The Effect of the 'Laying On of Hands' on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Researchers injected mice with a breast cancer strain that is 100% fatal within weeks. Then untrained volunteers (many of them skeptics!) held their hands near cages for an hour daily. The results were stunning: across 33 treated mice, nearly 88% achieved complete remission. Tumors blackened, collapsed inward, and healed, and mice lived full lifespans. Recovered mice became immune when re-injected, suggesting healing worked through the immune system. Here's where it gets weird: control mice at the same facility also started remitting at 69%, while controls shipped to another city all died on schedule. Was this a design flaw or evidence that healing spreads beyond intended targets? That remains the central puzzle, and no one outside Bengston's group has replicated these findings.
Abstract
After witnessing numerous cases of cancer remission associated with a healer who used "laying on of hands" in New York, one of us (W.B.) "apprenticed" in techniques alleged to reproduce the healing effect. We obtained five experimental mice with mammary adenocarcinoma (code: H2712; host strain: C3H/HeJ; strain of origin: C3H/HeHu), which had a predicted 100% fatality between 14 and 27 days subsequent to injection. Bengston treated these mice for 1 hour per day for 1 month. The tumors developed a "blackened area," then they ulcerated, imploded, and closed, and the mice lived their normal life spans. Control mice sent to another city died within the predicted time frame. Three replications using skeptical volunteers (including D.K.) and laboratories at Queens College and St. Joseph's College produced an overall cure rate of 87.9% in 33 experimental mice. An additional informal test by Krinsley at Arizona State resulted in the same patterns. Histological studies indicated viable cancer cells through all stages of remission. Reinjections of cancer into the mice in remission in Arizona and New York did not take, suggesting a stimulated immunological response to the treatment. Our tentative conclusions: Belief in laying on of hands is not necessary in order to produce the effect; there is a stimulated immune response to treatment, which is reproducible and predictable; and the mice retain an immunity to the same cancer after remission. Future work should involve testing on various diseases and conventional immunological studies of treatment effects on experimental animals.
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- Remote Mental Influence of Electrodermal Activity — Braud, William G (1993)
- The Efficacy of "Distant Healing": A Systematic Review of Randomized Trials — Astin, John A (2000)
- Two Meta-Analyses of Noncontact Healing Studies — Roe, Chris A (2015)
- Effects of Healing Intention on Cultured Cells and Truly Random Events — Radin, Dean (2004)
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📋 Cite this paper
Bengston, William F, Krinsley, David (2000). The Effect of the 'Laying On of Hands' on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{bengston_2000_laying_on_hands,
title = {The Effect of the 'Laying On of Hands' on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice},
author = {Bengston, William F and Krinsley, David},
year = {2000},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}