Brentwood real estate broker Joan Gardner was suffering such excruciating pain with a swollen knee, months after a fall, that she was homebound, depressed and unable to work. Her doctor and orthopedic physical therapist encouraged her to have surgery, but Gardner declined because, "I'm stubborn and vain." Instead, she decided to try something different.
Digging up a number her grocery clerk had given her, Gardner dialed Ken Klee, a UCLA law professor and prominent corporate bankruptcy lawyer who practices energy healing on the side. A seven-year student of more than half a dozen healing methods including reiki's radiance technique, pranic healing and Theta Healing, Klee practices eight hours a week out of his Brentwood home office, stacked high with stones and crystals, massage table at the center.
Without touching her body or charging her a fee, Klee waved his hands over Gardner for three hours last December, channeling divine healing energy and helping her clear out anger and other blocks. The next day the swelling in Gardner's knee was gone.
"I was in shock. It sounds probably crazy, but it's the truth," she said. "I feel like a million dollars, and I have since that day."
Stories like Gardner's raise eyebrows among those in the medical establishment and Klee's academic colleagues. Once the provenance of faith healers, shamans, ancient and New Age mystics, however, energy healing is increasingly going mainstream.
Hospitals throughout Los Angeles and around the country are using energy healers in integrative medical centers as a complement to Western medicine. Many doctors and nurses are getting trained, and the National Institutes of Health is funding clinical trials and academic centers to study energy medicine in cancer and cardiac patients.
UCLA's Mattel Children's Hospital employs two energy healers in its pediatric pain program. "We get kids nobody else is able to treat," said director Lonnie Zeltzer, who has trained in reiki herself. "Some of these kids do really well with energy healers."
Although energy healing has been around for thousands of years, results of the first government-funded scientific studies are just beginning to emerge. In February, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine became the first scientific journal to dedicate an entire issue to energy healing. The International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine recently had its first conference in Colorado to discuss the latest scientific findings.
