amazon.de, but the method is said to be particularly effective for serious illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis. This is odd, given that the heart of the book is to be found in Dr. Bengston's experiments with cancer in mice, and that in his introduction Dr. Bengston says that with chronic diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and arthritis he is only able to alleviate symptoms up to about 50 per cent -- and heart disease is not even mentioned.

Dr. Bill Bengston on using energy for curing cancer in humans

Healing Humans

The eight hundred pound gorilla in the middle of the room is the question of whether any of this works on people ...

As I noted at the beginning, my experimental work grew out of clinical observations and my frustrations at not being able to isolate what works and why through clinical observation. Certainly people have been taught my techniques and applied them to people with some interesting anecdotal results. But to a researcher anecdotes are simply not enough. At what point will there be enough evidence to do a controlled study on people? I don’t think the question has a clear answer. While my passion is in the lab, I would certainly be open to some clinical trials. But in my experience watching human cancers being treated decades ago, my anecdotal clinical observation was that the most successful remissions were all associated with a lack of conventional treatments whose purpose was to kill cancer cells. When people speak of “complementary medicine,” perhaps the methods I am aware of are not really complementary to the current crop of conventional treatments. If that turns out to be so, then the difficulties of carrying out successful clinical trials are greatly compounded. I don’t yet know how to solve this problem. I do know that it is a problem worth pursuing.

This is excerpted from an article by Dr. William Bengston entitled "Breakthrough: Clues to Healing with Intention" in an e-journal called EdgeScience. If you are curious about some of the anecdotal evidence that exists for the Bengston method, read the early entries of this blog. We certainly would like to see the human clinical trials done that Dr. Bengston refers to, as we believe that the treatment of cancer through energy healing is a grail worth striving for.

Update on June 9th post

On June 9th I wrote about a little tyke we were asked to treat who was suffering from neuroblastoma. It is now four months later and the poor little guy has gone through hell and back, with five courses of aggressive chemo and surgery, with more to follow. The word had gone out that he needed help, and innumerable people have been praying for him and sending him healing energy.

Well, it turns out that with all the treatment he has been receiving, allopathic and alternative, his nasty tumour had shrunk by 97% prior to surgery. The incision surgeons needed to make was half the length they originally thought it would have to be and the surgery was hours shorter than they expected. I was originally concerned about using Bengston bioenergy to treat him because of Dr. Bengston's caveats about mixing his method with allopathic treatment, so I forwarded the call for help to the Therapeutic Touch network, and I've been told that a large number of other people have been using other methods to try and help, including straightforward prayer and Reiki.

The huge shrinkage in the tumour is great news, but I am sorry that he had to suffer as much as he did to get this far. His mom posts pictures of him regularly, and the change in him is heartbreaking. He is a little trooper, but his eyes tell the story of someone who has suffered greatly.

More practical challenges in using bioenergy to treat cancer

We have now seen this pattern several times, so it's worth mentioning. We treat someone with some kind of aggressive, scary cancer, and it seems to halt temporarily or significantly slow down, with the added side effect that the patient has a much improved (sometimes near normal) quality of life. Then the person decides to take a break from treatment because it doesn't seem necessary, or because they go on holidays, or the weather is inclement making driving difficult. During this break the cancer resurges. The patient then begins to doubt the efficacy of the treatment and quits for good. So in effect the patient quits because the treatment didn't work when we didn't do it. That's like saying aspirin doesn't work because your headache didn't go away when you didn't take it.

There is a kind of magical thinking applied to energy healing that is not applied to more orthodox therapies. The expectations are different: you will give your physiotherapist six to twelve weeks to fix your bad back or wonky knee, but if I can't fix it in one shot with a bioenergy therapy, you won't come back to see me the second time. Granted, cancer is a bit more complex. But people don't seem to appreciate the significance of a therapy that seems to halt it temporarily or to slow it down without the side effects of radiation or chemo, and gives the patient a decent quality of life and some extra time. The thinking seems to be that if you can't make it go away, the treatment is not worthwhile. At the same time, this thinking is not applied to the conventional therapies now being used, which more often than not give the patient extra time with decreased quality of life, and sometimes decreased quality of life with no extra time at all.

Why it's hard to know ...

This is why it's hard to know what works ...

I am treating someone who has lung cancer, using the Domancic Method because the person is also receiving chemotherapy and the use of the Bengston Method is contraindicated during conventional treatment. In addition to the chemo and the energy treatments, the patient is also receiving intravenous vitamin C. After one chemo session the tumours have shown sign of shrinkage. Both the Domancic treatments and the intravenous vitamin C were started not long before the chemo. So, what worked? To make matters even more interesting, the chemotherapy drug is an experimental one. So if the cancer remits, the experimental drug will be credited for the remission, and this case will form part of the statistical analysis. In the meantime, the patient feels good and has no significant side effects from the chemotherapy. Onwards and upwards, keeping the clinicians happy and the experimentalists confounded.

I think what we are doing here is called "integrated medicine".

UPDATE Nov. 17: Unfortunately the lack of significant side effects from chemo did not continue. After the second round of chemotherapy the patient developed pneumonia and I haven't heard anything more since then.

Oh the heartbreak ...

About two weeks ago we were told about a little boy with neuroblastoma who was about to start very aggressive chemotherapy treatment for a very aggressive cancer. We hoped to be able to treat him before he started chemo, but alas found out afterwards that he was already on day 4 of his chemotherapy treatment. Now he is 10 days post-chemo. His immune system has been completely wiped out, he has had a high fever for days, he has no appetite and he is in pain. And when he recovers from the effects of his first treatment, they plan to do the same thing to him five more times, followed by surgery, followed by radiation, followed by more chemo. And he is just a little tike, knee high to a grasshopper. His poor parents are beside themselves with anxiety and helplessness watching their little one going through this hell.

For me, this has been my first up-close encounter with the effects of chemotherapy. I am speechless. I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can call this medicine. Who on earth decided that poisoning people is the best way of curing anything? Whatever happened to "first do no harm"? Why isn't medicine looking more closely at energy therapies like the Bengston Technique and the Domancic Method that claim to be able to cure cancer without causing the patient all this harm and suffering?

I wish we had been given a chance to treat the little guy before conventional medicine had a go at him. I know they mean well, but what they are doing to save him is just devastating.