Question from Lukas:
Here goes. Some time before my friend told me about Dr William Bengston. I as an agnostic of course didn’t believe in the story of this person that he cured cancer in mice but I could not give him any reasonable answer to his experiment and even could not find any skeptic information on this guy on the Internet. Therefore I am asking here if you could help me. Dr. William Bengston claims he can cure people from cancer with his energy healing. The complete info is here:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf
http://www.skeptiko.com/william-bengston-hands-on-healing-research-ignored-by-cancer-industry/
Thanks for your time reading this and if you could answer it – mostly the pdf. research that my friend send me I would be glad. Thanks very much.
Answer by SmartLX:
This is of course an atheist website, and I dabble in skepticism of the supernatural mainly because claims of the supernatural are often used to support claims of the divine. I’ll address this particular topic because it looks interesting, but supporting theism does not appear to be Bengston’s intention. In fact, he claims that even people who don’t think his healing-hands cure will work can perform it successfully, which contradicts most religions’ claims about the exclusive power of belief.
Anyway, you’re right, there’s hardly anything on Dr Bengston online by skeptics. I see two main causes for this.
1. He hasn’t been targeted as a charlatan as he does not appear to be aggressively pursuing monetary gain – until recently, with the release of his new book and audiobook, so he may soon attract that sort of attention.
2. When Dr Bengston addresses a group of skeptics, he says in the linked interview, he starts by telling them that he’s the only real skeptic in the room, and everyone else is a believer – who believes from the outset that he’s wrong or lying. Telling people right away that they can’t be persuaded is a terrible way to actually persuade them of something, or engage them at all, because it shifts the focus from the evidence to the people and puts them on the defensive. I can think of only two possible reasons why Bengston does this: either he wants a hostile, dismissive response so he can continue to claim prejudice, or he’s genuinely, obliviously bad with people and he seriously needs to let someone else present his findings.
His paper from the first link was published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration which is derided, along with the similarly-titled society that makes it, as a haven for fringe science. Apparently the experiment on breast cancer in mice has been repeatedly successful in saving the lives of the mice, and there’s nothing which obviously contradicts that. There is however something crucial which is missing from the paper: the method, the actual energy-healing technique.
The “Methods and Data” section has plenty about the mice, the cancer and the human participants, but nothing at all about how they went about healing the mice. It’s implied that the core technique is not the placement of (or clothing on) the hands but rather the mental activity of the practitioner, but there isn’t a single hint about what’s involved in that critical aspect. This means that the experiment cannot be repeated without consent and instruction from, and probably the participation of, Bengston himself or his associates. By withholding the details of the very thing which is tested in the experiments, Dr Bengston has retained absolute control of all relevant experimentation and research. If anyone tries without him, he can say they’re doing it wrong and declare the results invalid. This is not conducive to the advancement of science, and the fact that the experiment can’t be done without Bengston does not speak well for its merits.
As I said, he’s got a book out, and reviews of the book on Amazon contain plenty of anecdotes of people healing other people with its help. Any one of these, if genuine, and demonstrably not caused by other factors, could make headlines as a medical “miracle” or win James Randi’s million dollar prize if repeated under experimental conditions. Neither is happening thus far, to my knowledge. Despite all the claims and stories, Dr Bengston’s method is apparently not having an effect on the world at large, and that to me is very important. Something as amazing as a drug-free, doctor-free cancer cure should have a huge impact on the medical community, if only in the form of a huge pushback by the money-makers as Bengston claims, but as we’ve both found, there isn’t even a visible effort by any party to discredit Bengston. He’s a medical non-entity, and will probably remain so until we get more results than the endless parade of tightly controlled but apparently very fortunate mice.
3 thoughts on “Hands-Oncology”
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There is quite a bit of information out there on Dr. Bengston that you did not find. For instance, the technique is published in full here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17480126.
Thanks for that, though without paying for the article (US$249 on Google Scholar, or $51 for a single reading) all you can see is the abstract, which isn’t terribly informative.
Regardless, let’s assume that the full method is available to the public, but only for a fee. That means that one reason why there isn’t so much as an overview of the mental technique in Dr Bengston’s freely published paper is to ensure that people have to pay quite a lot to learn about it to a professional level of detail (i.e. more detail than his book, one would hope).
It also means that the opportunity exists for scientists entirely independent of Bengston’s circle to cough up the fee and then try to reproduce the experiment by themselves. If they didn’t get similar results, Bengston could still protest that they’d done it wrong somehow, but the experimenters could back themselves up with Bengston’s own instructions.
Therefore the important question now is whether anyone has tried the experiment without Bengston, and how they fared. If the effect can be reproduced by anyone using the correct technique, then we can be confident that there is at least something to investigate.
Hi
After reading through the answer from SmartLX and thinking about it I also came to a conclusion and of course I have again read all the data on Dr. Bengston. Dr. Bengston like SmartLX has pointed out claims that no belief is needed to cure someone. This brings Dr. Bengston to a strange like position in among healers because if Dr. Bengston is right then all other faith healers who ask from their patients to believe in something divine or to pray for them to be healed from their sickness. This is what is strange if Dr. Bengston is right then all other faith healers are wrong and he is the only “real healer” who can heal mice on 100 percent. When you even read this : http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf then Dr. Bengston was always 100 percent able to heal his mice but his students were only able to produce 87.9% in 33 experimental mice where the fine doctor was able to heal 100 percent in two experiments. This is something odd to me personally because if Dr. Bengstons method was the only thing needed to be a super healer then his students who he claims he taught them the way of healing would also have to had 100 percent. This is what I think and of course I can be wrong but according to what I read so far about these “cancer healers” all ended in jail or did it for the money and had no special powers only lied to people to get money from it. I would like to thank again SmartLX for his answer. Thanks again it opened up my skeptical mind on this subject.