In Part 3, I talked about about my interview — and an interview by Dr. Mehmet Oz (known to many from his his appearances on Oprah and more recently as the host of his own TV show) — with Dr. William Bengston. In part 4, I will continue with the Bengston interviews, and explore his energy healing technique in the laboratory.
The next step for Bengston’s research was to take his energy healing technique into the laboratory using a mouse model, and injecting breast cancer cells into lab mice. The mouse model has a 100 percent fatality rate, so if the healing process was not effective the mouse would die. In Bengston’s words, the mice responded “rapidly and dramatically.” The process was repeated ten times in a lab to confirm its results, and each time the original results were reconfirmed. The studies were done in several different labs in an effort to satisfy his own test quality benchmarks, so that no errors were made by the labs’ cancer researchers and technicians.
A group of healers were selected and trained by Bengston over a six-week period; they also had to be “non believers” in the subject of energy healing. Some of the clinical trial candidates suggested that he was designing an experiment in gullibility. The healers he trained for the lab experiments achieved a cure rate of approximately 90 percent, while his personal cure rate is 100 percent.
Bengston further tested his lab results by injecting the mice on multiple occasions with similar cancer cells, and discovered that the cancer did not return; further observations showed that the mice were cured for life.
Bengston also noticed through his mouse model research that if you take a tumor in the process of remitting and transplant it into a cancerous or infected mouse, the new mouse would also remit. He theorizes that there is some kind of immune response in the mouse that is overpowering the cancerous cells. He would like to have formal immunological testing done in an attempt to achieve the same results, but without the use of the “Laying on Hand” technique.
His research also suggests that a bonding took place in the experimental and control group mice during the lab experiments, which created a kind of placebo effect. In a placebo study typically one group will receive a drug and the other will not, creating an unusual effect in the group without the drug presumed to be related to power of suggestion. Bengston gets a similar affect with his mice experiments; the control groups of mice double injected with cancerous cells remit selectively. A bonding occurs even when the mice are in separate rooms.







Article comments
1 - shark
First, Dr. Oz is not exactly a bastion of integrity; furthermore, his wife is a "Reiki expert" -- and Oz is considered a borderline quack by most scientists and medical researchers. He's a TV showman first and foremost.
See this site for more on Oz, the man behind the curtain
From the article above:
"...Bengston was asked by Dr. Oz if he could explain why the medical community has not generally accepted energy healing as a mainstream approach to treatment..."
Quick honest answer:
Because there is no empirical data to support his claims.
~NEXT!
===
My full comments are in Part 6