From the Bengston Research Newsletter
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.