Hello, everyone!
First of all, all the best to Alex. Can one say "congratulations on your healing"?
Regarding Bill Bengston and the Bengston Method, I worked with him extensively in 2007 and 2008 to bring his method to the mainstream. I found his mouse experiments online and was so excited by what I read that I immediately contacted him. Our initial chat and a subsequent visit led to six workshops. We worked out the workshop format together (the first one was a four-hour talk on the mice followed by a half-hour demonstration of cycling). A practice group was formed from among the most interested students in the workshops and we met monthly to compare notes and work on various facets of the method. For the first couple of meeting Bill "joined us" by speaker phone from New York. One memory that stands out is one of those times, when all of us in the group complained to him about our difficulty in speeding up the images as we cycled. Suddenly he said "it's like this" and I felt as if somebody reached inside my head and spun my brain. A friend of mine in the group reported the same sensation. At another group a woman asked to talk to him when he came on the phone and she told him that she had had breast cancer, had undergone surgery but not any other treatment, and now she had lumps in the other breast. We treated her with Bill, and the next week when she had a guided ultrasound, no lumps could be found.
My experiences with the method and my thoughts about it can be found in the early entries of my blog, entitled Treating Cancer with Bioenergy. If you google "bioenergy and cancer" it should pop up. Essentially I began to wonder about the role of cycling in the healings and also the role of resonance in the healing of the mice by Bill's skeptical volunteers. I am quite sure that Bill's mentor, Bennett Mayrick, did not write down 20 things he wanted, create images of them and then begin spinning them at great speed in his head. He just developed his healing ability naturally. In fact since then I ran across Bennett Mayrick in Leigh Fortson's book
Embrace, release, heal. In chapter 5 of that book is the story of Jeff, who was healed from some dreadful cancer by a "spiritualist" in the desert called Ben. Ben, interestingly, did not charge him a dime, and Ben did not treat him with anything resembling image cycling. I wrote to Leigh Fortson asking her to contact Jeff to find out if his Ben was also Bill's Ben, and the details matched. Bill's Ben was 50 in 1971 and Jeff's Ben was 70 in 1991. Both Bens lived in the desert and both Bens died in (I believe) 2004. Jeff's healing was accomplished through what seemed like a combination of guided and spontaneous imagery with not a whit of "cycling" in it. Jeff had had extensive chemo (I can't remember whether he had radiation) and Ben still managed to heal him, so by this time he must have overcome the limitation of not being able to heal anyone who had had conventional treatment.
Regarding the role of resonance in the healing of the mice, let me go back to Bill's experiments, specifically the problem of the control mice being cured. In the first four experiments if anyone so much looked at the control mice, which were supposed to die, they instead recovered. In later experiments it wasn't even necessary to look at them. They would only die if they were secreted away somewhere far without Bill knowing where. To resolve the dilemma of why the control mice recovered, Bill worked out a hypothesis of "resonant bonding." The mice were resonantly bonded and therefore any treatment given to one mouse was given to all the mice. But he didn't go the full distance with the hypothesis to ask whether their healers were also resonantly bonded, which would have meant that any treatment given to the mice by any of healers was given by all of them, including Bill himself. The upshot is that if the skeptical volunteers were resonantly bonded with Bill, as the mice were resonantly bonded with each other, none of them needed to have learned anything or acquired a healing ability to be successful at treating the mice. And ultimately there is no less reason for the healers than for the mice to be resonantly bonded, if resonant bonding as a hypothesis stands.
Our practice group did some nifty healings, the best one being of a little girl with a lung abscess and scoliosis in Abu Dhabi. The most courageous of us, heartened by Bill's oft-repeated comment that the most aggressive cancers responded the most readily, ran out in search of people with aggressive cancers to treat. The first patient had acute myelogenous leukemia and was told that with aggressive medical treatment (which might result in death) she had a 10 per cent chance of survival. This was not something she was willing to do. We treated her valiantly but to little effect. I took her to see Bill by bus because she wasn't allowed to fly and his treatments perked her up, but when she returned home she crashed. I kept treating her after my colleagues gave up, and then something strange happened: her white blood cell count, which had sky-rocketed, reversed. The doctors cited lab error, but the numbers just kept going down. In fact they were within the normal range when she died.
Our second patient was a man in his late thirties with stage-4 pancreatic cancer. His wife contacted us through an intermediary after having been told that he had maybe 48 hours to live. We rushed into his hospital room, asked for his permission to treat him, and proceeded to treat him singly and in pairs for about an hour and a half day. The results were mind-blowing and immediate. First the swelling in his legs started going down, then he began to need less morphine, his jaundice reversed, and he began to eat. He was then able to stand up, walk first to the door of his hospital room and back then along the hallway, then he was able to stop his morphine altogether, and a week after we started treating him the hospital sent him home. His oncologist called him "our little miracle on the ward" and one of the nurses with 25 years of oncology nursing under her belt said that she had never seen a reversal like this in her entire career.
After he went home he continued to improve, walking down the stairs, then to the park and back, then going grocery shopping and to the cottage. His jaundice almost completely vanished and when he had blood work done six weeks after we started treating him, all the values were either normal or near normal. Then he went to the hospital to have a port removed and the doctor who did the procedure asked him why he would bother since he was going to die anyway. The hospital also did a CAT scan or MRI (I forget which) because his doctor was curious to see what was going on inside him given his blood test results. After this hospital visit he went into a steep decline and we could do nothing to reverse it. Just before he died I received a terribly distressed phone call from his wife who told me that the test results were back and that "all the tumours were still there and they were all bigger." When he died we were devastated. The group lost heart and many people drifted away. Another doctor told us later that his symptoms were consistent with septicemia.
Three of us treated yet another person who was told he had pancreatic cancer that had spread to the liver, although it may have been bile cancer. He was told in July 2007 that his cancer was inoperable, and we began to treat him in August. He was expected to decline speedily and die by March of 2008. In March 2008 he was still taking long walks with the dog and doing things like cleaning out the garage and painting the house. He even went back to work for a while. We didn't seem to be reversing his cancer, just slowing it down and keeping it on hold while giving him improved quality of life, which in itself had great value. We treated him until July 2008, when he went salmon fishing and white-water rafting and then returned from his trip and told us that he decided to terminate his treatment. He died in March 2009 after a futile and damaging attempt at chemo.
All these three were aggressive cancers that according to Bill's definition should have been "pieces of cake" but weren't. Incidentally the organizer of one of Bill's later workshops with whom he is no longer affiliated claimed in her promotional literature that our first pancreatic cancer patient, who had died six weeks prior, was alive and well and had gone back to work. There are other inaccuracies, as in this FAQ from Equilibrium Energy. Note the paragraph which claims that Bill and the therapists he trained have been successfully treating "bone, pancreatic, breast, brain, rectal, lymphatic, [and] stomach [cancer], [and] leukemia" for 35 years. This is a paragraph taken from the introduction his book with "and his therapists" added to it. I don't know whether Equilibrium Energy still hands out this FAQ, but it's on the web.
I think the only claims that can me made pertain to Bill's experiments. Everything else is very vague. "Anecdotally" people have had success -- but what does that mean? What is success? Is it a full remission? Does an extra year of life with relatively good quality of life count? The method works, but not to the degree that most of us would want. It keeps being marketed on the strength of the mice and on the hope that it may work for people. I have not been able to find out what kind of success other people have had with it and I would be overjoyed to hear about actual documented cancer remissions by people who have learned the method.
Good for Alex that it worked for him and good on Bernadette for persisting.