Phenomena: The Science & Stories of Energy Healing [Takeover]

Tami Simon:  Today we’re sharing something very special with you here on Insights at the Edge. We’re going to play, in its entirety, the premier episode of a new podcast series produced by Sounds True called Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing. Throughout this series, you’ll hear about evidence-based research and personal stories of healing, including today’s story about the latest study from MD Anderson on how energy healing has the potential to slow the metastasis of pancreatic cancer cells. This is the first in a six part series. You can subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and learn more at phenomenahealing.com. And now Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.

—

Lorenzo Cohen: We’ve been able to replicate, again, with multiple therapists and multiple pancreatic cell lines, that biofield therapy decreases the invasiveness of the pancreatic cancer, as well as the ability to migrate over distances. It slows the whole process down.

Ivy Ross: We are in a time of convergence. Throughout history, almost every culture in the world has used what we now generally call energy healing to help ease suffering. But modern medicine pushed these practices — these phenomena — to the margins. And stories of energy healing became just that: stories.

I’m Ivy Ross. As a business leader and artist, my life has always been about navigating two very different worlds: the solid ground of hard data and the undeniable power of the invisible. At heart, I’m a child of wonder. I’m curious about the forces that connect us all. So I invite you to join me as I explore this new frontier in medicine and healing — with astonishing stories, compelling science, and an open mind and heart.

This is Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.

For this episode, we’re starting big. If you’ve heard of energy healing practices like Reiki or external Qigong, you might think they only work for issues like mental health and stress. But what if I told you that recently, tier-one research institutions have been quietly studying the possibility that energy healing can have a real, measurable impact on chronic pain and other illnesses?

Not only that — they’re also investigating possible applications for one of the leading causes of death in the United States and the world: cancer. We’re going to hear from researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the world’s most respected cancer hospitals and research institutions, about their remarkable findings when they invited energy healers into the research lab to work with pancreatic cancer — in cells and in mice.

Like I said, we’re starting big. But before we go big, we have to go small — with one woman’s story that starts with chronic pain in her left shoulder.

Meet Mojdeh Stone.

Mojdeh Stone: My name is Mojdeh. Mojdeh means “good news” in Persian.

Ivy Ross: Mojdeh is a cheerful woman with a kind smile that always reaches up into her eyes. In 2013, Mojdeh received a diagnosis no one wants to hear, but too many of us do. She had breast cancer.

Mojdeh Stone: It was found very conventionally — my annual mammogram. I got a call that something unusual had shown up. This was a Friday afternoon. On the phone call, I scheduled a Monday morning mammogram because I didn’t want to wait. Monday morning at eight o’clock, I go there, and they see exactly what they saw on Friday. They say, okay, let’s do a 3D. Let’s do an ultrasound. Everything kept showing the same mass. Right there, they did a biopsy.

At one point the doctor leaves the room, and I said to the nurse, “This is cancer, but you just want to make sure.” She said, “Didn’t hear it from me. But yes — we both think what we see has all the marks.” Three days later they called me in and confirmed it.

It’s a very foggy thing. One day you feel great. You come back from the gym. And another day you get that news — and you’re still the same person. Nothing has changed.

Ivy Ross: Like most people who receive a diagnosis, Mojdeh began what’s commonly described as the runaway train of cancer treatment. It all starts happening fast — the appointments, the scans, the treatments. It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach that can feel overwhelming.

Mojdeh Stone: They wanted to do a biopsy-assisted MRI, just to make sure they knew exactly where this thing was. That was really the most difficult part. An MRI is scary enough on its own, let alone having a needle go into you — just to confirm what they thought they saw.

Ivy Ross: And what they saw was a standard four-centimeter tumor. Mojdeh scheduled surgery to have it removed six weeks later, and in the meantime kept her diagnosis within a small inner circle — not even telling her mother, because of her family’s difficult history with cancer.

Mojdeh Stone: My sister had had it, maybe eight years before I did, and her journey was really difficult. My first reaction was: oh God, my mother cannot go through this again. I didn’t tell anybody. Only my son, my sister, and my husband knew — because I didn’t want anyone’s terrible story. I was on a path of healing. I didn’t want anyone to say, “My neighbor had it — she died.” I just didn’t want anyone’s stories at all.

I wanted my story. I wanted to be surrounded only by people whose job it was to heal me. I put myself in a bubble of healing. And I wanted John on my team, because I had been so successful with the shoulder pain I had — pain that never came back.

Ivy Ross: In addition to all of the nurses, doctors, oncologists, lab technicians, and other dedicated healthcare professionals treating Mojdeh for her cancer, she wanted to add one more person to her healing team: John Lavack, an energy healer.

Mojdeh had met John years before at a seminar. At the time, she’d been suffering for years from chronic pain caused by what she calls a frozen shoulder. During a break, she and John struck up an unusual conversation.

Mojdeh Stone: He said, “You know, you’re holding your left shoulder a little lower than your right. You must hurt a lot.” I thought: oh my God, yes it does. And how did you know? I had a frozen shoulder that came back every year like clockwork in January. Physical therapy and cortisone would calm it down, and then it would come back. He said, “We could talk on the phone and get into why it hurts.” Two or three sessions on the phone, and my shoulder has never had the same problem.

Ivy Ross: John’s treatment of Mojdeh for her chronic shoulder pain is truly fascinating — involving energy healing sessions combined with visualization exercises around letting go of past generations’ demands on her. You can listen to that part of the story on our website at phenomenahealing.com.

But right now I want to stay focused on Mojdeh’s cancer story. Because John had helped her resolve this seemingly unsolvable issue of chronic pain — pain that never came back, even years later — he was one of the first people she called after her diagnosis.

Mojdeh Stone: He said, “Let’s work on this together, but I want you to also learn this — because it will empower you to heal yourself.” Every day John and I talked for about 20 minutes before my surgery, which was probably four or five weeks away.

He directed my attention to: why did you grow a tumor on top of your heart? Your body is telling you something. We needed to learn from this. You need to learn what your body is telling you. It started whispering, and now it’s shouting at you. You need to listen.

Ivy Ross: John was telling her: your shoulder pain before — that was the whisper. Now the cancer is shouting at you from the same place. It’s all on your left side. This means something.

I wanted to know more about John — what he does and how he does it. So we all sat down with him on a call.

John Lavack: My name is John Lavack, and I am doing what I call intuitive resonance healing work for a living.

Ivy Ross: John has rectangular glasses, a snow-white goatee, and a shaved head — which he says only happened because of all the research he’s been involved with. After so many times shaving it to attach electrodes and monitor his brain functions, he decided to just keep it shaved.

He describes his work as intuitive resonance healing. He shared that when he doesn’t really want to tell people what he does, he says he works as an “energy consultant.” But John hasn’t always considered himself a full-time energy healer.

John Lavack: I had a different career for a long time. I flew helicopters for 35 years. Part of why I did that for so long was that I flew in remote areas, mainly in Canada, working solo in the cockpit — sling loads, that kind of thing — so I didn’t have people around me and wasn’t picking up their energy.

It probably felt more like a curse for a long time, especially going through adolescence, when you really want to fit in. You want to be normal. And I wasn’t normal in that sense. I didn’t fit in with whatever the norm was.

Ivy Ross: John has been involved with research projects for years, including four and a half years with MD Anderson Cancer Center — which we’ll get back to shortly. But first, let’s understand what he actually does.

John Lavack: I’ve worked with people in — I don’t know if it’s 42 or 46 countries now. Lately it’s been more focused on diseases, but a lot of people with different kinds of cancers, which seems to work to varying degrees.

Ivy Ross: John practices different modalities of energy healing. Most prominently, he prefers to work in distance healing — which means he can work with someone who isn’t in the same room, or even the same country. He can create a connection simply by speaking on the phone or by focusing on the person.

With Mojdeh’s cancer, John employed what’s called the Bengston Cycling Method. And if you’re like me, it is nothing like what you might imagine when you think of energy healing. Let John explain.

John Lavack: Basically, it’s rapidly cycling through positive futures — going quickly through things I really want, in ways that I’ll know I have them. The feeling of that, but cycling rapidly. It creates a sensation, or a resonant field, in which healing happens.

You’re connecting with futures that you really want, and then you’re letting those futures pull you toward them as you get in the frequency for them. That’s basically all healing. It’s as natural as breathing. It’s not like I’m having to consciously do it anymore. Just as you don’t think about walking when you go out for a walk — you just get up and do it — same with the cycling. You’re just doing it, almost as naturally as breathing, after you’ve practiced for a while.

Ivy Ross: I have to admit, when I first heard this, I thought: how in the world does cycling through positive futures help heal cancer? But as we’ll hear later in the show, something very fascinating may be happening here — where John’s consciousness may actually be affecting the body’s ability to heal itself.

So Mojdeh and John worked together every day for about 20 minutes for weeks leading up to her surgery. Not in the hope that he would cure her cancer, but as an act of agency. And even though Mojdeh wasn’t looking for a miracle, something miraculous did in fact happen — or at the very least, something unexplainable.

Mojdeh Stone: During one of our daily calls, I told John I felt like a dagger had gone into my left side. And John said, “The tumor just let go, because you have learned from this experience as much as possible. You’ve paid it attention. You’ve learned everything you needed to learn from it, and now it could let go of your body.”

I thought, well, that’s sweet. Maybe it was just indigestion. But when I talk to John, I always feel energy going through my left side. It feels like when your hand falls asleep. But this was different — very directed. It really did feel like a dagger.

Ivy Ross: Mojdeh didn’t realize just how remarkable this moment was until the day of her surgery.

Mojdeh Stone: I remember it was cold, and it was December. There were two surgeons. They were complaining about who chose Christmas music — “It’s too early for that.” Anyway. Before going home, the surgeon came by and said: “You have never seen this before. It was not attached to your body at all. But we took it out. I’ve never seen a tumor that was just sitting somewhere, not attached to any tissue.”

And that was exactly what John had said: your body let go. And that was amazing.

Ivy Ross: Mojdeh’s surgeon told her she saw something she couldn’t explain and had never seen before. The tumor, which on multiple scans and biopsies had seemed perfectly typical, wasn’t attached to any tissue in Mojdeh’s body.

As John put it, it seemed like her body had simply let go. That the stabbing sensation Mojdeh had felt may have been that exact moment.

How could simply imagining good things have done this? How could intention and consciousness be working at a level we just don’t understand? And how could someone like John seemingly affect another person’s body — helping it heal itself? These are some of the questions I’m left with. And as you’ll hear in the second part of our story, John has been participating in groundbreaking scientific studies to answer just those kinds of questions about energy healing and cancer.

That’s where Dr. Lorenzo Cohen comes in.

Ivy Ross: Whenever I talk with someone about energy healing, it doesn’t take long for the conversation to break down into a binary of belief or disbelief. You either buy it or you don’t. But as a friend and researcher recently told me, belief isn’t a binary. It’s a spectrum. When we treat it like a light switch — on or off — belief becomes brittle, and positions harden in defense. When we understand that belief is a spectrum, we’re more able to incorporate new information. We have a greater capacity for understanding and growth.

The researcher and friend I mentioned — the one who opened my eyes to this — is Meredith Sprengel. We’ll check in with her later to help make sense of some of the research we’re about to hear. But first, I want you to meet Dr. Lorenzo Cohen.

Lorenzo Cohen: My name is Lorenzo Cohen. I’m Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Ivy Ross: MD Anderson is one of the largest and most respected cancer care centers in the world. For the past several years, Dr. Cohen and his team have been doing something remarkable: bringing healers like John into the laboratory to observe and measure the effects of energy healing modalities on one of the deadliest illnesses we know — pancreatic cancer.

Lorenzo Cohen: In the world of cancer, we need to leave no stone unturned. And although from my open-minded but somewhat conservative integrative medicine perspective, it seems kind of crazy — that somebody with their own energy could send it into another person, that it defies laws of physics — I felt it was important and incumbent upon us to put it to the test. That’s kind of how it all started.

Ivy Ross: To me, that’s a scientist’s answer, and I love it. Not dismissing out of hand. Admitting: we don’t know if it works, and we should find out.

I’ve always thought creative people and scientists react to the unknown in a similar way. We’re curious. Comfortable with the questions. In fact, we kind of love them.

So — what are the questions?

Lorenzo Cohen: When we first started doing biofield research at MD Anderson, we wanted to show that the phenomenon was real. That this effect was measurable. Most importantly, that it was replicable. And then we wanted to start understanding some of the mechanisms.

Where better to put it to the test than in a setting where you could fully remove the placebo effect? And that’s either isolated cancer cells in Petri dishes, or animals that don’t know who’s sitting in front of them.

What’s very important in this kind of research is to have appropriate controls. So in all of these studies — both cells and animals — we had what we called sham controls, colony controls, and incubator controls.

The basic setup: the biofield therapist would come in, plates were on the counter, they’d do their treatment for 15 or 30 minutes, then the plates would go back into the incubator. We’d then measure all the different biological processes over time.

The other group was cells or animals left in the incubator the entire time — never came out. The animals lived in the colony throughout. We tracked changes in cells and cancer growth over time.

And then, importantly, there was the sham control — where the cells came out and were placed on the counter for the same amount of time, while someone who knew nothing about biofield therapy, had no skills in that area, mimicked the session. If hands were placed near the cells, this person mirrored that exactly. The distance from the bench was all controlled. So if there was a difference between those groups, you could say the only variable was the biofield therapy.

Ivy Ross: Picture this: a healer sitting in front of Petri dishes filled with pancreatic cancer cells — hands hovering, never touching — cycling through positive futures, as in John’s method. Then the dishes go back in the incubator, and we look at the results.

One note: Lorenzo uses the term “biofield therapist,” which is yet another way of saying “energy healer.” Biofield simply means a field of energy — not necessarily electromagnetic — that surrounds and permeates the body.

Now, before we get to the results, I think it’s worth taking a step back and asking a basic question: what is cancer?

Lorenzo Cohen: Cancer, by definition, is uncontrolled cell growth. One of the hallmarks of cancer is the ability of a tumor cell to leave the primary organ, travel to another part of the body, and colonize there. We call that metastasis. Normal cells aren’t supposed to do that. When a healthy cell leaves, say, the breast, it will die — it’ll undergo a process called apoptosis.

Cancer cells release a number of different molecules that allow them to survive that journey. This is critically important because what kills people is not the primary tumor, which can often be removed. It’s the metastatic disease — once it leaves the primary organ and starts colonizing elsewhere, that is typically what causes death.

Ivy Ross: Cancer at its core is uncontrolled cell growth, and its lethality comes from spreading. So ideally, these experiments would determine whether energy healing could somehow slow that process down. And this is where Lorenzo and his team’s results are truly remarkable.

Lorenzo Cohen: We measured many things over a number of years of research. I think one of the most profound findings was the ability of biofield therapy to slow down the metastatic process.

We’re going deeper into this research now, but it was clear — from the mechanisms that drive metastasis, and from the concepts of invasion and migration, which are the two processes that allow a cell to move to other parts of the body — that multiple mechanisms controlling those processes were shut down or decreased by biofield therapy. That’s extremely impressive from a treatment perspective, because if you can keep the disease confined to the site, it’s easier to do radiation. It’s easier to surgically remove the tumor. Once those metastatic processes are activated, it’s very hard to shut the system back down.

And in repeated studies with animals, using different mechanisms — it’s clear that biofield therapy was shutting down metastatic processes in pancreatic cancer cells.

Let that sink in for a moment. Cancer cells that received biofield healing grew significantly slower than those that didn’t. Compared to both the sham controls and the incubator controls, there was more than a doubling of reduction in cell growth with biofield therapy. We’ve seen that measurement across multiple cell lines — both pancreatic and other cancers.

Now we can go deeper into the cells, looking at the driving proteins and genes. We’ve clearly shown that the gene regulatory pathways linked with the whole process of becoming metastatic were deactivated with the biofield therapy — decreasing metastatic potential at the genetic level.

And we’ve been able to replicate this, again, with multiple therapists and multiple pancreatic cell lines. Biofield therapy decreases the invasiveness of the pancreatic cancer, as well as its ability to migrate over distances. It slows the whole process down.

One of the interesting phenomena we found in the cell work was a change in the mitochondria. For those who can’t visualize it, think of a kidney bean — that’s roughly the shape. There are hundreds of mitochondria in every cell, and they’re the energy center. Without mitochondria, the cell dies.

They have a lattice structure — think of a ladder — that keeps the mitochondria in that oblong, healthy shape. What we saw in the biofield therapy mitochondria is that they would start to swell. The lattice structure — called the cytoskeleton — which helps maintain the integrity of the mitochondria, would fall into disarray. Instead of a kidney bean, you’d see something like a swollen balloon. And again, this was quantified and replicated across many studies. We’re deep into that research now, trying to understand the internal versus external processes involved.

Ivy Ross: Mitochondria are a whole other subject we’re going to explore more deeply in another episode. But as Lorenzo said — in a sense, they’re the power source for cells and for life. And to see changes in the mitochondria is truly significant.

For Lorenzo and his team, and for all the other researchers doing work in this field — and there are many now — they understand this is just a first step. And even this first step is a hard one.

Even Lorenzo, the man whose team is doing the research and who very much believes in the data his studies are producing, balances these new findings with healthy skepticism and an awareness of the reality of trying to shift paradigms.

Lorenzo Cohen: I still remain skeptical — even though I see it with my own eyes — because I don’t understand what they’re doing. Until we have the mechanism, this field is going to be questioned. As, in fact, have all real scientific revolutions.

Even before Galileo — and Galileo is the example I’m most familiar with — he was dismissed until he was understood. Dr. Semmelweis discovered that if people delivering babies washed their hands beforehand, the probability of death for both mother and child decreased dramatically. But he was summarily dismissed, drummed out of town, so to speak — because we didn’t know about germs. Once germs were discovered, it became obvious. Of course you should wash your hands before delivering a baby — especially if you’d just come from the morgue, which is often where the male physicians had come from, performing autopsies.

But the midwives intuitively knew: we should wash our hands before we deliver these babies. The mechanism is key. And we’re not quite there yet. So I am doing the research, and I believe exactly the data I’m seeing. Because that is the hallmark of a good scientist.

Ivy Ross: We’re not quite there yet. But it certainly seems like we’re moving in a very interesting direction.

We’ll be right back.

Ivy Ross: We’ve heard the science. Dr. Cohen’s research at MD Anderson shows that biofield therapy can actually slow cancer growth and slow its ability to spread. These are measurable, repeated results in the lab.

Now that we know something real is happening at the cellular level, I want to go back to Mojdeh’s story. Because here’s what I keep wondering: what does it actually feel like? Not the theory, not the Petri dish — but the lived experience of choosing to work with an energy healer while facing cancer.

Let’s return to those weeks between Mojdeh’s diagnosis and her surgery. What was actually happening in those daily sessions with John?

Mojdeh Stone: I told John I would talk with him every day for half an hour, so that we could work on this together. The doctors do their thing. I’d like to also be a part of my healing.

As soon as John and I get on the phone, I feel energy going through my left arm. I can’t explain it, but it’s a tingling — and it feels great.

John Lavack: It’s actually more comfortable for me to work with someone remotely than in person. When I’m with someone in person, I hold them as too real — too physical. Whereas when I’m not seeing them, I’m seeing them energetically. I bring them into what I call the energy space, and I’m cycling. I’m also tracking: where is the energy shifting? What’s coming up? How can I help facilitate the change that’s happening?

Mojdeh Stone: He said, “It’s on your left side. Your feminine energy wants to come out. You’re blocking love from entering your life.” He brought it to a whole dimension I hadn’t considered.

Ivy Ross: This is what they did every day — 20 to 30 minutes, for weeks. But here’s one thing: Mojdeh wasn’t looking for a cure. Not exactly.

Mojdeh Stone: I knew this thing would not just disappear. The more I talked to John, the more I understood that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to make the whole process what I call elegant. I was not looking for a miracle. I was really looking to feel empowered — to feel that I’m part of this solution, not a victim. I knew that having more than one toolbox mattered.

In fact, my son was very worried — “Mom, you still have to go to the doctor.” I said, “I am!”

Ivy Ross: Mojdeh was always going to have surgery. She was always going to follow her oncologist’s recommendations. John wasn’t replacing her medical team. He was joining it.

Mojdeh Stone: He said, “I’m not telling you that you don’t need surgery. I’m not telling you that you don’t need follow-up. But you need to learn from what your body is telling you.”

In my view, if we’re open to Western medicine and also understand that there are methods of healing — ancient and modern — that together could have synergy, it doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in modern medicine. It just gave me more power to look at this not as a victim, but as a participant in creating my own healing. It empowered me. It wasn’t, “I have magic now, I don’t need a doctor. John’s going to fix it.” It’s the synergy of all these things together that’s the magic. It’s not only one thing — it’s the sunshine and the clean air and the good food. Your health is not only one thing. And I think this could very much be a formula for a lot of healing.

Ivy Ross: The question I’m left with after all of this is simply: did energy healing do this? Was the tumor detached because of Mojdeh’s energy healing sessions with John?

But maybe the question is: why do we need it to be just one thing? Mojdeh didn’t feel she had to choose between two worlds — conventional treatment or energy healing. She chose both. She showed up as someone who respected Western medicine and also recognized that there was more available to her than just surgery and chemotherapy.

There’s so much to unpack here. To help me unpack it, I invited Meredith Sprengel to have a discussion. She’s the researcher I mentioned earlier.

Meredith, thanks for joining me. First — tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you?

Meredith Sprengel: That’s quite an existential question.

Ivy Ross: That’s why I love you, Meredith.

Meredith Sprengel: The hat I wear the most is researcher. I have a background of about 15-plus years in integrative and complementary medicine research, and I’m currently doing my PhD in cognitive science. I help direct the research for the Subtle Energy Funders Collective — an organization that’s heading a movement to better understand energy healing and other consciousness-based healing practices. But I’m here today because I’m genuinely fascinated by this research and by everything that’s been done in the past 30 years to try to understand energy healing.

Ivy Ross: So glad to have you. Let’s start with Mojdeh and John. I was so struck by the connection between her letting go and the tumor appearing to let go. Have you ever heard of anything like that before?

Meredith Sprengel: It’s really interesting to sit with, because cancer is so complicated. We don’t know specifically whether the tumor was embedded or wasn’t. But for her journey and her story, it’s fascinating that when the doctor went in to remove it, she said, “I could literally pick it up.”

There are many different cancer journeys. But Mojdeh’s in particular represented not only a medical journey, but a personal one.

Ivy Ross: That was what was so beautiful about the story. What are the possible explanations for what happened?

Meredith Sprengel: There are so many. Maybe it wasn’t attached — because sometimes on medical scans you can’t tell. Sometimes when they do an ultrasound puncture of the tumor, that can also kickstart a healing response.

So who knows? Was it the energy healer? Was it her ability to relax — working with the energy healer, getting her body into a calm state, and then starting to heal herself?

There are a lot of medical explanations for what happened to Mojdeh. But what’s beautiful about this story is that something was working. Something was working for her, and she got better.

Ivy Ross: And that’s the most important point. I really think energy healing is about triggering self-healing. It’s not about proving a point. We’re just looking to deal with pain, or to keep illness at bay. So I think we have to take these stories at face value.

Now let’s turn to the people looking for answers — the MD Anderson results. What’s your takeaway from what Lorenzo shared?

Meredith Sprengel: I think it’s fascinating. Regardless of what’s happening at the mechanism level, it’s incredible that they found so many different effects at so many different layers. You had changes in genetic factors. You had effects on the microenvironment of the tumor. You had bioelectric changes at the cellular level that can change how cancer reintegrates into the body. And then they found these remarkable results with the mitochondria.

Something was happening. And one of the things that’s really fascinating about what Lorenzo’s team found is that it shifts our perspective of how science thinks of us. Right now, we’re very much conceived of as biochemical beings. But some of the most interesting findings were about how much we are also bioelectrical beings. Specifically, the healers were changing the voltage potentials of the cells — and thereby stopping metastasis. Right now, we have no universal treatment to stop metastasis. The treatments we do have don’t always work for all cancers, or they’re very cancer-specific, or they cause a lot of side effects. So this is an incredible finding, if it pans out over time.

Ivy Ross: And that lack of mechanism — it doesn’t actually undercut the results, right? We have other things, like anesthesia and antidepressants, where we don’t know the mechanism, but we know they work.

Meredith Sprengel: Totally. And this is what’s so fascinating about the whole field of integrative medicine. A lot of this stuff works. Acupuncture works. They have theories of mechanism, but not a defined one. The scrutiny is higher for things like biofield therapy because they don’t fit the paradigm of conventional medicine. But yes — there are plenty of drugs and therapies that don’t have a known mechanism that have been integrated into mainstream medical care.

Ivy Ross: So where does the research go from here?

Meredith Sprengel: There’s a lot ahead. It’s going to take time and a lot of research to prove that there is some mechanism of healing we don’t yet understand.

For what Lorenzo is doing, they’ll have to replicate it within their own lab and then across other labs — because one of the valid criticisms would be inherent bias. Then they’ll have to move to humans. They’ll have to start demonstrating, using growth factors, genetic markers, or imaging, that biofield healing isn’t just helping people feel better — though that matters too. What they’ll need to show is that something is literally affecting the tumor. That it’s having direct impacts on cancer growth.

I think the field as a whole needs a wave of evidence — not just one or two studies. Many labs, many researchers, coming together to really start to understand: is there something we’re missing about how we heal?

And I don’t think we have a great grasp on what healing is. We have a great grasp on what curing is. But in the medical system, healing gets forgotten.

Ivy Ross: And the importance of slowing cancer metastasis — do you agree that’s a significant aspect of what was observed?

Meredith Sprengel: Completely. Slowing metastasis is really key for cancer care. Cancer is, in some ways, a waiting game. Time is one of the best things you can buy — because it takes time for treatment to work. If you can slow down metastasis, you give doctors more time to do their jobs, and more time to find better treatments for that particular cancer.

Ivy Ross: So what I’m hearing, Meredith, is that we’re really talking about a holistic approach. Slowing down these cells is part of a remedy for someone with cancer. It’s not going to take the cancer away, as far as we know right now. But buying more time, slowing the process down — that is certainly important.

Meredith Sprengel: Yes. You hit the nail on the head. It’s part of an integrative, holistic approach to cancer care. What Lorenzo has demonstrated in multiple studies is that it slows down metastasis. And as we said, that alone can enable a whole range of other therapies to come in and help.

Ivy Ross: I’m so glad we started our first episode with Mojdeh’s story, because she really represents this idea of an integrative approach. She didn’t walk away from conventional treatment. She just added energy healing to her program. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

Meredith Sprengel: Yes — completely. It’s integrative. It’s a whole approach. The use of conventional care alongside biofield healing can help foster a healing response. A lot of times during cancer care, people’s nervous systems get hijacked — the stress of treatment, the anxiety, the weight of mortality. These biofield healers can help put people in a place to heal themselves. Not only biologically, but psychologically.

I love this phrase: a symphony of influences. Healing is a whole ensemble of different elements that can facilitate the process together.

Ivy Ross: And in some ways, we’ve given our power over. It’s time we understood that there’s a part we play — and should be playing — in our own healing, alongside Western medicine. That’s what Mojdeh illustrated.

Meredith Sprengel: Agency is key. When we’re our own advocates — when we’re responsible for our health and our healing — we move away from being victims. We feel capable of doing what we need to do to get better.

Ivy Ross: And I’m hearing more and more about integrative protocols happening in hospitals. Patients demanding Reiki for pain, or acupuncture within a hospital setting. I think that’s the future.

Meredith Sprengel: It’s interesting — even though we don’t have all the evidence yet, there are plenty of hospitals that have already integrated these practices, and those patients are feeling better. There was a great study done by Dr. Natalie Dyer where they looked at cancer patient symptoms. Cancer patients who saw a healer after chemotherapy had reductions in pain, nausea, and anxiety. It’s incredible, and it’s wonderful that these modalities are getting integrated as more people express their needs within the hospital system.

Ivy Ross: We’ll talk with Natalie Dyer in a future episode — she’s also a healer herself. Meredith, with all of your experience — if someone facing a terrible illness or chronic pain came to you as a friend, what would you recommend?

Meredith Sprengel: Always have a doctor. Always have a physician who can oversee different aspects of your disease or condition. Or a therapist, if that applies.

Beyond that, I’d say: there are many modalities within integrative health that can help you feel better and can help with your pain. Energy healing is one that can put you in a place to seek more treatment, and to engage more fully in your own healing. Even just one encounter with a healer — someone who holds you in love, kindness, and compassion — can shift something in you. Many people who’ve experienced this say it gave them a taste of what they can do for themselves: meditation, yoga, Qigong, Tai Chi, acupuncture. It opens a door.

Ivy Ross: And you know, one of the important reasons we’re doing this podcast is that people explore these modalities before they get sick. It’s so good for your mind and body to have these experiences. It deepens your understanding of the world and how the universe works. That’s been a gift for me. And now, in the last ten years, seeing the research begin to poke at what might be happening — that is music to my ears.

Meredith Sprengel: These aren’t just practices you turn to when you get sick. These are lifelong practices that add to your quality of life and help you connect more fully to the experience of living — especially in a society that seems determined to disconnect us from just that.

Ivy Ross: And it shifts us away from the mechanical view of the body as a machine. I think this understanding of self-healing, energy medicine, biofield therapies — whatever you call it — is our birthright. Something we have to come back to.

Meredith Sprengel: Maybe there’s something we always intuitively knew about how to heal, and what the mechanisms were. We just didn’t have science to help test it out — until now.

Ivy Ross: As we come to the end of this first episode, this already feels like a lot of information. But what I find refreshing — especially in today’s world, where everyone thinks they have all the answers — is that the people we heard from today humbly accept that they might not. Including you, Meredith. Mojdeh says it’s the synergy of everything together. John says he doesn’t heal anyone — he helps them heal themselves. And Dr. Cohen says he believes his own data, even though he doesn’t fully understand the mechanism yet.

So the question isn’t whether this is real. We have compelling evidence that something is happening. The question is: what do we do with that knowledge? How do we make it accessible? How do we integrate it into a healthcare system that desperately needs new approaches?

And maybe that’s the biggest question: if there really is energy between us — if consciousness can influence healing, if we’re all connected through some kind of field — what else does that mean about who we are and what we’re capable of?

For me, that thought is incredibly exciting. And something I want to explore further.

Ivy Ross: Join me next time on Phenomena, when we’ll explore Reiki — one of the most well-known forms of energy healing. We’ll meet someone whose chronic pain was transformed through Reiki, and we’ll talk with researchers who recently conducted the most rigorous clinical trial ever done on healing energy for chronic pain, by researchers at the University of Utah and Harvard. Can energy healing actually work better than pain medication? The results are pretty remarkable.

You can learn more at our website, phenomenahealing.com — where you’ll find resources, the full story of Mojdeh’s shoulder healing, more from Lorenzo Cohen, links to the research we discussed, and information about the documentary series also called Phenomena.

If this episode moved you or challenged you, share it with someone. These conversations matter. We’re at the beginning of something — a new understanding of what healing can be. And the more people who engage with these questions, the faster we’ll find the answers.

I’m Ivy Ross. This has been Phenomena: The Science and Stories of Energy Healing.

Thank you for listening.