12. From the Casebook
A predictable result of my going semipublic was a sudden increase in the number of people who wanted me to treat them.
Probably my most bizarre case was Jerry from Connecticut. As an X-ray technician who contracted out his services, he had an inexhaustible supply of doctors he could consult, including a number of psychiatrists who routinely diagnosed him as unbalanced and prescribed medications. He had also been having bloodwork done almost every week and had undergone so many X-rays I’m surprised he didn’t glow in the dark. I didn’t ask to see his records, but I knew he had been working his way down the clinical ladder until he came to me. From his demeanor it was clear that psychologically he was hanging by a thread.
As soon as I put my hands on Jerry’s shoulders, I had the weirdest feeling. “I don’t know how to tell you this. I sense something in your head. The best description I can give is that of a vibrating egg. The pointy end is slanting at about thirty degrees toward your eyes.”
Jerry started to cry. “That’s it! Nobody ever believed me. Phone my doctor! You’ve got to phone my doctor.”
I could imagine the conversation. “I don’t think that’s going to help your case with him.”
“Then I’ll have him call you!”
And he did. A clipped, clinical voice informed me, “I’m phoning about my patient Jerry...”
I immediately began the defense. “This call was not my recommendation. I can only report what I observed.” Despite my disclaimers, my explanation sounded surreal even to my ears. “I sometimes get sensations when I work on people. Coincidentally or not, they confirm what Jerry experiences.”
Naturally, the doctor assumed I was as unbalanced as Jerry, or perhaps in collusion with him.
I certainly didn’t believe, without evidence, that Jerry had a physical egg in his head. Perhaps the image was so vivid to him that he was able to convey it to me. Perhaps his brain was trying to make sense of some kind of neural experience the rest of us routinely filter out. In any event, the egg was real enough to profoundly affect Jerry’s life. He was desperate, so I treated him once a week for quite a few months until he was cured. By then he had latched onto me, which occasionally happens, and I had to forcefully discharge him. I was afraid he might come back with something else—scrambled eggs, a whole omelet—but that didn’t happen.
Jerry’s problems reminded me of a case of spirit possession, real or imagined, that Ben and I cured many years previous. Tom and Ellen, a New Jersey couple, were absolutely convinced that Donny, their poorly behaved adolescent son, was possessed by a demonic spirit. They had felt its presence. They had seen it. So had Donny. I’m not sure who got the idea first, but by the time they called Ben and me, the situation was very intense.
When Ben began describing the spirit as an angry-looking boy, it was like a preview of my experience with Jerry and the egg. All three started shouting, “That’s it! That’s it!” Since Ben and I weren’t faith based, he attempted to persuade the angry spirit to seek out another spirit as a better match for himself and to leave the kid alone. That seemed to work. The parents were happy. The kid was happy. There didn’t seem to be any downside—unless, of course, the spirit actually was demonic, and he and his new pal ganged up on someone else.
I lump these cases together because of their nonphysical elements. In our culture, we are programmed to seek out ministers and priests for spiritual help, therapists and psychiatrists for psychological help, and medical doctors for physical help, reinforcing the illusion that these are separate categories. Most practitioners soon discover that these fields overlap, giving them a choice between strict adherence to the rules of their discipline, or a certain flexibility in serving the real needs of their clients.
After a seminar in which I jokingly confessed that I had never been able to cure a wart, a dermatologist described to me how he had cured a patient who was covered with them. He instructed the patient: Take an apple. Place it like this. Cut it like this. Do this four times a day. To make sure the patient precisely performed the elaborate ritual, they practiced together in his office.
As the doctor hoped, and the patient expected, the warts soon began to disappear. The doctor had responded to the real needs of the patient, based on his own life experience and what he understood to be the patient’s belief system. He had also taken a personal risk. If he had tried this routine on the next patient, he might have faced a malpractice suit.
While I consider flexibility to be a virtue, I also know my limitations—not necessarily those of the energy, but of me as a person and a healer. Sometimes when I touch people, they have flashbacks to events or emotions they have repressed. While I have no problem with their expressing these feelings, I leave the interpretation to others.
My most dramatic reaction to hands-on treatment came from a woman in her fifties who I can only describe as a tumor factory. As fast as they were surgically removed, others would grow in their place—all benign. Since Greta and I played tennis together, I could tell that she was sometimes in pain. By then, she’d had five or six operations, which hadn’t solved her problem and had resulted in a mass of scar tissue.
Greta was a very private person with a diamond-sharp mind and complex eyes that looked out from a thundercloud that perpetually hung over her head. She had an extremely dark and traumatic past, having to do with the politics of another country, of which I was unaware when I offered to treat her. As I reached out to touch her in the sanctuary of her own home, she began shrieking, “Keep your filthy hands off me!” I was startled, to say the least. Her world and mine were obviously not the same.
After we both got over our shock, Greta mustered enough trust to allow me to treat her about a half-dozen times. I banished her latest crop of tumors, and as far as I know she never developed any more. Were Greta’s tumors the result of her traumatic past, or were they caused by exposure to some toxic substance? Was my treatment physical or emotional? My best guess is that it might have been both.
I am sometimes asked if curing people of one ailment only leads to their replacing it with another. Perhaps. But if that’s their need, they’re canny enough not to return to me with the replacement symptom. Some problems, like alcohol or drug addiction, have obvious psychological as well as physical elements. With those, I concentrate on helping the person overcome his or her cravings, while insisting they work hard at cycling. If I’m treating you for a lump, you may get away with being passive, but curing addiction requires you to change who you are, and that needs constant reinforcement.
I’m still frustrated by people who quit treatments that are producing positive results. A colleague asked me to help a relative who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive, wasting disorder that attacks muscles and nerves. After I treated Bert a few times over a couple of days, he was able to use a knife and fork to feed himself. He was astonished. My friend was astonished. But Bert didn’t return for his next treatment. Eventually I received an e-mail saying he might be able to fit me in some time. That didn’t happen.
For the record, as well as treating people and mice, I have also successfully treated a rabbit. One woman drove five hours from Philadelphia with her sick bunny, which I cured of whatever ailed it. Though I wouldn’t expect a rabbit to return my calls, I never cease to be amazed when people I have successfully treated fail to respond to my follow-up inquiries, possibly because they’ve convinced themselves it was really the carrot juice that healed them. One friend, whose breast cancer I had cured, didn’t want me to treat her husband, hospitalized for chest pains suffered while jogging. As she snapped, “Then both of us would owe you our lives!”
Far from expecting enduring gratitude, I file my healing experiences in a different neural cabinet from my ordinary memories, so I’m more inclined to forget a case unless something triggers my memory.
I’m always frustrated when unnecessary delay changes a treatable problem to one with an uncertain prognosis. This is especially true with injuries, because the situation is so dynamic. Whereas you didn’t get Alzheimer’s last Tuesday, that might have been the fateful day you fell from a ladder and broke your neck. Wednesday will be quite different from Monday. Time is of the essence because everything is still fluid.
I remember Ben and I treating a woman who had recently been blinded by trauma to her eyes. Monica could tell the difference between day and night, but she couldn’t distinguish movement or shapes. Doctors had told her that the chances of her sight returning were not good. Within the first half hour of our first treatment, Monica pointed to her father and blurted out, “Person!” He was so moved he broke down sobbing.
Ben and I treated Monica once more that first day, and several times the following day. After that she could distinguish shapes and colors, allowing her to walk across the room without bumping into things. Eventually she regained functional vision.
I believe much of our rapid success was due to the freshness of Monica’s wounds. We saw her within a week of her injury, before her brain and body had identified her as blind. Energetically, her memory and attitude was that of a fully functioning person with a temporary problem that just needed to be fixed.
Contrast Monica’s case with that of Gordon, who had a ski injury that supposedly left him permanently paralyzed. A mutual friend, who sometimes does energy healing, thought Gordon could be helped, but only if treated immediately because the window of opportunity was a sliding one. My gut instinct confirmed that diagnosis.
Since distance was a factor, Gordon kept putting off his visit to me while exploring medical options closer at hand. Essentially, these well-intentioned procedures helped Gordon—once an athlete—to cope as a cripple: here’s how to use your arms to lift yourself into your wheelchair; here’s how to rearrange your house. By the time I did get to see him, more than a year had elapsed, during which Gordon had become his injury. He was a handicapped person rather than a well person trying to solve a problem, and I knew that a critical part of any treatment would have to be uncrippling Gordon’s mind. This meant his envisioning himself standing up, walking around, even skiing, with cycling as a paramount part of the treatment. Unfortunately, Gordon was no longer up for that kind of challenge.
Kyle’s case was yet another in which delay became a formidable enemy. He had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of metastatic bone cancer that I had cured a number of times; however, before we could set up an appointment, he booked himself into an experimental clinic in California. After that he went to Mexico for some drugs, then on to Santa Fe for a chemical cocktail of this or that. By the time he got around to me, he had grown so many cancers that his doctors couldn’t count them all. He had also undergone chemotherapy. I treated him a couple of times but could do nothing for him.
My belief that I can’t cure anyone who has had radiation or chemotherapy may be a self-limiting one. Perhaps as a healer, I have crippled my own mind through negative thinking. Whatever the reason, this illusion or reality lies at the root of some of my biggest disappointments. Unlike Monica, who lost her sight through trauma, eight-year-old Jenny was going blind from a tumor on her optic nerve. She had received chemotherapy, and even though I treated her once a week for a number of months, I just couldn’t get the energy moving. Since her parents were willing to do whatever it took, they flew her to Europe, then to Mexico, for experimental treatments. Last I heard, her sight was deteriorating.
Lucien’s case was more baffling, at least at the outset. An interpreter phoned me from France on Lucien’s behalf. Then the two of them flew to New York, where I treated Lucien over several days for what should have been a routine case of liver cancer. Even though something didn’t feel right, and Lucien didn’t seem to be benefiting, he invited me to Paris for more treatments. That’s when I discovered how completely and perhaps dangerously I had been deceived. Not only had Lucien undergone chemotherapy, but he actually had a chemo pump implanted in his chest! Now, that’s not subtle. My treatments might even have been undermining the effects of the chemo, giving Lucien the worst of both worlds.
A pleasant sidebar to my trip to Paris was an opportunity to visit Jacques Benveniste, an immunologist internationally respected for his research on allergies and asthma. Respected, that is, until some of his findings caused him to veer into alternative medicine.
While Benveniste was head of France’s government-sponsored Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), he accidentally discovered what became known in scientific circles as the “high-dilution effect.” This means that water might retain a “memory” of a substance (antibodies, chemicals) that it once contained, even after being so diluted that not a single molecule of the original substance remained. He demonstrated this through an allergy test, which worked even when all the molecules of the allergen had been eliminated. As he summed up, “A person can enter a room two days after a cat has left it and still suffer an allergic response.”
By extension, Benveniste’s discovery supported the homeopathic belief that illness can be treated with solutions so dilute they appear to be pure water. This finding, replicated in a number of laboratories, caused an uproar in scientific circles.
Undeterred, Benveniste refocused all his INSERM research on proving that water can, indeed, carry biological information. As he indicated, the stakes were high: “This [the INSERM] is the only group that is researching at a basic level problems that affect 15 percent of the population. At the same time, one billion francs are spent on pharmaceuticals for allergy each year.”
When more laboratories attempted to replicate Benveniste’s findings, the results were mixed. The INSERM sacked him as a figure of scorn.
When I met with Jacques in Paris, he was working in a lab not much bigger than a trailer and scrambling for funding. At his request, I held a test tube of water for a few minutes, then gave it to a technician who scurried off with it. I was later informed that I had increased the amount of information the water could hold by about 50 percent—a finding mystifying to me, and so surprising to Jacques that he reported it to a 2000 SSE meeting in Amsterdam, where we met once again.
I was saddened when Jacques unexpectedly died in 2004, at age sixty-nine. In mourning his passing, Le Monde stated that the world of biology had lost “one of its most brilliant, original, and impassioned researchers.” I hope this will be seen as the first step in rehabilitating the reputation of a courageous man whose final years proved, as Andrew Greeley previously observed, that science is a faith-based system with gatekeepers ever ready to persecute its heretics.
Bennett Mayrick in the mid-1970s
Bill Bengston
Typical mouse with mammary adenocarcinoma, 14 days subsequent to injection
Same mouse as above, 28 days subsequent to injection and showing the beginning of
tumor ulceration
Same mouse 35 days subsequent to injection and showing full ulceration
Bill applying a hands-on healing session to lab mice
Example of very rapid-healing mouse, 22 days subsequent to injection
Same mouse as above, 6 days later, completely healed