Dawit Healing

Former governor Craig Benson, who touted the value of bucking convention while in office, credits an alternative healing method based on ancient Chinese practices with curing him of a potentially fatal heart ailment.Benson appeared in a television news broadcast last month describing his recovery from what the broadcaster calls a “debilitating and often-lethal heart condition,” and he says a method called Tong Ren healed him.

“I used to have a rapidly beating heart that you could feel all the time,” Benson says in the Fox 25 News broadcast. But after practicing Tong Ren, he says, “I feel like I don’t even have a heart inside my chest. It is so calm.”

Benson’s claims come in a news segment about Tong Ren and its founder, Tom Tam, based in Quincy, Mass. A Tong Ren website describes Tam as a “healer, energy worker, Tai chi practitioner and acupuncturist” who came from China as a political refugee 30 years ago. The site says Tam developed Tong Ren in 2001 as a way of “changing a patient’s energy system by using the collective unconscious.”

Tong Ren sessions involve Tam and his patients gathering in a room and rhythmically banging hammers on miniature white dolls. The dolls are the kind used to train acupuncturists. The banging is meant to unlock “blockages” and restore “the natural flow of ‘Chi’ energy,” according to the Tong Ren website.

Tam calls these sessions “guinea pig healing classes.” He claims that this practice has helped people suffering from cancer, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, arthritis, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS, among other ailments.In his interview, Benson leaves little doubt about his faith in Tong Ren’s effectiveness.

“People think that you’re a little bit different when you believe in things like this, and maybe you’re not dealing with reality very well,” he says. “The fact of the matter is, there’s more than one way to cure problems in this world, and Tom‘s found a way to do this.”

The broadcast identified Benson, dressed in a white Polo shirt and shorts, as a former New Hampshire governor who “a decade ago was diagnosed with a debilitating and often-lethal heart condition.” He was paired with a woman who claims that Tam‘s methods cured her of breast cancer.

Benson, 52, does not name his prior medical condition in the news segment. When he campaigned for governor in 2002, he acknowledged suffering from “a minor viral heart infection” in 1998. The revelation came amid rumors and news reports that one of the Republicans then running for governor was battling a serious health problem.

When he revealed his earlier infection in 2002, Benson said it had resulted in a minor decrease in heart function but that it was not serious.

“It’s a very, very, very, very, very mild thing that I have,” Benson said at the time.

But in the Fox News interview last month, Benson describes his prior health in much graver terms.

“They said it’s one of these conditions that’s going to get worse and worse over time, and your life expectancy is probably not that long,” he says.

According to the Tong Ren website, healing classes are conducted for free in 11 states and several countries, including Brazil, Thailand and Russia. A training session is offered for $250.

It’s unclear from the news broadcast when Benson, a Republican, learned about Tam‘s teachings. As governor, Benson was known to exercise fanatically; he installed a personal gym in a private office a few blocks from the State House and followed a rigorous, macrobiotic diet. He lost his re-election bid in 2004 to Democrat John Lynch.

Calls to Benson and the Tam Center for Healing in Quincy, Mass., were not returned yesterday.

—— End of article

By DANIEL BARRICK

Related posts:

1. Fox News Report

Filed under: Home on September 10th, 2007