Medical Doctors Turn to Channeling

By: Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr.John Weldon; ©2012

One example of channeling’s influence can be seen in how medical doctors and psychiatrists are cooperating with spirits in diagnosis and treatment. This would seem to be a concerted effort on the part of the spirit world to lend credibility and prestige to the phenomena of channeling.

Medical Doctors Turn to Channeling

One example of channeling’s influence can be seen in how medical doctors and psychiatrists are cooperating with spirits in diagnosis and treatment. This would seem to be a concerted effort on the part of the spirit world to lend credibility and prestige to the phenomena of channeling.

Consider the medical practice of neurosurgeon and former Harvard professor C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, founder of the 700-member American Holistic Medicine Association. He is the author of Occult Medicine Can Save Your Life,^[1] and coauthor, with spiritist Caroline Myss, of The Creation of Health: Merging Traditional Medicine with Intuitive Diagnosis.^[2] Dr. Shealy has a working relationship with Myss,^[3] who is also co-publisher of Stillpoint Publishing Company. This publisher has produced a large number of books for adults and children that have been received through channeling. They are designed to convey the importance of New Age channeling methods.^[4]

According to the Stillpoint catalog, Myss provides psychic diagnosis for Dr. Shealy’s patients through the help of “Genesis,” her spirit guide, even when the patients are hundreds or thousands of miles away.^[5] (This is reminiscent of the psychic diagnosis channeled through medium Edgar Cayce and hundreds of other psychics who use similar methods. Indeed, scores of doctors, such as William McGarey, MD, have spent several decades integrating the spiritistic revelations of Cayce and other psychics into their modern medical professions.)

Bernard Siegel, MD, professor at the Yale University Medical School, is another prominent physician who uses a channeler in his medical practice. “One of my patients is a medium. She regularly gives me information about the living and messages from the dead….”^[6] Robert Leichtman, MD, also uses spirit guides for medical diagnosis.^[7] He has co-written some 40 books describing his discussions with spirits of the alleged dead through the mediumship of D. Kendrick Johnson.^[8]

W. Brugh Joy, MD, has worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. In Joy’s Way,^[9] he details his conversion to occultism and its supposed value to his medical practice. His experimentation in mysticism and mystical energies resulted one day in his being “commanded” by a voice to reform his medical practice:

It was a Saturday morning. I had finished rounds at the hospital and was working on some patients’ charts in my office when I felt an incredibly strong urge to enter into meditation. It was so strong that I did not understand what was happening to me. I completed the patients’ charts and gave in to the impress. A vortex of energy, of a magnitude I had never before experienced, reverberated through my body and threw my awareness into a super-heightened state. Then a loud voice—not that of the Inner Teacher—said, in essence: “Your experience and training as an orthodox physician is completed. It’s over. The time has come for you to embark on a rededication of your Beingness to a deeper commitment and action….”

The voice didn’t care about my many personal concerns and commitments. It next presented to my awareness that I would soon begin a journey into the world, going first to Findhorn [a spiritistic community in Scotland] and to England, Egypt, India, Nepal near the Tibetan border and perhaps to Japan…. The voice explained clearly that my vision of being a physician had been distorted by boyhood ideals and by the current concepts of science and medicine, which overemphasized the body and external causes and ignored the journey of the soul. I was to begin the study of alternative healing practices and reach insights Western medicine had not yet dared to dream, insights that would unify exoteric and esoteric traditions and thus form the basis of an integrated approach to the art of healing. The last instruction the voice gave me was simply to detach from everything.^[10]

Dr. Joy did indeed “detach,” and today his commitment is given equally to New Age medical care and the radical spiritual (occult) transformation of his patients’ worldviews.^[11]

Perhaps an illustration of how one medical doctor became converted to spiritism would be instructive. The pattern for such contacts is fairly typical. It involves careful preparation of the spirits behind the scene, psychic development, contact with spirits, rejection of Christianity, and the spirits assuming of influence or control in the doctor’s life. We have selected a portion from psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham’s autobiography^[12] as an illustration. Here he recounts his conversion from Christian orthodoxy as a child to the ancient heresy of the Cathar faith. Catharism, or Albegensianism, teaches that the creation, the material world, is evil, a manifestation of the devil, who is Jehovah of the Old Testament.^[13] The true world is pure spirit and created by the one true God. Man’s purpose is to ascend to knowledge of the true world and the true God in the realm of spirit. Man’s materially contaminated psyche is eventually purified through reincarnation and by evolving to “higher” levels of consciousness.

Catharism, like all occult beliefs, provides a logical philosophical basis for spirit contact. The true realm of “goodness” is the spiritual world, i.e., the spirit realm; the devil is found only in the material realm. (This doesn’t credit much to the practice of conventional medicine!) Regardless, once the spirit world is predefined as the true realm of God, then all contact with the spirit realm is acceptable and divine by definition. Contacting the spirit world is exclusively an encounter with the divine sphere, even a form of “fellowship” with God.

Sooner or later, however, the spirits’ teachings reveal that their true nature is demonic. Through Cathar philosophy, therefore, the activity of evil spirits is camouflaged. What is ultimately demonic is wrongly interpreted as contact with the “forces of God.” The spirits Dr. Guirdham contacts claim to be people who lived as Cathars in the thirteenth century, who now demand he revive their beliefs as true Christianity.^[14] Thus, Dr. Guirdham’s spiritism not only dramatically altered his own medical practice but his life’s philosophy as well. His books powerfully reveal this.^[15] Consider the following:

I verify the evidence presented to me by different and often discarnate sources. I do this soberly and patiently. It is something which my demon demands. I cannot deny what Braida [his spirit guide] asks of me because to do so would be a mutilation of my psyche…. To me it is an inexpressible relief to find that what I had been brought up to worship was the Satanic God of the Old Testament. It is always a comfort to switch over to God from the Devil….^[16]

The Dualist [i.e., Cathar] attitude towards nature and the universe was certainly positive and a great help to me as a doctor…. Because I was a Dualist I was enabled to accept [astrological doctrines] easily that the stars and the moon influenced the patients’ medical history, and how in those susceptible to the earth’s vibrations the pattern of illness was related to the seasons. This was of special importance to me as a psychiatrist…. All I can say is that the more I became saturated with Dualism the greater was my usefulness as a doctor.^[17]

Most important of all Dualism has given me a greater understanding of the nature of death….I know that, in the next life as in this, there are guides waiting to direct us….

It is clear to me that I am the modest instrument of a cosmic design. I see now that the purpose of my life and its chief happiness is to be passively manipulated…. I know that the dead are not dead but are living in a state of altered consciousness. I know that they are around us, that they speak to us and guide us. I know, what I would never have imagined, that they guide us not only by vague exhortations but sometimes with a precision adapted to the unbelieving rationalism of our natures. In my case they have set me a specific task to perform. When my pen moves across the paper I am doing what is asked of me….^[18]

Dr. Guirdham is not alone. A conservative estimate is that hundreds or thousands of qualified medical doctors, psychiatrists, and nurses around the country are either channelers themselves or currently engaged in using channelers to help them diagnose their patients. Tens of thousands of nurses currently employ a form of psychic healing known as therapeutic touch.^[19] During its heyday, physicians formed a significant portion of the 2,000-member Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine (APM), which devoted a good deal of time to research in psychic healing. Partly due to the influence of the APM, the spiritistic phenomenon of psychic healing is currently practiced by hundreds of physicians.

The first APM president was Robert A. Bradley, MD, a medium and inventor of the Bradley method of natural childbirth. In his article, “The Need for the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine,” he stated that this particular method of childbirth was given to him by his spirit guides, either in dream states or by direct conscious communication. “I’m a great believer in spirit guidance I think it is the only logical explanation for some of the things that have happened to me…. I personally think spirit communication is going on constantly, that we are never alone. The talks I give, the ideas I have on natural childbirth came to me either in sleep or from direct spirit communication.”^[20] In this article, and elsewhere, he underscores the importance of spiritism for modern medicine. He says that much important information “comes from altered states of consciousness which are spirit controlled.”^[21]

In Great Britain the World Federation of Healers^[22] has about 10,000 members, composed largely of professed channelers or mediums. With government approval, these mediums actually treat patients in some 1,500 hospitals in Great Britain. The organization has even been given corporate membership in the United Nations Association.^[23]

In America, thousands of physicians have been trained in sophrology and other New Age methods utilizing Eastern and Western mind and body disciplines such as yoga, autogenics, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, visualization, and various somatic (body work) therapies.^[24]

Because of all of this, an increasing number of physicians are being persuaded to incorporate New Age techniques into their medical practices. As in the past, spiritism today is playing a significant role in health care. This is another example of the power of modern channeling.

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NOTES

1. ↑ C. Norman Shealy, Occult Medicine Can Save Your Life (NY: Bantam, 1977).
2. ↑ C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Caroline M. Myss, The Creation of Health: Merging Traditional Medicine with Intuitive Diagnosis (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1988).
3. ↑ Ibid., pp. xx-xxiv.
4. ↑ “Empowering Message from Genesis, a Universal Teacher,” and “Applying Universal Principles for Spiritual Fitness,” in The Stillpoint Catalogue (Walpole, NH: Fall/Winter, 1987-1988), pp. 1-15.
5. ↑ Ibid., pp. 5-6, 9.
6. ↑ Shealy and Myss, Creation of Health, p. xviii.
7. ↑ Robert Leichtman, “Clairvoyant Diagnosis: Developing Intuition and Psychic Abilities in the Diagnostic Process,” The Journal of Holistic Health (San Diego, CA: Mandala Society, 1977).
8. ↑ D. Kendrick Johnson, Robert R. Leichtman, The 24-Volume From Heaven to Earth series (Columbus, OH: Ariel Press, 1978-1990).
9. ↑ W. Brugh Joy, Joy’s Way (Los Angeles, CA: J.P. Tarcher, 1979).
10. ↑ Ibid., pp. 206-07.
11. ↑ Ibid., pp. 1-15.
12. ↑ Arthur Guirdham, A Foot in Both Worlds (London: Neville Spearman, 1973).
13. ↑ Ibid., pp. 66-70.
14. ↑ Ibid., pp. 202-19.
15. ↑ Ibid., pp. 124; cf. Arthur Guirdham, The Psyche in Medicine: Possession, Past Lives, Powers of Evil in Disease (Jersey, Channel Islands, Great Britain: Neville Spearman, 1978).
16. ↑ Ibid., p. 202.
17. ↑ Ibid., p. 205.
18. ↑ Ibid., pp. 202, 205, 210-12.
19. ↑ John Ankerberg, John Weldon, Can You Trust Your Doctor?: New Age Medicine and Its Threat to Your Family (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1990), pp. 391-406.
20. ↑ Robert A. Bradley, “The Need for the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine,” The Varieties of Healing Experience: Exploring Psychic Phenomenon in Healing (Los Altos, CA: Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, 1971), pp. 100-01.
21. ↑ Ibid., pp. 100-01, 106.
22. ↑ George W. Meek, ed., Healers and the Healing Process (Wheaton, IL: Quest/Theosophical Publishing House, 1977), p. 50.
23. ↑ Marilyn Ferguson, ed., The Brain-Mind Bulletin, October 26, 1981, pp. 1-3.