17. Looking Back, Looking Forward

“Western civilization is virtually unique in history in its failure to recognize each human being as a subtle energy system in constant relationship to a vast sea of energies in the surrounding cosmos.”

—EDWARD MANN, Canadian sociologist and energy-healing historian

I began my apprenticeship in healing by helping Ben treat people who came to him with their afflictions. Ben’s inner guides were instinct and pragmaticism—what felt right combined with what worked.

After a few years in the clinical field, curiosity about the principles behind hands-on healing inspired me to turn to the laboratory. During the past thirty-five years, I have continued to switch back and forth from applied science to pure science, with questions from one leading to a search for answers in the other.

I’m now willing to sum up what I have learned in six propositions, listed here in descending order. In other words, I’m most certain about the first proposition and least certain about the last one.

1.Cancer can be cured using energy healing. Though my findings about humans in the clinical field are anecdotal, they reflect decades spent curing many kinds of cancers, with results often backed by systematic medical testing. From the laboratory, I have experimental proof conducted by trained, skeptical observers in five biological and medical institutions. A fatal injection for cancer is sixty thousand to one hundred thousand cells. In all our experiments, we used at least that maximum. Sometimes we used two hundred thousand cells; sometimes the mice were double injected, and even double injected with double-lethal doses.

2.Once an organism has been energy-cured of cancer, it is immune for life. To my knowledge, which is based on self-reporting, no person I’ve done healing work with for cancer has had a recurrence. In the lab, this also proved true with mice that were allowed to live a full life span. During experiments in the St. Joseph’s biology department, attempts to reinfect cured mice failed. At Terre Haute, implanting tumors from treated mice into untreated mice that had been injected with cancer cells seemed to transfer some kind of immunity: only three out of eight produced tumors. All my research points to an immune response. I will be flabbergasted if the mechanism of healing turns out to be something else.

3.Dose matters. For ethical reasons, I have never experimented with dose when dealing with people, opting instead to overtreat so I’m in alignment with my intention to provide the best possible outcome; however, in the biology lab at Terre Haute, Margaret Moga and I attempted to discover the least amount of treatment that would still be effective. When I treated one batch of twenty-five mice only a couple of times from a distance, a few deaths predictably occurred among those with the largest tumors.

4.The more aggressive the cancer, the faster it remits. When doing healing work with humans, I found that aggressive cancers like blastoma remitted faster than slowly developing ones like prostate cancer. This corresponds with laboratory evidence gained treating mice. Since mice injected with mammary cancer had only a fourteen- to twenty-seven-day lifespan as opposed to forty-five to fifty days for sarcoma, I judge mammary cancer to be the more aggressive. In all my experiments, mammary cancer remitted faster.

5.Cancer remits in bursts. My gross observation both in applying hands-on healing with humans and mice is that periods in which nothing seemed to happen were followed by dramatic change. This appears to be supported by my experiments with geomagnetometers that were put next to mice cages: 20 to 30 hertz oscillations would suddenly slow, at unpredictable intervals, to 8 to 9 hertz, and then to 1 hertz. Similarly, my EEG experiments showed a sudden anomalous switch to pulsations in the 8 hertz range. Though equating these sudden spikes with healing requires a leap of faith, the findings are suggestive.

6.Some types of energy healing may not be compatible with some conventional medical procedures. When my hands-on treatments for cancer were allowed to run their full course, my only clinical failures occurred with patients who had received radiation or chemotherapy. This supports Ben’s and my subjective feeling that the energy systems of such patients had been depleted beyond our ability to restore them to health. My assumption is that hands-on treatments nurture the immune system, in contrast to chemotherapy and radiation, which unavoidably kill healthy cells along with the targeted cancer cells.

Though I caution once again that I have listed these propositions in declining order of certainty, I have no doubt about the first one. Energy healing is a reality. As a result, many questions need to be systematically explored with suitable lab facilities, qualified personnel, and stable funding.

Here are a few such questions:

•How many treatments are necessary to produce remission? Is it better to have many short treatments or a few longer ones?

•How do different types of cancer respond to the same treatments?

•If remissions can be produced from a distance, does the rate of remission vary with distance? Some psychic researchers say distance is irrelevant for all psychic phenomena. My clinical experience is consistent with this claim.

•Do multiple healers add to the positive effects of energy treatment? Claims are conflicting.

• If a lab animal with cancer is irradiated, will energy treatments be effective?

•Can the effects of treatment be stored in some materials, then transferred to an organism? If so, what materials work best? In Grad’s pioneering work at McGill, he found that healer Oskar Estebany could transfer healing effects to water and cotton. My UConn experiments with water and my clinical work with cotton seem to verify these findings.

•Do some materials block the healing effect? Answering this question might shed light on healing’s fundamental properties.

•Can healing energy be detected and measured? Many claims for measurable “subtle energy” have been put forward over the decades, but none have gained general acceptance.

•Can hands-on treatment before cancer occurs create immunity? My guess is that it cannot, because healing energy responds to the current needs of an organism.

•Can immunity be inherited? Can an organism that has been cured pass on resistance to the next and subsequent generations?

•Can blood transplanted from an organism that has remitted produce remissions in an untreated one? If so, can a vaccine be made from this blood that will produce remissions in another? This could be the billion-dollar question!

New York cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz has predicted that energy healing, which is basic to the East, will become the cutting edge of Western medicine. As he has also noted: while financial systems and manufacturing are global, medicine remains national and local.

This observation suggests that health care is controlled more by tradition and politics than by scientific data. As more than one doctor has confessed after taking one of my workshops, “If I introduce energy healing into my practice, I could lose my medical license.” Tough restrictions govern doctors in New York, whereas in Arizona the field is much more open. How scientific is that?

This top-down lock also limits research. It’s far harder for me to get funding, lab space, and experimental animals than it is for researchers who want to test drugs, despite my past successes and the obvious fact that hands-on healing is easier on the animals.

All fields of science—physics, chemistry, biology—fiercely protect their orthodoxies. Any findings that don’t fit are deemed not to have happened. In the medical field, this is exacerbated by the grip of the pharmaceutical industry. Fortunately this seems to be weakening due to drug recalls, unforeseen side effects, false claims, and favorable results too obviously tied to drug-company funding.

I am, of course, aware of legitimate problems of acceptance with energy healing. The first hurdle is what I call the “boggle effect.” The idea of curing cancer with hands-on healing is just too good to be true. I get that. A physicist friend of mine is working on a system that he says will beat the second law of thermodynamics and produce endless amounts of nonpolluting energy. That boggles my mind, but either he can produce the data or he can’t. Most of the big discoveries in science turn their fields upside down, but those on the inside usually ignore the anomalies until these can’t be ignored any longer.

The same attitude prevails with respect to unusual abilities. If a savant can instantly come up with the square root of a seven-digit number or play a complicated musical composition after hearing it once, that person should be given center stage, not turned into a freaky sideshow. How does he do this amazing thing? Why can’t we all do it? Can we find out how this happens in order to apply it? If Ben could heal hands-on, why can’t everyone? Can this skill be analyzed and taught to others?

The second obvious problem with energy healing is determining who is qualified to practice. Currently anyone can claim to be a healer, whether through genuine ability, fraud, or self-delusion.

I would like to see the development of tests that can show “something” relevant is happening when healing is supposed to be occurring. For example, after I held a beaker of water for several minutes, a chemist friend reported that the water’s oxygenization had increased 25 percent. When he tested other healers, increased oxygenization also occurred, but only by about 1 percent. Does this have anything to do with healing? The field is still too mysterious for us to know.

So many questions ... Over the next few years, I hope to find some of the answers.