Most people find Bill Bengston’s work because they’re looking for an alternative path to healing. And of course, we know the Bengston Method can be a helpful approach for all kinds of physical and psychological challenges. But those who use the Bengston Method know it does a whole lot more than that.

Some of us don’t use the method for healing much at all, or if we do, it’s for special circumstances. Personally, I came to Bill’s work because I wanted to know how to heal, but I didn’t want to be a healer. It was more of an “in case of emergency” kind of thing. I quickly learned that the Bengston Method can help with many things besides healing. And in using the method just for myself, I found the most powerful self-help tool I’ve ever known. I’m a practicing psychotherapist, so that’s saying something! These days I mainly use the Bengston Method to get what I want, and that has been incredibly beneficial for my own mental health and my life. I also think it’s been the most difficult shift in mindset for me.

For those who are new to all this, the Bengston Method involves a mental technique called “image cycling.” It starts with making a list of 20 things you want, and then you learn to “cycle” images of those things in your mind at a pace that is so rapid, you can no longer decipher what the images are. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is weird. It’s also weirdly effective. (The story of how Bill discovered this and then tested it in the lab is covered in The Energy Cure. The technique of image cycling is also covered in depth in the Hands-on Healing audio course and our live workshops.)

While Bill did develop the method to aid the healing process, he also discovered that people who regularly image cycle tend to get the things they put on their list. This is a happy side effect for those who put in the time to learn. But for some of us, it’s also the point of why we do it.

Our experience with those first learning the Bengston Method is that they sometimes have trouble with this. Identifying 20 things they want can be difficult. Many people learn the method because they have some sort of health challenge, or because they want to heal someone they love. It can be difficult to think about what you want when you’re preoccupied with a serious health concern. But the list is important, and it works best when it’s filled with things you actually want.

At first, many people put generic things related to health, happiness, or money that are too broad to work with this process. Or, they wish for the well-being of their loved ones, which is understandable, but shouldn’t be done without permission, and should not be the sole focus of the list.

Lots of newcomers struggle to make the list self-oriented or “selfish,” as Bill would say. I think that the idea of being “selfish” doesn’t mesh well with our existing identities or ideas about healing. But putting your own wants as the centerpiece of your list is important if you want this to work. To do this, sometimes you have to sit down with yourself and spend a bit of time thinking about what you want. A lot of feelings can come up. When I first tried it, I was surprised to see how anxious I was about just wanting stuff. I felt as though many of the things I wanted were too much or too trivial or too materialistic or too ambitious. And if I couldn’t have what I wanted, if I’d never get it, why bother wanting it?

Here’s what made it easier for me. Bill explained that the point of the list, as he saw it, was to occupy your ego during the healing process. It serves to get your conscious mind out of the way so healing can flow more easily. Being “selfish” in this sense makes you a better healer. It doesn’t matter how big or how small the items on your list are, though a variety works best. If you want them, you can cycle them. And if you cycle, you may also get those items.

But Bill was not a big believer in “manifesting” anything. To manifest, as he described it, was to create something from nothing. He theorized that image cycling might involve what he called a “teleological pull from the future” that caused the arrival of items on the list. To put it another way, when you make a list and cycle, you might arrive at the place where those items exist for you. You’re not creating something from nothing, but maybe instead, image cycling dials in a future address where you have the thing you want. And then somehow, you get pulled there.

It fits with his take on “the Source,” too. He described an experience he sometimes had when he was healing someone of being brought to a place of infinite possibility. That experience made him ask if by image cycling he was simply helping people arrive at the possibility where they were no longer sick. However it works, we may never know, but we have plenty of real world experience with it working for people.

Here’s one of my favorite examples from my own list. In the spring of 2024, I had just wrapped up helping Bill and Margaret turn the Bengston Method workshop into curriculum for other Bengston practitioners to teach. It had been a great experience and I really loved working with them on it. I knew I wasn’t done with my dive into all things Bengston, so I put on my image cycling list, “cool new Bengston project.” I had no idea what that might be, but I was open to whatever showed up. A week later, Bill asked me if I wanted to help him write his next book!

That’s a pretty dramatic thing to get from my list, but I’ve also gotten good medical test results, fresh flowers, unexpected travel, job offers, taken out to dinner, and much more. The best part is that these examples are fairly typical for people who use this method regularly. People end up with all kinds of things, from new cars to yellow socks (Margaret), you name it. Some things people report are pretty funny, but some are downright life changing. At the last workshop he taught, Bill was asked what the best thing he ever got off his list was. He said it was Margaret!

Beyond getting things from my list, I’ve found that pushing myself to ask, “What do I want?” has had some of the most beneficial effects of all. It’s not necessary to do this, but personally speaking, I take time every week to revisit my list. Do I still want all these things? Do I want something else that’s not on the list? What arrived this week? Every week there’s something new. I find that doing this on a regular basis empowers me to define and then live the life I want.

Can we prove that we get things we want because of image cycling? I don’t know. There’s probably a way to learn more if some intrepid researcher out there wants to design a study. But until then, with the number of positive stories coming from people who image cycle, it’s worth trying!

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten off your image cycling list? If you’re an image cycler, I’d love to know!

If you have been following our Substack posts, you are aware of the recent paper outlining research at MD Anderson on pancreatic cancer using the Bengston Energy Healing Method. Earlier we interviewed John Lavack, a Bengston Method practitioner, who participated in the research.

This week Amy and I had an informal talk with Eric Bates and Laura Shalliker, the other Bengston Method practitioners who participated in this research. Among other very interesting things, their participation showed that the results were not unique to just one person and something was happening with everyone who used the Bengston Method.

The video is about an hour long and offers further insights about their participation and what it was like to be at MD Anderson.

The research at MD Anderson is ongoing and we are hoping that by this time next year there will be an opportunity for clinical trials.

If you are interested in learning the method itself there are two offerings available:

• In-person workshop is being held in September in Novato, California

• On-line workshop will be held in October.

• Other offerings: Energy Tools for Everyday Living and Bengston Method - A Deep Dive Review

For information on these workshops and others visit BengstonWorkshops.com/UpcomingWorkshops.

If you want to learn more about the method and earlier research visit the BengstonResearch.com.

I recently was asked the question, “Isn’t cycling a ritual?”

My answer basically consisted of how one should be playful – change your gimmick, etc. All good thoughts but didn’t really address the question. I answered the person, but the question kept coming back to me because it baffled me.

The real answer to the question is No.

I suppose one could ritualize the process. However, then it would not be cycling. Cycling is a dynamic process.

Remember Bill’s definition of ritual — ritual is trying to produce something that occurred, in the same way, to bring about the same result. The first time the result was X, it happened spontaneously but as one tries to recreate it you surmise it happened because you did A, B, C, then D. “Let me do the same thing in the same order and I will get the same X result.” This is ritual.

Ritual will kill the thing it is trying to produce.

Cycling is like walking. You learn to walk and then you just do it. Do you walk the same way each time? What influences your walk? Perhaps your emotions, a need to get from one place to another, etc. all have some influence over the pace, the route you take and more. Are you paying attention to walking? Nope. It ebbs and flows based on what you are doing. Are you always paying attention to cycling? Nope. It ebbs and flows as well.

Cycling is simple, just not easy — don’t complicate it. Learn how to do it, practice it until it is as instinctual and integrated as walking. To echo Bill, learn it, practice your brains out and “make it your own.”

Furthermore, cycling does not have an end goal. Cycling is simply cycling. When you begin cycling—really cycling—you have to let go. You throw a future address out to the universe, let go and let it begin to draw you toward it. Do we know how this happens? No. Can we control it? No. One makes a list, cycles, and lets go.

Again, simple but not easy. It takes practice. Just do it. Don’t overthink. This is not an intellectual pursuit. Cycling is experiential, dynamic, and ever changing. Cycling for Bill and me was and is a way of life.

If you are playful, you will never succumb to ritual. As Bill said, the manual really only needs one side – Be Playful!

This article was writtent by Bill early 2025 but never published.

Picture if you would being alive about 250 years ago when Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a key attached trying to figure out if lightening had electrical properties. As the mythological story goes lightning struck his kite, charged the key that was hanging on a string, and he took this triumphantly to be a demonstration of electricity being an important part of our understanding of the way the world works. What could he have imagined about the impact of his discovery? Could he have imagined that one day that same force of nature could be captured, “bottled” and used for the storage of electricity? Further, imagine he envisioned that one day this electrical charge could be stored and even be mass produced. If he did and spoke about it, he would have been considered daffy at best and crazy at worst. His goal was simple, just show that electricity really exists. What could be done with it was most likely outside his scope of imagination.

Now imagine coming forward a few hundred years and Franklin walking into a store that sold batteries. What would he make of that? Could he see the connection between flying a kite and the mass production of batteries? Likely not. The transition from fundamental discovery to technical application is often-times a bumpy road.

This is what we are trying to do with healing. We have spent decades figuratively flying many kites, demonstrating that healing is real. Most of those demonstrations have implied one-on-one healer and healee – that is one human harnessing some mysterious power and trying to direct it, or apply it, to another human with a need. How many kites needed to be flown before skeptics threw up their hands and conceded that electricity is real. How many healing studies need to be done for skeptics to throw up their hands and say, “enough already, healing is real.” We are past that point now. Healing is real. That doesn’t mean every claim of healing is real and it doesn’t mean that we don’t still have a whole lot of mysteries to solve regarding healing.

Sooner or later, it was time to move on from the kite flying days to the creation of batteries and the mass production of batteries. At this point, no one disbelieved that batteries were possible and we could harness the power of nature to store and scale electricity. The same is true of healing. It is time to move on from the simple question of whether healing is real to the more interesting question, can we make healing storable and scalable. Imagine if you will, some future date where an unlimited number of people have access to already stored healing that can be applied on an as needed basis. We are already used to the mass production of things that augment health. For instance, we take vitamins that have been stored, scaled and live in our pantries. Can we do the same for healing?

Personally, I have been doing healing research for 40 or so years. The fact that healing is real has been demonstrated in my formal experiments and there are clinicians who would attest anecdotally that healing happens, cures happen. I often get asked to repeat these experiments — If you would repeat the study in this lab, or at this university, we will acknowledge that healing is real. I am all for replication but repeating these experiments over and over again is not interesting to me. There will never be enough data to satisfy some people. Healing happens, cures abound. This said, there is still much to be explored such as what conditions respond, what don’t and why, dose — and so much more.

What has captivated my attention for the last several years is the question — Can we store healing and then scale it? No matter how many people become clinicians and treat others and regardless of how many people they treat, it will only make a small dent in the number of people who need help. The number of people in need is endless. So, can we store healing and then reproduce (scale) it making it readily available to anyone who needs it?

In order for healing to be made conventional, it must be both storable and scalable. This is not to minimize the relevancy of clinicians. Their services will always be needed. For some a hands-on treatment is the most desirable. And perhaps in some cases perhaps more efficacious, we don’t know. Making healing readily available will, however, insure it can be used by anyone who needs it.

Storage is all around us — imagine a car battery, the battery in your key fob, a vitamin or other pill. With healing, we know from previous experiments, our own and others, that healing can be “stored” in organic and inorganic materials. Organic materials that have demonstrated stored healing include cotton, cell medium and blood from treated mice. Inorganic storage includes water and “recorded healing intention” using a variety of recording media.

Just because healing can be stored, it does not mean that it can be scaled. It is also possible, that healing can be scaled, but not stored well. More than a half century ago, the great Bernard Grad at McGill University demonstrated that healing intention could be stored in cotton. Today practitioners often supply treated cotton (or water) to clients to use in between hands-on or distant treatments. The follow up question should be, can treated cotton be scaled. Right now the answer is No, anymore than Benjamin Franklin’s kite and key could meaningfully be scaled. In lab experiments cancer cells in vitro showed significant genomic changes when brought near treated cotton. Voila! — lightening indeed is composed of electricity. Voila! — healing intention can be stored in cotton. But can it be scaled? So far No. We haven’t found a technical way to scale cotton.

Similarly, cell medium treated in a lab and shipped to a different lab will produce significant changes in cancer cells grown in that medium, indicating with high certainty that healing intention can be stored in laboratory cell medium. But can it be scaled? So far No.

One more example — cancerous mice treated with the Bengston Method will result in a cure. But more interesting is that blood taken from treated mice and injected into other mice infected with the same cancer will result in a cure in those mice. But can it be scaled? Healed mice obviously have the capability of storing healing information within their own bodies. How much can we scale in this way? Mice don’t have that much blood, so it is interesting but not practical for large scale application. Unless that is these cured mice, or their blood, contains the information needed to create a vaccine or something analogous. A vaccine, mass produced, would solve the scaling problem and is worthwhile as a research project. Right now, this is not a practical solution.

Notice these examples are all with organic material — cotton, cell medium, mice themselves are all organic. For our purposes, the definition of organic material is that it is based on a carbon atom. Inorganic material contains no carbon atoms.

Can we also store healing in inorganic material, water for example? The great Grad, many years ago, showed that healing intention is storable in water. We too, in the lab, have demonstrated that healing can be stored in water. Treated water bottles fed to cancerous mice will cure those mice. Impressive, but without the technical knowhow it is not necessarily practical for large scale application. We will come back to water later.

Other approaches to inorganic storage — we wondered whether we could simplify the situation and store healing intention in a recording. If so, the scalability problem would be essentially solved.

In conjunction with IONS, we put 33 detectors in a Faraday Cage and had three practitioners of the Bengston Energy Healing Method treat cotton while running all the detectors. We reduced those signals to a .wav file that could be played on ordinary sound equipment even there is no audible sound coming out of the recording. Cancer cells were placed in vitro in an incubator playing the recording. In seven replications we found 68 consistent genomic changes out of 167 genes tested. We tested the same recording on cancerous mice. That experiment needed to be cancelled for technical reasons, but the data from blood and tissue samples indicate high suggestibility that a recording could possibly address cancer in mammals.* Interestingly, these experiments, both in vitro and in vivo, were published in conventional biology journals. An examination of the relative strength of the recording versus a live, hands on or distant, treatment suggested that hands on is still stronger than the recording. By the same token, the success with the recording is suggestable that a technology of healing is possible. We are currently working on ways to enhance and strengthen the recording. And further research is underway.

Notice that hands-on treatment remains stronger than the recording, but perhaps not for long. Hands-on healing is hampered by scalability abilities and while the recording reproduces much of the hands-on effect, it is still not quite as robust. This could all change in future iterations.

The recording is maximally scalable, but not maximally storable yet. Imagine if you will, sometime down the road that the recording matches hands-on healing in strength. The distribution is already in place. Envision uploading treatments to the cloud, to be downloaded by anyone anywhere who has a healing need. Imagine Benjamin Franklin trying to go from a kite flying experiment to a battery store. The problems are similar.

Now, let’s go back to water. We already demonstrated (above) that healing intention can be stored in water. The problem is scalability — how to get virtually unlimited amounts of treated water.

We began with water treated using the Bengston Energy Healing Method, and then potentially increased its potency through a dilution and succussion process. We should note that this is not a homeopathic formulation in any classically meaningful way, though dilution and succussion are involved in preparation. This formula is then placed in a proprietary device designed and intended to replicate the healing information in the water, making the water in essence scalable. The device has a hose fitting for water input and output.

The output water from the device was then given to volunteers in a clinical setting who expressed a need across a wide variety of physical, emotional and spiritual needs. The results were quite dramatic, in that 98% of the volunteers self-reported health improvements over an enormously wide range of conditions. Virtually everyone wanted more. (These studies are posted at www.bengstonresearch.com/pulbications)

Not yet satisfied, we ran a double blind, placebo controlled study on COVID patients entering a hospital. These patients were randomly divided into two groups, those taking the informed water in addition to their medical treatment and those taking just medical treatment with tap water serving as the control. This was double blinded so that neither patients nor doctors knew what the patients were receiving. The treated group took two drops under the tongue 6 times a day and the control took 2 drops under the tongue 6 times a day although they did not know they were getting a placebo. The results were astounding. The treated group reported higher general health, much more rapid symptom relief and PCR tests came back negative much quicker than the control group.

These studies demonstrate that healing can be both stored and scaled. There is much more to be learned and the research continues. Like Franklin, we can’t really envision the future and what it might hold regarding stored and scaled healing. We can however use our imagination to keep asking questions and testing possibilities with research.

The stored and scaled water mentioned above can be found at www.bengsproducts.com. Restore and Recover were the products used in the above research.

1. Beseme S., Fast L., Bengston W., Turner M., Radin D., McMichael J.; Transcriptional Changes in Cancer Cells Induced by Exposure to a Healing Method; Dose-Response: An International Journal; July-September 2018: 1-8

2. Beseme S., Fast L., Bengston W., Turner M., Radin D., McMichael J.; Effects Induced In Vivo by Exposure to Magnetic Signals Derived From a Healing Technique, Dose-Response: An International Journal,; January-March 2020: 1-10

3. Bengston, W. Cizdziel P, Tanaka A., Matsuda H.; Differential In Vivo Effects on Cancer Models by Recorded Magnetic Signals Derived From a Healing Technique, Dose-Response: An International Journal; April-June 2023: 1-11.

4. Bengston W., Nies M.; A Double Blind, Placebo Controlled Clinical Trial on Hospitalized Covid Patients Using Informed Water; Journal of Scientific Exploration, March 2023.

*This article was written before a follow up experiment with the recording was done and paper written. Click here for the paper.

Research papers can be found at www.bengstonresearch.com/publications.

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about how to find a Bengston practitioner. Specifically, people have been requesting a session with John Lavack, our friend who was featured on the debut of Phenomena Podcast, the Telepathy Tapes (Season 2, Episode 9) in relation to the MD Anderson pancreatic cancer research, and he is also featured in the forthcoming documentary from Phenomena. This interest is understandable, as John’s ability to affect cancer cells has been demonstrated in the lab, and not a whole lot of healers can claim that! (There are other Bengston practitioners, namely Laura Shalliker and Eric Bates who also participated in the MD Anderson research). There’s only one John, however, and there are a whole lot of folks who need help.

We do have a list of recommended practitioners, and if you write to info@bengstonresearch.com, we will share the list. These people all learned from Bill. There are others out there who use the Bengston Method, but please be advised there is no credentialling, certificate or initiation degrees etc. with the Bengston Method like in a few other energy healing modalities. That can make finding a healer difficult, especially when you or someone you love is in need and anxiety may be running high.

As people who have been down this road, we offer some considerations as you search for someone to support your healing journey:

1. What modalities are they offering? How well-known or researched are those modalities? Some Bengston healers are trained in multiple energy healing approaches, but that isn’t necesary. You want to ask what modalities they use in energy healing, and why.

2. What is their experience in healing? How long have they been doing this work? How did they get started? How many clients have they worked with, and with what conditions?

3. What is their philosophy of healing? What is their opinion about allopathic approaches to healing? These are things you should be aware of with any healer you intend to work with. Healers who say, “I don’t know why it works or how it works, but here’s my experience with it…” have a genuine sense of humility about the process and are being honest. That’s a very good sign.

4. What are they charging? How will they decide how many treatments they recommend, or how often? Professional healers earn their living by charging fees for services, just like any other professional. Unfortunately, energy healing is not covered by insurance, so the cost to you is something to consider. Does the healer offer charged cotton or water to help your healing journey? These are all good questions to ask. (Some healers do offer these things and some do not—that does not speak to their ability or ethics as a healer!)

5. Do you know anyone who has worked with this person? Word of mouth references, especially from people you know and trust who have been helped by the healer is often where we all start on this journey.

6. If you are looking for a healer on the internet, someone who also has a professional license in another state-regulated modality (massage, accupuncture, nursing, social work, counseling, etc.) is already beholden to certain standards of professional and ethical practice with vulnerable populations in order to have that license. If you have no other reference to go on, that can be something to give some peace of mind. That said, those credentials have no bearing on whether they are a good energy healer! To our knowledge, there is no credential or certificate one can earn that certifies someone’s results as an energy healer—just completion of certain training programs. But if you’re looking for someone without any other reference, holding some sort of license in a client-facing profession is something worth considering. But it must be noted, very few of the healers we recommend hold state-issued professional licenses, and they are the among the most accomplished, ethical healers we know.

Another consideration for beginning a Bengston healing journey is learning the method yourself. Although self-healing is possible, we suggest that the Bengston method seems to work better when someone else—someone not too close to you—is the healer. But most Bengston healers also recommend that their clients learn how to image cycle and will coach their clients on how to do this. If you participate in a workshop, you will learn the method, often meet experienced Bengston healers and can ask questions about the healing process. If you are interested in learning more about the method, whether you ever intend to heal someone or not, this is a great way to meet people who can connect you with experienced healers.

Wherever you are in your healing or Bengston journey, we hope some of this helps guide your conversations and your search!

Our friend and colleague, John McMichael passed yesterday morning, June 12, and I find myself with memories and a grieving heart. Most of you probably don’t know his name, yet Bill and I considered him one of the “Greats,” a pioneer and remarkable man.

Late 2009, Bill received a call out of the blue from John. Never having met, John introduced himself and then said, “If your research and thoughts about placebo are correct, you have just destroyed the last four years of my placebo research.” Bill responded, “You’re welcome.” There was a pause and then John laughed. And so began a lifelong friendship and collaboration.

John was an immunologist and virologist who spent his career developing and studying potential therapeutic products. His focus was on Resonant Molecular Signaling (RMS). RMS utilizes naturally occurring molecules to regulate the body’s signals and restore health, targeting various diseases including viral infections and central nervous system disorders.*

I could go on about the over 200 patents John holds, and the research and papers written. They are indeed laudable. However, I would prefer to touch on other more personal aspects.

At heart, John was a New England farmer and had a distinct love of the land. He loved history and his book collection is huge and well loved. He didn’t own a computer, cell phone or a television but read extensively. Communication was through the land line, fax or, best of all, in person. John always answered the phone gruffly, “McMichael.” He didn’t need much sleep and was working while most of us slept. When frustrated he chopped wood. I never heard him swear at all, even in the most stressful of times. Many of his ideas for new formulas and research came to him, as we liked to say, milking the cows.

John was one of the most generous people I have ever met. He lived in one of the poorest counties in the state and people who needed help always seemed to find their way to him. During Covid we had a conversation about the antiviral product he had developed and researched. That week he had given away 900 bottles to people in need. He would leave them in the mailbox and people, in return, could donate what they could. This went on for weeks at the height of Covid. This was just one of the many products he gave away to help others.

His generosity didn’t stop there but included anything he could provide for others. Be it the eggs, chicken or beef he raised on the farm, a helping hand, or thoughts on research and use of the lab in Rhode Island. His wife Carol, was his partner in crime in this, always distributing things and volunteering in the community. For years, John mowed one of the local cemeteries in the summer because it needed to be done and it gave him time to think.

John’s company, Beech Tree Labs, hosted a conference for like-minded people for many years. This was a small group of folks from various walks of life who were interested in research, the work John was doing as well as other healing and research work. It consisted of physicians of all stripes as well as others, GP, surgeons, cardiologists, naturopaths, homeopaths, scientists, dowsers, intuitives, remote viewers and more. Everyone was invited to present and we listened to talks — from what was happening in research and clinical practices to ethical viewpoints, all ending in questions and discussion. It was a welcoming atmosphere and one where titles were left at the door. We were there to share. Each year the people changed depending on who could come and new folks who had just learned of what John was working on. Informal conversation abounded, with the sharing of perspective and ideas. Good food, and great personal connections were all part of the equation. John paid for everything, we all just showed up. This conference was the highlight of the year for Bill and me.

John and Bill’s first conversation led to “The Biophysics of Cancer Project” which was sponsored by the not-for-profit John started, The Institute for Therapeutic Discovery. This project morphed and changed into supporting Bill’s storing and scaling of healing research. The collaboration that began in 2009 continued until Bill’s death last year and beyond. John stepped up to help me complete a paper, to be published in the JSE this fall, about the last water research Bill completed.

Over the past months, John and I would talk. Our conversations rambled — his research, Bill’s research, what might be next, farm work, who needed help, spiritual matters, what happens after this life, and the importance of silent time. He loved sitting by a brook or stream, Bill loved sitting by the ocean, I love the desert — all places to be silent.

I will truly miss our conversations and a very dear friend!

Margaret

Listen to John explain RMS.

*Essentially, RMS is the use of extremely small doses of a particular molecule or molecules to stimulate a therapeutic effect. Essentially, all illnesses arise at least in part from abnormal communications – or signaling – within and between the cells that make up the human body. Abnormal signaling leads to imbalances in how the body functions. Resonant molecular signaling (RMS) is a novel platform that aims to address a wide range of illnesses by restoring normal cellular communications and correcting these imbalances.

Bio: Dr. McMichael received his B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Maine and his Ph.D. from Oregon State University in Immunology and Virology, and did his post-doctoral work at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, PA. He developed the world’s first live-virus fish vaccines for use in fish populations, and is an Alzheimer’s disease pioneer, having licensed 30+ patents to Elan Corp. plc, to support their Alzheimer’s initiative. He now holds more than 200 patents worldwide.

Why can’t people just accept what the data are telling them when it comes to anomalous research? Sometimes they don’t accept it even when the research is mainstream! In Death as an Altered State of Consciousness, a great book by Bill's colleague Imants Barušs, there's a Feynman quote that describes the problem like this:

There is a possibility: after I tell you something, you just can’t believe it. You can’t accept it. You don’t like it. A little screen comes down and you don’t listen anymore. I’m going to describe to you how Nature is—and if you don’t like it, that’s going to get in your way of understanding it. It’s a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They’ve learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with the experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd. (Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 2006)

The exploration of anomalies and their acceptance have always encountered resistance, and likely always will. Bill often talked about this, and as a sociologist and the president of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), he was well-positioned to comment on this common human experience. The SSE is an organization dedicated to the rigorous study of anomalous experience, and even within its ranks there were limits to what people could accept, regardless of the quality of the data. Bill called this “the Boggle Factor”—or sometimes “the Boggle Effect”—and it refers to the point at which even open-minded individuals cannot accept information that stretches their foundational beliefs about reality. It’s a point in their critical thinking they simply cannot go beyond. Even Bill himself had that line and put certain types of information in the “boggle” drawer! Bill shared this story about his experience with being boggled:

A few years back, a friend of mine told me that a prominent member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) had privately expressed exasperation at a presentation I had recently made on my healing research. . . . The bottom line was that he thought my results were simply “too much” for him to handle. Once I got the ranting out of my system and became less defensive, it slowly occurred to me that I react in much the same way to many anomalous claims I come across. Some of the presentations at the SSE conferences have left me with that uneasy “too much” feeling.

There are times, places, and information that no matter how open we are, we simply cannot go there. Our way of being in the world gets challenged, our long-held thoughts get challenged, and things are turned upside down. As Bill said, “We enter the unorthodox at our own peril.”

The Boggle Factor begs us to examine our interests, knowledge, and beliefs. This last word—belief—is especially confounding.

On what do we base our acceptance of something? What would cause us to change our mind? Is it research data, personal experience or knowledge, friends or colleagues? These are all questions worth examining.

For more on Bill’s thoughts on this common experience, check out the article he wrote for EdgeScience, The Boggle Factor.

Bill often said, “Folks—we are asking the same questions here.” We researchers, practitioners, and clients are all seeking answers to some similar core questions.

Bill started by observing clinical phenomena of healing and then took it into the lab to try to find answer the question, “What in heaven’s name is going on?” This need to find out what was behind his observations and experiences drove his research for over 50 years. In the clinical world, the variables are too great to try pin down the answers. In the lab the conditions could be controlled.

Clinicians usually think clinically while researchers think experimentally, and the two often don’t meet. Researchers and clinicians consider things from different angles—researchers seek data to support the answer to a question; clinicians are seeking the health of their client. In research, the question drives the quest to discover the answer. As the clinician, the questions drive our practice and interactions with clients. If we are the client, the answers to these questions are directly relevant to our health.

The questions get answered in different ways. In research, a protocol is set and adhered to based on past research, preliminary findings and/or the question being asked. In the clinician’s world, experience plays large role. In the research world, once the experiment starts, the answer is fixed. The clinical world is more fluid and may change based on the response of the client.

But again and again, the same questions tend to come up in either place. Some of the most common are below.

Can this treatment fix X condition? or Will it work?

The researcher explores this under controlled conditions in the lab and the client wants an answer from the real world—who else has been fixed? How consistent are the results? Will it work for me?

I am using “X condition” deliberately because the question applies regardless of the condition. Bill’s research and the MD Anderson research asked this question using specific types of cancer in the experiment. Both asked whether a specific type of cancer could be fixed or impacted using a specific healing method, (The Bengston Energy Healing Method), under controlled laboratory conditions. However, this question is relevant regardless of the condition.*

How much treatment is necessary (time and quantity, i.e. dose)?

This question naturally follows the one above. As Bill said, “You can take chances experimentally and play around with dose. With people, you want to fix them.”

The researcher asks how many treatments, and for what length of time, should I include in the study. What will give me the best data points. The client asks how long before I start feeling better. The clinician, wanting to fix them, uses their experience to answer the question.

The researcher may do preliminary testing to see what dose should be used in the protocol. They may base the dose on historical data, or they may simply say “let’s try this” and make their best guess. The dose is then set in the research protocol and is adhered to in the experiment. Secondary questions lead to future research, “Will the dose be the same for all cancers? Is the dose different for a human?” And the fun begins again.

The client asks the clinician “How long will it take?” and “How many treatments do I need?” The clinician asks, “What length of time should I treat?” When treating people, the practitioner actively follows the patient’s condition to see if they are improving, stabilizing, etc. Dose can, and often does vary, depending upon what the client is experiencing, any test results, and the practitioner’s own observations. Again, secondary questions abound. Does the clinician give the same dose every session, even if the time is the same? Are all treatments the same—is a treatment given on day one the same as one given on day two or three? We don’t know at this point.

Will the treatment last?

The patient asks, “Once I’m fixed, will my condition come back?” The clinician cna inform the client of their experiences from past similar cases. But there’s no crystal ball and no guarantee.

In research, this question may take a long period of time to answer. Bill’s research with mice involved survival studies, and consequently they were able to witness mice that had been cured of mammary cancer living out a normal life span of two years. He also found that if a mouse that had been cured was re-injected with a lethal dose of the same type of cancer, they did not get the cancer again. For the mice, the treatment lasted as long as their natural lifespan.

Bill’s research spanned decades. This question takes time to answer in the lab.

Can healing be combined with conventional treatment?

In both the lab and the clinical world, if we combine radiation or X with healing, what is the effect? We may assume we know the answer to this, but from a research perspective very little has been done in this regard. In the clinical world, each practitioner uses their experience to best answer the question.

When giving lectures about his research, Bill requested that researchers and clinicians not be siloed—that they learn from each other. He often asked, “How can lab findings inform clinical practice? How can clinicians help inform pre-clinical studies?” Bill’s desire for answers to the above questions consumed decades. Although his passion was research, in later years, he pursued clinical experiences again. He felt strongly that both worlds should inform each other. Can we find a better way for the clinicians and researchers to share information?

In a future post we will offer thoughts on choosing a practitioner and understanding the skills they might offer and what questions you might ask them. One thing we’d recommend, when possible, is working with a healer who appreciates how the existing body of research can inform their work! And for the researchers, we hope they’ll consider adopting several healers they can talk to and learn from as well. We’ll all be better off when these conversations are a regular affair.

*Bill’s research used a mammary cancer model because past research gave historical evidence that this cancer caused death in a specific number of days regardless of the treatment tried. The Bengston Method has been used for other conditions as well.

Last Saturday, April 16, we hosted a discussion about the recently published paper The Preclinical Effects and Mechanisms of Biofield Therapy on Pancreatic Cancer Cell Growth and Metastasis. This paper outlines the studies done at MD Anderson over the past several years with pancreatic cancer using the Bengston Energy Healing Method.

The number of people who registered to attend was unexpected and some people were not able to participate because we reached the maximum registrants allowed (500). Not only were we surprised by the response but pleased and grateful to see the interest in this ongoing research and the Bengston Method. We recorded it so everyone could have access and the link is below.

The paper itself presents exciting findings, which were covered by Amy. And the fact that the research remains ongoing, with the possibility of clinical trials being explored is extremely gratifying.

It has been about 50 years since Bill did his first experiment with a mammary cancer in mice and a synopsis of Bill’s early work and the differences in research directions and protocols were covered in the discussion. This was followed by John Lavack, one of the Bengston Method practitioners in these studies, talking about what it was like to be part of the research team at MD Anderson.

Unfortunately we ran out of time before we were able to answer all of the questions people had so as promised, the questions with answers follow in this post.

If you would like to read the complete paper, please visit Cancer Medicine - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cam4.71726. This is an open source paper so available to everyone.

Listen to the Recording

If you missed the presentation, you can watch through Substack or YouTube.

Questions and Answers — April 16, 2026 Zoom Event

Below are the questions that directly relate to this research. Other questions will be answered in subsequent posts.

What was the frequency of treatment- How often and for how long? What was the set timer amount of time with the protocol in the study?

The answer to these questions can be found in the methods section of the paper itself. It depends on whether they were treating cells or mice. For cells in dishes, it was a single 15 or 30 minute session. The paper notes they tried longer sessions, up to two hours, and didn’t see a stronger effect. We don’t know if this was done as single sessions and not done over time. For mice, it was 30 minutes a day, three times a week, for three weeks — so nine total sessions per mouse. In some experiments this followed by seven weeks of observation and in another the mice were euthanized 24 hours after the last treatment. The gemcitabine chemotherapy control mice received their drug on the same three-times-a-week schedule.”

What do you know at this point about the possibility of future research? Anything planned or being discussed - at MD Anderson or beyond?

The paper lists that they’re looking at several things now: testing whether the effect persists when EMFs are blocked, measuring the healer’s own brain and heart activity during sessions, and looking at quantum biology hypotheses. They’ve also called for studying other biofield modalities like Reiki and Healing Touch, since this paper only tested the Bengston Method. And in the press release, Lorenzo Cohen has said this work sets the stage for human clinical trials, though there isn’t a published timeline for that yet.

It would be great to have a dedicated web page updated with the latest on current and upcoming research for those of us who want to know what’s planned and what’s in progress. Would also love to know when Bill’s book will be published.

We’ll do our best to use our new Substack newsletter to keep people informed of new research developments using the Bengston Method when we have news on that front! Please consider subscribing to stay up to date!

We anticipate Bill’s book will be published Spring/Summer 2027.

“What’s next,” and can you detail a research timeline that you would like to see going forward?

Our hope is that people with the background and credentials, such as the team at MD Anderson, will continue to pursue research using the Bengston Method. We are encouraged by the level of interest in this latest paper and how it bodes for future research. The body of existing research Bill conducted lays a solid foundation for others to build upon.

I do not have a timeline, but as for the wish list on what research might be done, there were several directions Bill hoped would be explored:

• Placebo: Conducting a “placebo-by-placebo” experimental design to test his hypothesis that placebo effects can be contributed to resonant bonding. This experiment would parse out what portion of placebo effects are due to resonant bonding and what might be psychological.

• Comparative Healing Modalities: Conducting comparative analyses of different healing methods (such as Reiki, Healing Touch, and his own method) to understand how treatment outcomes might for individual conditions. This is a complex question.

• New Clinical Targets: Expanding research to see if the healing techniques or recordings are effective against Alzheimer’s disease, Long COVID, Lyme disease, and bacterial infections.

• Storing and Scaling Healing: Continuing his research in storing and scaling healing using the recording and water he worked with. We would be happy to discuss possible research.

• Measurement Tools and Treatment Synergy: Developing a “heal-o-meter” or “charge-o-meter” to objectively measure when an object is charged or when healing is actively occurring. He also wanted to investigate if healing is complementary or could be alternative. This might vary based on the modality used or the condition.

What did MD Anderson figure out about how many hours, days, weeks did they establish was necessary create standard healing in the mice? During the evaluation, did you observe any fluctuations or wave-like patterns in the results? For example, were there periods with little to no measurable change followed by sudden shifts or significant effects, or did the results develop in a more linear and continuous way?

This research looked for, and continues to look for, pathways and a mechanism of action and they are not studying dose or looking for a “standard” for healing. These were not studies of long-term treatment or survival. The mice were all tested and euthanized at specific times. They followed a research protocol that was specifically 30 minutes, three times a week, for three weeks. They did not test variations in time of treatment, treatment frequency or survival, so we don’t know from this study what the effective “healing” dose in these mice would be. There were no comments made about sudden shifts or healing being in a linear fashion.

Is there research on using the method with the immune compromised? How did the cells become cancerous to begin with?

There have been no clinical studies with immune compromised humans. Bill did some research with nude mice. Nude mice are bred to have a compromised immune system. These mice were injected with cancer. Bill thought that the immune system was involved in healing and that these mice would not respond well. It turned out he was correct. However, if I am understanding the current MD Anderson research they were using nude mice, at least in some of the experiments. But since they did not take these experiments to either death or full cure, it may not be possible to answer the question of an immune response in the same way as in Bill’s research.

The cells used in the study were already cancerous when the team received them. They are established research cell lines used in cancer research for decades, plus organoids grown from a real patient’s tumor tissue.

Did all the Practitioners work on all the cells? Or did John work in his own set of cells, Eric on his set, etc? And how long did they cycle for during the study over the cells?

Each practitioner in the research had their own cells or mice. There was no “group” research shown in this research paper. How long they treated depended upon the protocol for each piece of research that was done.

What does it mean that John has no intention when he does cycling? He doesn’t visualize the healing in the cycling? Does he think it would help if he had an intention for them?

I think what John meant is that he sets a fleeting intention, “take what you need,” as is taught in the Bengston Method. There is no focused intent involved in the method. I don’t think any other intention is needed.

Why do you believe the more the need, the higher the healing? Any theories?

What Bill said, and witnessed in clinical practice and research, is that the more aggressive the cancer, the faster it would “fix.” He felt the energy in the system was what drove the speed of cure. A fast-moving cancer would remit faster than a slow growing one.

The paper’s focus on FOXM1 would seem to hint at this, as FOXM1 is an indicator of how aggressive a cancer is. It was one of the variables effected by the Bengston Method treatment in this study and the more FOXM1 was present the greater the effect of treatment.

Are the changes done by MD Anderson to the trial methods at risk of being utilized in a way specifically to discredit the method? Just as was done for example with hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 where they specifically chose inappropriate / ineffective dosing.

There is nothing that indicates that this is happening. All the researchers and staff that are involved in these experiments are highly ethical and skilled people. The research that they report is rigorously backed up by data.

It would be interesting to have John treat mice during specific times from his own home to see if the mice respond the same.

It would. This would be an experiment in distant healing. Perhaps MD Anderson will replicate Bill’s work on this at some point. The possibilities for research are endless.

So you aren’t seeing the cross cure with the controls like he did at the early studies as the cell lines and mice are “related”?

Bill proposed that resonant bonding occurred during his experiments and was keenly interested in what makes and what breaks a bond. In Bill’s experiments, the control mice were impacted after someone who was involved in the experiment looked in on them, even if briefly. This is not happening at MD Anderson. The control groups, be it cells or mice, are kept completely hidden from the person treating. John has also asked not to have any knowledge of where they are kept or be given any information about them.

How challenging was the peer-review process i.e. major challenge? Have other medical specialties expressed interest?

We were not involved in the writing of the paper so don’t know about the peer-review process. We also don’t know if any other medical specialties have expressed interest or will be examined.

Dose and survival seem so important for this research.....what’s the hold back for MD Anderson on this? And it seems like it would be such an important thing to include for the human clinical trial whenever they get around to that?

I don’t think there is “holdback” on looking at these questions, but rather a change in direction from what Bill had done. MD Anderson is looking for a mechanism of action. If this is interpreted as what is happening, then they are looking for detailed clues as to what happens at cellular levels during/after treatment. If a mechanism of action is interpreted as what is causing these things to happen, we still don’t have an answer. In either case, the direction of the research, although different, is significant. If we can turn up any clues into how this modality impacts a condition (rather than simply “something happens”), it will help the entire field of research in energy healing.

The research questions are many and take time. Even if dose were studied in depth, can we extrapolate the dose for cells, to mice or to humans? It may provide a starting point, but perhaps not the answer. Also, when treating clinically, not experimentally, the time for treatment can change based on the need. If one is experienced, one can often sense this. When doing a clinical trial, once again the time and duration must be set so things can be studied.

We hope you find this discussion and post helpful and as exciting as we do. I sincerely hope that others begin to do research using the Bengston Method and other biofield thereapy modalities. There is so much to learn. And, I think so many can benefit from the use of these modalities.

All the best,

Margaret and Amy

(photo of Bill treating nude mice)

Recently, a major paper was published out of MD Anderson Cancer Center that shared the results of The Bengston Method with pancreatic cancer in mice and in cell cultures. On Saturday, May 16, we’ll be doing a live Zoom event with both John Lavack, the main Bengston healer who was part of those experiments the last five years, and Margaret Nies, who can talk more the history of Bill’s research. The degree of statistical significance of Bill’s findings continues to be rare in the healing research field.

It all began in the 1980’s, when Bill found himself in a Queens College laboratory holding a cage of mice. These mice had been injected with a 100% fatal strain of mammary cancer. This was not his plan. Bill was a sociologist, not a healer. His plan was to study the healer Bennett Mayrick to see if he could collect data that would help him understand the real-world healing he’d witnessed by Mayrick and himself in humans. Ben had agreed to do the study, but then, as people sometimes do, he backed out at the last minute. The mice were already injected. Someone had to do something. Bill just didn’t think it would be him.

“You can do it!”

Bill’s friend and co-conspirator in this experiment was a geology professor named David Krinsley, and Dave was not about to give up so easily. With his encouragement, Bill reluctantly stepped in as the healer and so began one of the stranger scientific journeys in modern research — a decades-long series of healing experiments that produced full cures in a 100% fatal cancer model.

The first published findings appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2000, co-authored by Bengston and Krinsley. The results were unambiguous. The mechanism of action was, and remains, genuinely unknown. They did not know why the “hocus pocus” (as Bill affectionately called his healing) cured the mice, and to this day, we still don’t know how this healing works, (although with the latest paper from MD Anderson, we are perhaps gathering some important clues).

The cancer strain they used in those initial experiments was H2712, a line of mammary adenocarcinoma that had been killing laboratory mice reliably for decades. Once injected, it grew and killed within 14 to 27 days in 100% of cases. Researchers typically chose this cancer model precisely because it had consistent lethal outcomes and was the most understood, widely published model for cancer mouse research.

In that initial study, Bill spent roughly an hour a day treating each mouse. Dave monitored them. Their working assumption was that healing, if it did anything, might suppress growth from the start. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the tumors grew and got quite large. It disturbed Bill enough that he repeatedly asked to euthanize the animals to end their suffering, but Krinsley persuaded him to continue.

By Day 14, the tumors were visible and large. By Day 22, they were larger still, but something odd was starting to happen at the surface. A blackened, encrusted area had formed at the posterior edge of each tumor. They initially mistook this for necrosis, but it wasn’t. It was the beginning of a remission pattern that would repeat, reliably, across four experiments at five institutions. The blackened area spread, ulcerated and then oddly the tumor appeared to resorb internally.

In that initial study, all five experimental mice went into complete remission.

One of the more interesting findings from all of this was not the healing in the subjects (as fascinating as that was), but the controls. Before he had backed out, Bennett had warned Bill not to keep the control mice in the same room he would be treating them in. “Don’t even let me see them,” he warned. Ben couldn’t explain why, but he believed proximity might affect the controls. Krinsley, skeptical, agreed to the protocol and housed the six control mice in a separate laboratory. Two of the six died on schedule. On time, within the expected window, as the model predicted.

Then Bill and Dave went to observe the remaining four control mice, which appeared quite ill whereas the treated mice, even with large tumors, were acting quite normal. Several days later, those four mice developed the blackened area. The tumor ulcerated. These four mice remitted — lagging behind the experimental group but fully recovering. They hadn’t been treated, yet still went to full cure.

The next obvious question was whether Bill unusual? Maybe whatever was happening was a property of one specific person and not repeatable by anyone else. The second experiment was designed to answer this question. Krinsley agreed to be part of the experiment himself and also recruited a skeptical Queens College faculty member. Bill recruited two of the most skeptical students he could find — students who, by their own later account, believed Bengston was doing a study in gullibility. They all trained for several hours a week over six weeks, learning the image cycling technique Bengston had developed. In this experiment, all seven experimental mice remitted. Four of six on-site controls went into remission, again after they were looked at by the students.

Bill continued his research moving to other institutions with similar results – treated mice went to full cure and control mice when viewed by a healer in the experiment also went to full cure. As each experiment completed and the data was collected, more questions were raised. What was apparent is the researchers had established reliable, on-demand production of remissions in mammary adenocarcinoma, replicable across multiple institutions, and that “the possibilities for research were almost endless.”

As Bill continued to research other mystifying and perplexing data appeared. We will be exploring this data and its ramifications in future posts.

These early mouse studies and those that followed over the next couple decades were the beginning and remain the foundation: controlled, peer-reviewed, and stubbornly real.

*Primary source: Bengston, W.F. & Krinsley, D. (2000). The effect of the “laying-on of hands” on transplanted breast cancer in mice. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14(3), 353–364.*

CORRECTION: The original article said our event was Friday, May 16th. It is SATURDAY, May 16th!

My apologies for the error and hope to see you all there! - Amy

We have something special coming up, and we hope you’ll join us!

On Saturday, May 16th from 1:30–2:30pm EST, we’re hosting a live Zoom presentation and Q&A about the recently published MD Anderson Cancer Center paper on the Bengston Method — and we have two special guests joining us.

Margaret Nies is Bill Bengston’s wife and one of his closest research collaborators. She has been in the room — often literally — for over a decade of Bill’s research, and nobody is better positioned to tell the story of how Bill’s early mouse research eventually found its way to one of the world’s most prestigious cancer centers.

John Lavack is a Bengston healer who spent the last five years as an active participant in the MD Anderson study. He’ll tell you what that experience was actually like from the inside, and where this research is headed next.

What we’ll be sharing:

• Overview of the MD Anderson study and its findings

• Margaret Nies on the history of Bill’s involvement with the MD Anderson study

• John Lavack on what it was actually like to be inside the study — and where things go from here

• John and Margaret will be answering your questions about this important milestone in the research journey

This is a free event, open to all, so please spread the word! The Zoom link will go out closer to the date.

Mark your calendars! Saturday, May 16, 2026 | 1:30–2:30pm EST | Zoom

We’ll see you there!

Note from Amy: This is an article that was written by Bill Bengston himself after Bernard Grad passed away. Bernie was a mentor to Bill and an enormous influence on his work. Read on to learn more about this pioneer of healing research!

Special thanks to Margaret Nies for sharing this with us.

Bernard Grad, Ph.D. was a an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. During his thirty-six year tenure, he engaged in both conventional studies on aging and cancer, and also in studies of bioenergy. Grads pioneering studies with the gifted healer, Oscar Estebany, demonstrated clearly that such healing was not due to suggestion but was basically dependent on a bioenergetic interaction between healer and organism being healed. Dr. Grad is the author of more than 130 articles, many of which are about healing.

Excerpt from the introduction to Biogenesis: On the Road to Healing Memoirs of a Scientist

by William F. Bengston, PhD

I remember exactly where I was in 1970 when, as an undergraduate student in upstate New York, I first encountered the pioneering work of Bernard Grad. I had journeyed to Buffalo to hear some lectures on healing by the well-known parapsychologist Douglas Dean. I had already done a reasonable amount of reading on the subject of healing, at least in the popular literature. Most of it was disappointing, being either abstract discussions of human potential or series of anecdotes about supposed miraculous healings. Story after story, it left me – a natural skeptic – unsure about what to believe. I was intrigued by some of these anecdotes, but not persuaded.

Worse, at least to me, was that most of the anecdotes implied that “belief” was somehow central to healing. I was left with the nagging thought that perhaps healing was more of a psychological phenomenon than a natural biological process. The idea that healing efficacy required a psychological “buy-in” on the part of the person being treated left me uneasy. The logical inference of this way of thinking would be that unsuccessful healing must somehow be related to lack of faith. Blaming the victim wasn’t my thing.

So I wasn’t surprised that Professor Dean’s introduction to healing took off on the usual track, with entertaining stories about healers allegedly producing remarkable results with a variety of ailments. After some minutes of this, I was about to drift off when Dean suddenly shifted to a slide of a plant-growth experiment with precisely measured comparisons of the effects of a healer’s intentions. Here was a straightforward presentation with healer X giving Y minutes of intention directed at plants, with results Z. These data compared growth rates of randomly selected plants and seeds to plants and seeds in a control group.

I sat straight up in amazement. Finally, real data! Presumably, I thought, the plants didn’t “believe” in healing (sometimes now I’m not so sure), yet here was an obvious and measurable effect. The statistics were straightforward, and the pictures spoke for themselves.

Slide after slide of data followed, some involving healthy plants and others involving plants that had been “shocked” by saline solution. Then, to my amazement, there followed some animal data. Experimental mice with skin wounds were treated for precise intervals by healers and compared to control mice with skin wounds which hadn’t been treated with healing. The surface areas of the wounds were precisely measured over time; the statistical and visual results were unquestionably favorable. Mice with induced goiters were randomly treated by healers and compared to those that were not treated. And so it went, on and on. My skeptical, non-believing-self became overwhelmed with the inevitable conclusion of these astonishing data: healing is real!

As my mind reeled from the implications, I learned that the researcher was Dr. Bernard Grad, a biologist at McGill University in Montreal. Grad had performed experiments that would almost single-handedly change the way that we look at healing. Prior to Grad, the relevance and efficacy of whether or not a patient “believes” in healing was perhaps the biggest question about healing, when ­– if ever – it was discussed scientifically. After all, the pre-Grad era consisted mostly of collected cases and haphazard anecdotes. But what could be said in this regard about research in the post-Grad era? That’s easy: that the question of “belief” in healing has been completely transformed. While it was still reasonable to believe that faith or belief could still influence the efficacy of hands-on healing, the efficacy itself can no longer be claimed to be only attributable to a patient’s faith or lack of faith. Clearly there is a biological and energetic basis to healing. How healing works is still open to question and is being explored. Whether healing happens, in a post-Grad era. . . well, that’s a no-brainer. The door was flung open forever. An entire new field of healing research had been created.

My intellectual framework changed from this exposure to Grad’s work. He became for me (and still remains) simply “the Great Grad,” the scientist who changed the way we can know about how the world of healing works. Half a dozen years later, when I began my own healing experiments, they were modeled on the protocols of Bernard Grad. Decades later, I and many others are still following in his footsteps. I would take this further – I don’t know of a single line of healing research that can’t be traced back to Grad.

It would be a full thirty years after I came upon his work that I would finally have the opportunity to meet him in person. A mutual friend from the Society for Scientific Exploration arranged for me to see him in New York at the American Society of Psychical Research (ASPR), where Grad was on the board of trustees. With some trepidation ­ this was, after all, “the Great Grad” ­­– I met him in the ASPR lobby. We skipped the small talk and immediately adjourned to the library where we paced around a large table while rapidly exchanging ideas about healing. It turned out that we fundamentally disagreed on some points, and I found myself blurting out, “Grad, you just don’t understand anything about healing!” He stopped suddenly and burst out laughing at my sheer audacity. A friendship was born.

Bernie (he never wanted me to call him Dr. Grad) turned out to be a very special friend, as well as an invaluable colleague and mentor. In multiple experiments in different labs, I had been able to produce full cures of cancerous mice using skeptical volunteers. This intrigued Bernie to no end. Some of the patterns of remission were confusing, and both of us would literally work on possible explanations for years. Sometimes, when I finished an academic paper, I would drive to Montreal from Long Island just to show him a draft, knowing that his keen mind would find any weaknesses in either the data or the arguments. He was a relentless and wonderful taskmaster for precision.

Once when I was staying with Bernie and his wife Renee at their home in Montreal, I discovered by accident a huge trove of papers and data stored in various rooms. Since Bernie’s attention was always focused on whomever was visiting him rather than on himself, he had never brought up the research treasures that lay around from his many decades of work. With some prodding, he showed me the equivalent of ten four-drawer file cabinets worth of published and unpublished data. Bernie’s mind was a beautiful mind.

The catalogue of unpublished data that he never got a chance to write up far exceeds the normal output for any typical scientist for an entire career. (This data is now stored at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.) Bernie wasn’t typical, either professionally or personally. Professionally, he pioneered healing research despite incredible obstacles. Personally, he inspired so many to pursue their passions. And he did it all with deep humility, a twinkle in his eyes, and an infectious curiosity.

Some of Grad’s research papers include:

Grad, B. A., & Dean, E. D. Independent confirmation of infrared healer effects [Abstract] In R. A. White & R. S. Broughton (Eds.), Research in parapsychology 1983 : abstracts and papers from the twenty-sixth annual convention of the Parapsychological Association, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, p. 81-83. - See more at: http://watercalendar.com/2014/the-healing-water/#sthash.XUv6sdYt.dpuf

Grad, Bernard A Telekinetic Effect on Plant Growth International Journal of Parapsychology Vol. 3, 1961 & Vol 5., 1963

Grad, B. A. A telekinetic effect on plant growth: II. Experiments involving treatment of saline in stoppered bottles International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 6, 1964, p. 473-478 & p. 484-488.

Grad, Bernard Some Biological Effects of the ‘Laying on of Hands’: A Review of Experiments with Animals and Plants Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 59, Iss. 2, 1965, p. 95-129

Exciting news! A team of researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center just published a paper in Cancer Medicine — a peer-reviewed, open-access Wiley journal — showing that the Bengston Energy Healing Method slowed the growth of pancreatic cancer cells and reduced primary tumor growth and liver metastasis in mice. The paper is called The Preclinical Effects and Mechanisms of Biofield Therapy on Pancreatic Cancer Cell Growth and Metastasis, and it went live this week. The study was co-led by Peiying Yang and Lorenzo Cohen at MD Anderson, with a twelve-author team spanning palliative medicine, gastroenterology, biostatistics, and veterinary pathology. You can read it here.

The researchers ran a long series of experiments — multiple human and mouse pancreatic cancer cell lines, patient-derived organoids (basically mini-tumors grown from real patient tissue), and two different mouse models where human or mouse pancreatic tumors were implanted directly into the pancreas of the animal. The experiments were run using the Bengston Energy Healing Method as the biofield therapy. Three different experienced Bengston Method practitioners were used, all following a standardized version of the technique: John Lavack (who was the healer for the bulk of the experiments), Laura Shalliker, and Eric Bates.

They used two control groups: a sham control (a non-practitioner sitting in front of the cells, mimicking the physical movements) and an incubator control (cells that never left the incubator). The staff evaluating the outcomes were blinded to which group was which. The whole protocol was preregistered on the Open Science Framework before the experiments were run.

From this, we learned that the Bengston Method created statistically significant changes across multiple cell lines—but we also got a glimpse of what, specifically, was being affected by the healing intervention.

First of all, cancer cells exposed to the Bengston Method grew more slowly than both the sham and the incubator controls. Healthy (non-cancerous) pancreatic cells were largely unaffected. And in living mice, animals with pancreatic tumors who received Bengston healing had smaller primary tumors and less liver metastasis than sham controls. In one of the studies, the Bengston treated group had 70–75% fewer liver nodules on average than the colony control group!

So in summary, in a rigorously designed study run by a major cancer center, trained practitioners using the Bengston Method affected cancer cell growth and tumor spread in mice. The effects were replicated with three different therapists. The control group sitting in the same room with a fake healer didn’t produce the same results.

Cancer Medicine is a mainstream, peer-reviewed oncology journal published by Wiley. Getting a biofield therapy paper through its peer-review process is a significant institutional milestone for this field. It means the reviewers and editors looked at the methodology, the controls, the statistics, and the mechanistic work, and agreed: this is publishable science.

Bill provided many hours of initial consultation for this research in addition to inventing and refining the healing method they studied. While he may not be here to see this paper in print, it would not exist today without the decades of work he did, the contacts he made, and the persistence he had in pursuing rigorous research of this method.

It makes me sad that he’s not here to weigh in on this study, but I’m sure he’d be smiling to see this paper finally published.

As mentioned in the previous post (What is the Bengston Energy Healing Method?), Bill met the psychic-turned-energy healer Bennett Mayrick in 1971 while life guarding at a pool on Long Island. After witnessing Ben’s unusual talent first-hand over many occasions, Bill became deeply interested in understanding Ben’s gift through the lens of science. This is how he became involved in anomalous healing.

Through the endless questions he asked Ben, they worked to decipher what Ben was doing when he healed people and how it could potentially be replicated. Bill then took this process into the lab to see whether it could be replicated under controlled conditions. It turns out, it could! This began Bill’s long investigation of healing, and we’re all better off for it.

The full story of how Bill came to this work is outlined in The Energy Cure. In articles to come, we’ll be sharing some of the research and Bill’s findings.

If you’ve read Bill’s first book, The Energy Cure, then you have an idea of how it all started, way back in 1971. A 21-year-old sociology student at the time, Bill met a middle aged man named Bennett Mayrick who had spontaneously developed psychic abilities. Bill was skeptical despite repeated first-hand witnessing of Ben’s unusual talent, and he proceeded to spend the next several months trying to debunk him. Much to Bill’s amazement, Ben was unbunkable, and Bill had to conclude something real was going on.

Eventually, Ben’s abilities shifted from things like psychometry (psychically reading objects to get information about the people they belonged to) to perceiving physical ailments, and then to healing them. Bill spent the next several years observing and healing alongside Ben. He witnessed hundreds of people being healed over several years in a weekly group that Ben held in his living room. What struck him was that Ben didn’t focus intently on the patient. Instead, Ben seemed to heal through a specific type of detachment. There was no meditating or chanting or drawing mysterious signs in the air. While healing someone, Ben would carry on unrelated conversations, distracting his mind while his hands would move instinctively.

Over time, Bill reverse-engineered the process and what emerged is what we now call the Bengston Energy Healing Method. The core technique of the method is a mental imaging process Bill called “image cycling.” He sometimes explained this as a “technology of the mind” and also, more commonly a “gimmick.”

The best way to learn the method is to take a live workshop or do the audio course available from Sounds True. There are descriptions of the method in Bill’s published research as well as in The Energy Cure. A brief overview of how it works follows.

You start by making a list of at least 20 specific, concrete things you personally want but don’t currently have. The items should have specific, recognizable outcomes. Not “I want to be healthy,” but the image of yourself having normal bloodwork or getting a clear scan. Don’t put “money” on your list—put the vacation to Hawaii or the yacht you’d buy on your list. For whatever reason, these items are more effective than vague concepts like “money” or “health” or “happiness.” Once you have the list, you spend some time getting to know your list by vividly imagining a future where each of those things has already happened. We coach newbies to wallow in every item on the list, using all the senses and fully inhabiting that reality in their imaginations.

Once you’ve done that, you then mentally “cycle” through the images. Eventually, you will do this so fast that your conscious mind (what Bill called the “pea brain”) can no longer keep up. People new to cycling will get a little frustrated or confused at this point, and that’s typical. The best advice is to keep practicing. It isn’t a normal thing to do, and it doesn’t feel natural. But the more you practice it, the easier it gets. Any emotion you’re feeling can fuel the speed: joy, anxiety, frustration, excitement. Using anxiety or worry or anger to fuel the speed of your cycling is a great way to help cope with some of those emotions (an interesting side benefit). Seasoned practitioners will say that those tense emotions are great for cycling.

Image cycling on its own has a lot of positives, and many long-time practitioners are always cycling. Bill was always cycling. “You’ve never seen me when I wasn’t cycling my brains out,” he’d say in almost every workshop. You don’t have to heal anyone at all using this method—it’s still worth learning, because it’s a great way to simply get things that you want. Most people who do it consistently find that they get many or most of the things they put on their list, sometimes in shocking or surprising ways!

If you’d like to use cycling for healing someone, you hold a fleeting intention for the person in front of you to be healed while you are cycling. Like Bennet Mayrick would have a conversation about the weather to distract himself from the healing, healing with this method does not involve sustained, focused attention. You do not need to put the person to be healed on your list of 20 items. You cycle, hold a brief intention for the healee to “take what you need,” and then you let it go. Bill was emphatic about this distinction. Concentrating, using a lot of effort, believing too hard were all things he believed impede the process. The healing, in his model, is initiated by the healee’s need, not the healer’s will. You’re offering a signal, and they take what they need. For some reason, it seems to do things. Bill didn’t know how or why. As he’d say, “It’s above my paygrade.” He was okay with the mystery.

Anyone claiming a theoretical framework for why it works is probably fooling themselves. All he could say was that it does interesting things and he didn’t know why. But he also had years of data from controlled, replicated experiments. Researchers at Wake Forest, Brown, and MD Anderson have studied this work. The volunteers doing the healing in those early studies were skeptical biology students who thought they were in a study about skepticism. They didn’t believe in energy healing, and it still worked.

One of Bill’s most significant findings was that healing does not diminish with distance. Mice treated from across the room healed at the same rate as mice treated from 2,000 miles away. That’s a problem for the word “energy” in this “energy healing” idea. Literal energy diminishes with distance. Because healing isn’t affected by distance, Bill concluded that energy healing isn’t energy in any classical sense. His preferred framing was that healing is the transfer of information—perhaps an information packet riding on some kind of carrier wave, forming what he described as a resonant bond between the healer and healee. He aligned this loosely with the work of physicists Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at Princeton, who proposed that conscious intention interacts with the physical world through unconscious processes and something like a timeless, spaceless source of potential.

Of course, we don’t know if that’s what it is, but it’s a working model.

Bill was fairly insistent that the Bengston Method isn’t spiritual. It doesn’t require belief in anything. It has no symbols, no chakras, no attunements, no particular cosmology you have to sign onto. Bill actively discouraged people from being believers, and instead encouraged healthy, open-minded skepticism. He trained skeptical biology students to use the method in controlled experiments specifically because they didn’t believe in it, and they still got results. Belief in healing, he said repeatedly, is irrelevant to healing. In fact, he speculated it could actually get in the way.

What effective cycling and healing with the Bengston method does require is patience and a lot of practice. Think about learning tennis or the piano. Anyone can pick up a tennis racket and bounce the ball, but to play the game? That takes practice. Similarly, image cycling takes time to learn and get proficient. The early stages are effortful. With enough practice, it becomes automatic—running in the background while you have a conversation or sit with a client, the way your body maintains balance on a bicycle without your conscious attention. That’s when it starts to get interesting.

Bill spent fifty years not knowing how or why it works, and that didn’t stop him. It doesn’t have to stop you, either! Give it a try and see what happens.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our new Substack, dedicated to the work of Dr. William Bengston. This effort is spearheaded by Margaret Nies, Bill’s wife and research partner for the last 15 years, and Amy Saville, an author who worked closely with Bill on his second book.

After working for over 18 months to bring the story of Bill’s research to print, we realized there was still a lot more to say. And while sadly, Bill is no longer here to tell the story himself, we are! Research on the healing method he developed is still being conducted, papers are still being published, and there are a lot of people — we suspect you’re one of them — who are genuinely curious about what Bill found and what we’re all still learning about healing and the world around us.

Each week, you’ll find plain-language summaries of published research, stories from long-term practitioners, case studies, and the occasional piece where we push on the harder questions: What do we actually know? What are we still guessing at? What would it mean if we’re right? And if you’re here because you want to learn more about how to heal people using the Bengston Method, there will be opportunities to dive more deeply into Bengston healing, too.

What Is the Bengston Energy Healing Method?

The Bengston Energy Healing Method® is an innovative healing technique that has been shown to be effective on a wide variety of conditions. We have another post with a more in-depth explanation coming up, but for a brief explanation, please read on! (And to learn the method yourself, please visit BengstonWorkshops.com!)

Bill’s first book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how he discovered and developed this unusual healing method using a mental technique he called “image cycling” — which we refer to simply as “cycling.” To put it very briefly, cycling involves mentally moving through images of things you want. It is deceptively simple, but also not easy to do. The process is belief-free — complete skeptics are often quite effective with the technique. But as with any new skill, it takes practice and commitment to become proficient. When coupled with a brief healing intention, the results — in clinical practice and in controlled laboratory settings — have been quite remarkable.

Although energy healing is a common term recognized by many, Bill proposed that the “energy” in energy healing is information, and that healing information may ride on an energy wave. Research is now pointing toward this being the case.

Bill’s work was recently mentioned in the popular podcast The Telepathy Tapes — a show focused on consciousness and anomalous phenomena — in Season 2, Episode 8 by his colleague Jill Blakeway. In Episode 9, an excerpt about “biofield” therapies featured John Lavack, Bill’s close friend and long-time Bengston practitioner, who has been working with a team at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to study the impact of The Bengston Energy Healing Method on pancreatic cancer cells, with some seriously interesting results.

About Bill

Bill was a pioneer in healing research. The technique he developed now falls under the general term “biofield therapy”, historically referred to as many things, but most commonly as energy healing. He was a professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in New York until he retired in 2022, and received his Ph.D. from Fordham University in 1980. His areas of specialization were research methods and statistics — a background that informed the rigor he brought to 40+ years of research into anomalous healing.

That research demonstrated the effectiveness of his technique in 10 controlled animal experiments conducted in seven biological and medical laboratories in universities throughout the United States, producing the first successful full cures of transplanted mammary cancer and methylcholanthrene-induced sarcomas in experimental mice. He also investigated correlates to healing such as geomagnetic micropulsations and EEG harmonics and entrainment.

Bill had publications in Dose Response, the Journal of Scientific Exploration, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Explore, among other academic journals. He lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe, served as President of the Society for Scientific Exploration for 12 years, and sat on the editorial board of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

In the last years of his life, he worked extensively on two projects to carry his work into the future. The first was answering the question, Could healing be stored and subsequently scaled? The answer is Yes. The second was a book to follow The Energy Cure, detailing the journey through research he took while pursuing this question: How can we make healing go mainstream? We anticipate the book will be available in early 2027. In addition, he worked on training his most trusted practitioners to teach his method to the public — those workshops are taught live and are currently available at Bengstonworkshops.com.

His memoir with Sylvia Fraser, The Energy Cure: Unraveling the Mystery of Hands-On Healing, is available wherever books are sold. An audio instruction program, Hands On Healing: A Training Course in the Energy Cure, is also available from Sounds True.

We’re just getting started, and we’re excited to explore this terrain with you all. Whether you’re just discovering the Bengston Method and Bill’s work, or have been image cycling for decades, we’re glad you’re here.

— Amy Saville & Margaret Nies

This is The Bengston Research Newsletter.

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