252. Bernadette Doran on Energy Healing

Interview with energy healing researcher and practitioner examines the Bengston Method of energy healing.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Bernadette Doran of Equilibrium Energy + Education.  The interview is included in Tsakiris’ soon to be published book, Why Science is Wrong: About Almost Everything:

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Like a lot of middle-aged men, I don’t like going to the doctor. But, in 2013, I started experiencing severe heart palpitations. I felt like I was having a heart attack 3-4 times a day, and I knew I had to see a physician. After looking up the name of my doctor who I hadn’t seen in 5 years, I made an appointment. It’s amazing how quickly they schedule your visit when you tell them you’re a man in his fifties with heart pains.

After a few in-office tests and an EKG test, my doctor could find nothing wrong with me and sent me home. I was relieved but still concerned. Despite the tests, I was still experiencing strong heart palpitations every day.

After a couple of months I went back to my doctor and said, “Look, I know you didn’t find anything the first time but I’m concerned, and I am not generally someone who obsesses about their health.” My doctor did another exam. Then she ran another EKG. Then she came back in, listened very carefully to my heart, and said, “We have got to get you right over to the cardiologist. You need to go now. We’re scheduling an appointment for you.” My sense of satisfaction about being right about my condition quickly turned to fear about what was going to come next.

Of course, medical stories like mine often have twists and turns. With me, Obama-Care intervened. Within hours after my appointment with the cardiologist was set, I received a call back telling me Obama-Care laws had gone into effect that very day, and my insurance was no longer in effect at that hospital. I called my insurance agent and found myself in insurance limbo. I would have to either change health care systems, including switching the doctors that everyone in my family had used for years, or I would have to wait 30 days for my new insurance to take effect. I decided to wait – a decision completely against my doctor’s advice. In fact, she called me up and told me, “Okay, if you have a heart attack here is what to do… Here is what to tell the ambulance.” I was starting to question my decision, and that’s when I remembered my interview with Dr. William Bengston.

 Dr. William Bengston, Energy Healing

Dr. William Bengston is a sociology professor at St. Joseph’s College in New York who stumbled upon some amazing discoveries about energy healing. He’s a top-notch scientist and a stickler for methods and statistics. In fact, he’s so highly regarded by his peers that he’s been twice elected the president of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group of impressive academics and researchers who apply a tight peer-review process to exploring areas of science deemed taboo by the mainstream.

After interviewing Bengston in 2008, I was so impressed by his methods and his results that I made a personal vow to give his healing techniques a try if I ever had a serious medical condition. But before I tell you the rest of the story and what happened to me, let me tell you why I was so impressed with Dr. Bengston’s research and why it offers another compelling reason why we must dispense with this mind-equals-brain silliness science-as-we-know-it is mired in.

Me: Tell us a little bit about your background, particularly in sociology and how that’s served you as you’ve tried to wrap your arms around this healing experience that you have.

Dr. William Bengston: Well, I’m traditionally trained in sociology, which means you generally have a specialization or two and then it’s pretty much assumed that you’ll become technically proficient in designing studies and data analysis and things along those lines. I actually went a little bit farther down those lines. I’m kind of interested in advanced statistical modeling. I don’t know that the sociology training, other than focusing me on becoming very, very rigorous, really helped in healing. I didn’t see that as a career path.

Me: But what also struck me about your story is that I don’t think many people would encounter someone who claims to do energy healing and immediately go, “Great. Well, let’s run an experiment.” Tell us how you got interested in energy healing.

Dr. Bengston: I ran into a guy who claimed that he had become spontaneously psychic. And I was skeptical. I always begin from a skeptical point of view, so I gave him a couple of things very informally to do readings on and such. I couldn’t trip him up. It was very annoying. So he would do readings on personal items, wallets, and rings and things like that and tell too many detailed things. I then defaulted to, “how am I deluding myself? How can I make this effect go away?”

So I designed, for example, a double-blind study at the hospital where patients coming in would sign a blank index card. That would be put into an opaque envelope, which would then be put into another opaque envelope, and then I would pick up the opaque envelopes. I wouldn’t have any idea even if it was a male or a female. I gave these to this newly minted psychic and he would do a physical [psychic] reading on them. Then I probably broke a whole lot of laws and had somebody on the inside look at the medical records to see if he was accurate.

Me: Bill, what kind of reading would he give? What would he say if he has an envelope inside an envelope with an index card and just someone’s name scribbled on it? What kind of information could he give you?

Dr. Bengston: Oh, he would give detailed information. He would say, “You’ve got a gall bladder problem.” Something along those lines. So he’d say, “The lungs are filled with fluid.” He would say, “There’s pain in this area.” Things along those lines. “There’s a tumor that is located here.”

It was particularly startling when I went back and got the confirmation of this. I actually thought I had him in a mistake but the hospital had made a mistake. So the person that he had diagnosed was accurate. The hospital had made a misdiagnosis. I came back a month later and found out that his original idea was right.

Me: Amazing.

Dr. Bengston: Yeah. It was pretty nutty. So I couldn’t make the effect go away, which was pretty annoying. And so I started to pay attention to this guy and he was doing these physical [psychic] readings. This naturally morphed into the people he was doing physical [psychic] readings on were claiming that the conditions were being helped on their end. And both he and I thought that was nuts.

So let’s say someone has a migraine headache and he does a reading on a person who has a migraine headache. He doesn’t know they have a migraine headache; he’s holding something of theirs and he would get the headache. And the people would say, “At such-and-such hour my headache left.” It was too coincidental. At a particular hour he would get it and it would leave them. We’re scratching our heads going, “What could this mean?”

Me: You know, one of the amazing things about this whole account, this whole story of yours is that it’s so counter to New-Age-ish ideas about energy healing. Here are two guys who are saying, “What the heck’s going on? Healing? What does that have to do with anything?” You’re not getting any kind of divine guidance here. You’re not even looking in that direction, and yet the data, as you say, is just pulling you there. So what’s the next step for you in trying to make this technique operational? How did you get pulled into it?

Dr. Bengston: I got pulled into it by having myself fixed. I had had a chronically bad back for a bunch of years, and I had previously been a competitive swimmer and had to give up competitive swimming because of the bad back. As this guy, Bennett, and I are going through doing these readings and such and gathering all these silly anecdotes, suddenly it occurred to me, you big dope, you’re in pain all the time. Ask the guy to try to help. So I thought, “Maybe if I give him something he’ll do a reading on me and maybe he can help my back.”

He picked up the pain just as I thought of that. I didn’t actually give him an object. I said, “Put your hands on my back,” and he said, “And do what?”

And I said, “I don’t know. Fix it.”

And so he put his hands on my back, and quite astonishingly he did fix it. I was the first person he ever deliberately healed with hands-on.

So we went from this and said, “What do we do with this?” We started to watch people put hands on other people and see what happens. Sometimes pain was alleviated, sometimes fast and sometimes not so fast. And in watching this on a couple hundred people, patterns started to emerge; for example, malignant growths responded very, very quickly. Benign growths didn’t.

So if he put his hands, for example, on a wart, nothing would happen. Nothing at all. If he put his hands on a lump that turned out through medical diagnosis to be malignant, the thing would respond very, very quickly and dramatically. And so it turned out that some things he could do and some things he couldn’t do, and among the things he was particularly good at were malignant tumors.

Me: Bill, tell us a little bit about the experiments that you’ve run clinically. People need to know these are experiments you’ve run clinically in university labs. This isn’t just a guy in his kitchen doing healings. You’ve run some pretty rigorous experiments. Tell us about some of those.

Dr. Bengston: Starting from these clinical observations, and they were kind of case-by-case relatively haphazard observations that, for example, malignant growths respond quickly and benign growths don’t respond so quickly or sometimes not at all, I thought to myself, “How are we going to get a handle on this? How are we going to go from a haphazard kind of experience to very controlled conditions?”  I wanted an absolute air-tight, no question about it, test that if it worked you didn’t have a viable counter-hypothesis. So we’re not talking about, “Eh, that was interesting,”, but rather a slam dunk.

Since this guy seemed to be particularly good on malignant growths, I thought, “Let’s see if we can get a study with malignant growths under controlled laboratory conditions.” So a friend of mine, Dave Krinsley, was associated with City University of New York in an academic professorship and he called in a bunch of favors there with the biology department and said, “Where can we get really an airtight, no question about it, really tight experimental model?”

They were working for 20 years on a particular mammary cancer in laboratory mice and they knew exactly what was going to happen. There were literally thousands of published studies on these mice. They get injected with a particular form of cancer, they’re particularly bred—they’re actually pretty inbred—and after they’re injected you know exactly what’s going to happen. The tumor’s going to grow; it’s going to be non-metastatic; it’s going to kill the mouse in a certain number of days.

At the time we started this, the record living mouse was 27 days. No mouse in literally thousands of experiments had lived longer than 27 days after injection with this particular mammary cancer. And you knew exactly how many mice would die and what particular day after injection because it’s, again, very well documented, found in labs all over the world. So we said, “This is perfect.”

The mice presumably don’t believe much. We didn’t believe much. We were just observing. Maybe this doesn’t make any difference with the healer or the healer’s beliefs. Let’s find out if there’s a real underlying biological mechanism going on.

So it turned out that this original guy, Bennett, was not particularly interested in doing experiments. I’d dragged him from lab to lab and I think I pushed too many buttons. He kind of backed out. Then I was left with experimental mice and no healer. That was a dilemma. It was actually borderline panic.

Since I had spent the most time with this guy, Krinsley suggested, “Well, you do it.”

I thought, “Me? I’m not a healer.“ You introduce me as somebody who has healing ability, I’ve actually never thought of myself as someone with healing ability. It’s just this stuff happens when you do this stuff. It’s not my identity in any way, shape, or form. So I just kind of hang around and you can produce healing if you need to.

So I put my hands around the cages of the mice for about an hour a day. I suspected at the time that healing, if it were to work, would be something analogous to radiation. So if you take mice and you radiate them, you can kill radiated cells. I thought, “Well, if we get these mice close enough to their injection time and we zap them, as it were, with healing then maybe something like radiation occurs and we’re killing the cancer.“ Something along those lines.

But instead, the cancer started to grow and I thought it was failing. So the tumors grew and I said, “Well, give it a shot. It didn’t work and so it goes.” And I said, “Let’s call it off. Why put the mice through this?”

I got talked into going a little longer. The tumors kept growing, and I kept thinking, “Well, this doesn’t work.“ And I kept treating anyway. The tumors got bigger and bigger. Thought it wasn’t working. Then they developed this ulceration on the tumor and I really thought it wasn’t working. The ulceration grew and the tumor imploded and the mice were completely cured.

Me: Unprecedented medically in this particular biological experiment with these particular mice, right?

Dr. Bengston: Never happened before for any reason. So the world’s longest living mouse to me was 27 days and it went through this process of growth then ulceration then implosion. And the mice were cured. I used to say they remitted but that’s the wrong word because remitted means a reduction in symptoms or temporary disappearance. These mice are cured for life. So we watched them and we leave them for two years and they live out their normal lifespan hanging out, being completely happy.

And it goes even further than that. We’ve re-injected them with the cancer; the cancer won’t take anymore. So the mice that are cured are cured for life.

Me: So, let’s finish this story, Bill. The world changes; you receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Cancer treatments around the world are revolutionized and energy healing is the most highly researched area of medicine right now, right? I got all that right?

Dr. Bengston: Except for the entire scenario – yes. It’s not going to take off as you suggest. That would be my guess, yeah. So this isn’t something that we’ve cured a bunch of mice, therefore the cancer industry folds its tents. We’ve got to find out what’s going on.

Me: And that’s where it gets even more challenging. What do you think is going on?

Dr. Bengston:  Well, I’ve replicated this experiment now about a dozen times and I use—sometimes, not always—I use sometimes other people who have no experience in healing and who are all skeptics in the real sense of the word.

Me: Tell us a little bit about your process in terms of screening these folks. I think it’s really funny but also interesting.

Dr. Bengston: When I was able to cure a bunch of mice I thought to myself, “Well, obviously this is pretty curious. The first thing we need to do is see if this replicates. Was there some flaw in the procedure, some fluke?” And there was in my mind also a lingering fear: what if I can do it and other people can’t? I mean, that would be curious but it wouldn’t be very useful. So what I did is I decided to get some people who had no experience in this, train them in the healing techniques that Ben and I had worked out, and see what happens when they do it.

I went to a number of students and said, “I’d like you to do a healing experiment.” If they responded to me, “Gee, that’s wonderful, I like this stuff,” or “I know about this stuff,” I’d say, “Thank you for your interest,” and I left. I didn’t want them. I didn’t want someone who knew. I didn’t want someone who was already into healing.

I wanted a really blank slate and I wanted someone who—my actual criteria was they either had to laugh in my face when I told them what I wanted them to do, or they had to express extreme skepticism, something along the lines of I’d say, “I’m going to teach you for about six weeks on how to do some healing techniques and then you’re going to get cancerous mice and you’re going to put your hands around the cage for an hour a day and we’re going to see what happens.” And they’d go, “No, really. What do you want me to do?”

My Healing

Dr. Bengston is an impressive guy. And while his unexplainable methods, and too-good-to-be-true results left a lot of unanswered questions, his approach and rigor left an impression on me. So when I needed healing, I looked for a healer that used the Bengston Method. With a little bit of help from Dr. Bengston I found Bernadette Doran, an energy healer in Chicago. I decided to schedule healing sessions with her while I waited in insurance limbo. I also decided to chronicle my experiences with her for Skeptiko.

Me: First of all, let me just say that this show is going to be a bit of a departure from topics, that we normally talk about in terms of consciousness science, but I think the further we get into it folks will see that it is not at all a departure from the topics that we talk about. Let’s start by having you tell folks a little bit about this group, E3.

Bernadette Doran: Equilibrium, Energy, and Education is a research-based energy therapy wellness center.

Me: Give people a sense for what we are talking about when we talk about therapies and energy healing.

Doran: First of all, energy therapies –are non-physical – or non-physical in the sense of Western medicine.  All the energy therapies we do here stimulate your body’s own chemistry set to rebalance itself.

Me: This whole idea of energy healing is an outgrowth of this whole movement of mind-body medicine, right?

Doran: Yes, that is absolutely correct.

Me: So this whole idea that we have been exploring and that has gained some kind of credibility among conventional medicine is that there is more to the body than just the physical. There seems to be this interaction with the mind, and we don’t know quite how it works, but heck, we have this placebo effect and we can’t get around it and it seems stronger than our strongest medicines. Maybe we better take another look at it.

And then the other point you made is that some people have gone further and said, “Well, you know, if I really dive into this mind-brain thing, there is this consciousness thing that it is in your mind, but there is also this energy thing, that we can’t quite put our finger on, but this energy does seem to be able to be moved around and adjusted and shifted. And when we look at other cultures, they seem to have a long history of that.”

So with that, I just really support people who are willing to venture out as you are and say, “Okay, we don’t understand everything about this, but let’s start using the tools and methods of science that we have to start applying some of these techniques and seeing if we can measure the results.“ So it’s kind of a black box thing; we don’t know exactly what’s going on but let’s see if we can do this. Let’s see if we can measure on the other end what comes out here and see whether it is efficacious in the same way that we do with many of the other more conventional treatments that we have.

And it’s really medical history. That’s how medicine has always advanced. And we have refined it; we have tried to understand better about the treatments that we use and what they really do. But in the end, if you really get real about reading our medical history, a lot of times we didn’t know exactly how or why the treatments we were using on people were effective, we just measured and found out they seemed to be helping people.

Doran: I want to go immediately to your remark about medical history. And a lot of your listeners may already know this story, and you may know this story, but the thing about energy, energy therapies, is that they are invisible. That’s the most difficult thing. That is why moving forward in this highly valuable therapeutic direction is so challenging for us because if it is invisible, people don’t think of it as something valuable or useful like, for example, if you are used to taking an aspirin [in comparison]. If you are used to something physical from the medical community, then you can’t imagine that something invisible could be helping you.

Now, the example I want to use in this is I am not sure what the year was but I want to say the late 1800s or early 1900s, a dramatic shift was made. It was before the invention of the microscope, so whenever that occurred. That is the time we are talking about. But there was a huge, extremely high mortality rate of women during childbirth, I want to say around 50% or something like that. And people just took it for granted – oh well, you have a baby, you might die. There you go.

Well, there was a physician who had the idea, he noticed that doctors did not wash their hands after handling one patient, they just went on to the next patient and next patient. It was just his idea. I don’t know if it was an intuition, if it was his own personal science experiment, or if he was just really into personal hygiene. But he decided to see if it would make a difference. So he went out of his way absolutely every single time to wash his hands after going from one woman who delivered her baby to another. And the mortality rate in his hospital plummeted once he started doing that.

And he was the laughingstock of his hospital. People made fun of him; they thought he was crazy. They thought he was ridiculous. Well, some years later the microscope was invented and people could see the microbes on their hands. And so what all of those doctors for all that time were doing was transferring infected matter from one person to another to another. Women got septicemia and all kinds of things and died.

This was a doctor who just moved forward with a theory that he thought would work. It was proven but he became the laughingstock of a lot of people. And I sadly discovered in Larry Dossey’s new book One Mind, he actually commited suicide because he had become such an outlier and felt so rejected by the community.

But it changed the course of medical history. Now every doctor washes their hands. They use Latex gloves. They use all kinds of sanitary precautions and so the death rate has dropped dramatically in all kinds of ways. But if it wasn’t for that one guy who said, “I can’t see anything on my hands.” And the doctors would say, “Look, my hands are fine. There is no blood on it or anything.” Well no, you can’t see what’s really on them.

So that is what I say the state of energy therapies is right now. Now I must tell you that these kinds of therapies are far more accepted in other countries than America.

Me: Bernadette, let’s shift gears for a minute here because what we’re actually going to do, and I’m very excited about it, I am actually going to get a series of therapeutic treatments from Equilibrium E3, to help me with my condition. And I am going to pay you for that, as would be appropriate, but I am going to share some of that process with folks as I go through it and what the results might be.

So for me, I really would like to do the Bengston therapy and for all the reasons that we have just said and talked about and because I do have that personal experience. And for me, I do have a health issue that I want to address and at the same time I want to explore this more fully because, as anyone who has listened to this show knows, this exploration of the larger questions of consciousness and our relationship as human beings to consciousness and extended consciousness is really at the core of what I am interested in doing. So with that, let’s shift gears for a minute and why don’t you tell me, as someone who is preparing for a Bengston therapy, what you would tell me and what I need to know and ask any questions that you would ask.

Doran: Great, very good. So when someone says, ‘I would like to do Bengston therapy,’ there is [often] a very long [series of] emails that [describe] Frequently Asked Questions about Bengston therapy that we send to them – so we will be sending you that.

There are a couple of things to know in advance. First of all, it seems to us, and I am going to give a slightly broader foundation here, there is a whole branch that I am sure you are very familiar with – a new branch, about 12 years old now I think it is, of medicine called psychoneuroimmunology. You can actually now be trained to be a physician: A psycho-neuroimmunologist. And psychoneuroimmunology, I have tons of research on this, is the relationship of thoughts and emotions to physical disease. And pretty much everybody, even in the straight, strictly western medical community, now understands and believes that at least 80% or 90%, maybe more, of physical diseases have an underlying emotional component.

And so the first thing the Bengston method does is collapse whatever the emotional infrastructure is, whatever the emotional scaffolding is, that might have allowed the biochemical platform for disease to manifest. It is very, very common – I would say 99.9% of the time – for people who are receiving Bengston therapy to have two things happen. First, they have tremendous emotional releases immediately, like the day after the treatment. You may feel suddenly overwhelmingly sad, suddenly overwhelmingly angry, all kinds of things for no apparent reason. The reason is the Bengston method is working on that emotional scaffolding first because the physical disease is unlikely to be strongly helped unless that emotional scaffolding is gone. It will just come back.

The other way people experience the release of that emotional infrastructure is through dreams. It appears to us that dreams are an extremely efficient evacuation route for emotions, and a lot of people, especially the first few nights after the first treatment or two, will have dreams about longstanding emotional set points – people who are very fearful have a lot of fearful dreams. People who are angry have a lot of hostile dreams. They are very interesting and we are complicated little music boxes, way more than we think about on a day-to-day basis. But the Bengston method helps us kind of slice and dice what all these elements are.

So we tell you to expect that. We also tell you to expect to feel the need for much, much more sleep than usual. We are not sure why that is… We also have several clinical cases where people’s belief systems – it’s not that they don’t believe in the therapy, but they have limiting belief systems that we feel get in the way of the energy helping. And so we believe that the therapy also makes you sleep because then your mind doesn’t get in the way and undo what the therapy is trying to do. So we would tell you about that.

Me: Okay, and just to interject again, I don’t have to believe any of that; I don’t have to accept that is going to happen, I don’t have to try and make that happen. I can be skeptical that is going to happen; I can say, ‘Gee, that probably won’t work for me,’ which I think most people in this situation or most middle-aged men like myself with a rather traditional background would say, “Gee, I kind of have my doubts that is going to happen,” and all that is okay, right?

Doran: Oh yeah, absolutely without question – 100% okay. You do not need to believe anything. However, I will tell you part of the way of generating the therapy, if you are trained in this therapy, is something that Bill [Bengston] developed early on called image cycling. And what it does is it is a provable thing. Now, if you are interested in helping yourself as we are trying to help you—and you do not have to do this, you do not have to do this at all—but if you are interested there is something called image cycling.

How I want to describe this is, most of us image cycle [the worst case scenario] all [the] time. For example, it’s like, “Oh my God, my boyfriend is going to leave me. Oh my God, my child isn’t going to get into Harvard. The house is going to be foreclosed”  Worry, worry, worry – most of us constantly cycle those worrisome thoughts. It is proven that worrisome thoughts send out a cortisol release that is like an acid bath to the system. The more you worry, the more the stress hormone cortisol affects all kinds of organs and systems in your body. [This also] lowers and lowers and lowers your immune response.

But we offer people something called image cycling. It’s Bill’s technique that essentially, in a nutshell, is focusing on the positive. And so if you want to help yourself to have a proven immune boost, you can jump on board. It is not required, it is not necessary. But we offer that and it is something you want to do or not do. It doesn’t matter; we will help you either way.

Let’s see – what else? And the other thing, we generally prefer to do the therapy at night simply because you will probably fall asleep within five or ten minutes of my starting the treatment. If you want to take a nap during the day that’s totally fine, we can set it up, but we always ask you to be lying down, whether you are on the couch, whether you are in bed, or whatever. We just don’t want you to be operating heavy machinery.

Me: We will be able to do this over the phone, right?

Doran: Yes, although it’s not required. We don’t need to be on the phone. We can be on the phone but a distance healing does not require a physical connection like Skype or the phone or anything like that. Absolutely, distant healing means that you just lie down and I send you the energy.

Me: That sounds pretty simple. So I tell you what, I am not going to go into any specifics on the condition right now but I will share that information with you via email and then I will share it with our listeners after this whole therapy is done and I report on the results. So I think that we will just keep it really simple.

So, while I was waiting for my cardiologist to accept my insurance, I started doing energy healing sessions with Bernadette Doran. I also began exploring other alternative treatments for my condition. I found an excellent website called StopHeartPalpitations.com and, after doing my own research, followed their dietary recommendations. I realized this was  confounding treatments, but I was just trying to restore my health.

The energy healing sessions with Bernadette were rather amazing. The first time we scheduled a session, I laid down a few minutes before the healing was to begin (9 p.m. my local time). Almost immediately I felt a warm, painful sensation in the middle of my heart. You might expect I would have associated this with the healing, but I didn’t.  I raised my head and looked at the clock. It was 9:01.  That’s when I thought there might be something to this energy healing stuff after all. The sensation lasted for a few more minutes then faded away. I spent the rest of the hour in a somewhat meditative state then fell asleep.

The next day I felt terrible – much worse than the day before.  I was experiencing severe heart palpitations, pain in the heart, and an upset stomach. I reported this to Bernadette.  She immediately told me this was very common.  She told me I should expect to feel worse for a while after the treatments and then feel better. In fact, over the next couple of days, I did feel begin to feel better. She also told me to notice my dreams. During that first night, I didn’t notice anything different about my dreams. During the second night, and at other times during the treatment, I had some very deep, profound dreams that seemed to be related to my healing.

During the course of my next three treatments I continued to be very skeptical and reported this skepticism to Bernadette, but I also kept telling her about my improved health.

After four sessions, Bernadette and I decide to do four more. I still had my doubts about “energy healing” and about paying someone to “send you energy” from 2,000 miles away, but I couldn’t deny the results either.

About a week after the eighth treatment, I finally reached a point where I didn’t think about heart palpitations. They weren’t there anymore.  I have had a couple of mild recurrences in months since, but only mild ones, and very infrequently.

I don’t know if anyone else would have the same experience. I don’t even know if it was purely Bernadette’s treatment, or  the change in diet, or all in my head. I don’t know, and to some extent, I don’t care.  I do know that during the period Bernadette was supposed to be “sending me energy”, I felt a sensation followed by a shift in my health. It was a remarkable experience that I  haven’t completely absorbed into my worldview. How can a person 2,000 miles away use a very structured, ordered technique to somehow channel energy to someone?  I don’t know, but it certainly defies a mind=brain understanding of human consciousness.