Observations placeholder

The Reluctant healer – William J Macmillan

I have to treat on the bare skin of the patient. Material of any kind feels to my hands like an insulation. I start rubbing on the solar plexus and if necessary over the stomach and intestinal region. If the patient is, or recently has been, emotionally too keyed up, the solar plexus becomes violently red when I touch it. This is not due, as one might suppose, to the friction caused by the rubbing. I can rub with considerable violence on a portion of the body which does not need treatment and the only result is the normal pinkness of the blood coming to the surface of the skin. The red to which I am referring looks like a violent sunburn and frequently lasts a considerable number of hours after the treatment is finished.

The patient experiences a sensation of heat which ordinary rubbing or massage fail to produce. I rub a given area ten minutes. This is followed by five minutes of “passes”. These are motions of the hands which look as though I were fanning the patient. In point of fact these passes, silly as they look and feel to me, can stop the excessive flow of blood in a haemorrhage or from a wound. Apparently they induce a different form of energy. To the patient the moving air feels intensely cold. Most patients find the passes extremely soothing.

While I am treating I chat to the patient or they talk to me.

The point of this is to prevent the patient from fixing his mind on movements of my hands or on any particular portion of his body. The less concerned the patient is about his health, one way or the other, the quicker the cure will be……….

Having spent fifteen minutes on the solar plexus region, I move up to the base of the neck, the glands in that region, and …. eyes. The same process is repeated for the same length of time, then the patient lies on his side and I treat the base of the skull, the spine and the nerve centre at the base of the spine. This, too, is a repetition of the same process and timing. The patient had received three-quarters of an hour's treatment with a particular emphasis on the nerve centres of the body. Often the patient is sufficiently relaxed by this time to be able to sleep immediately. If not, he remains dozing for half-an-hour.

I have found that this after-treatment rest period is essential.

Apparently this time permits the power to seep gradually throughout the whole body. If the patient rises and becomes active immediately after the treatment, various unpleasant sensations may result such as acute dizziness or palpitations of the heart. If these particular reactions do not take place there is a feeling of great lassitude which is a considerable strain upon the body to overcome. In either case, the full effect of the treatment is considerably mitigated.

A five-minute interval takes place between the treatments. I smoke a cigarette and try to relax. Mentally I must completely dismiss the personality of the patient from my mind together with my reactions to his problems. In order to do justice to the next patient my mind must be as sensitive and responsive as I can make it. This technique of treating has forced me to learn the ability to focus my awareness with sufficient concentration to exclude anything except the immediate experience from my mind.