At the turn of the Millennium, orthodox medical administration more and more resembles the Communist nations in their last years, or the dinosaurs in the days before the comet. The medical establishment is a lumbering, ungainly beast whose cost is rising with its ineffectiveness. Nevertheless, it is a beast with a million parasites; systems like AIDS administration provide employment to many. At the same time, the beginnings of a Twenty-first Century medicine are struggling to emerge, both practically and politically.

Of all the newly popular healing techniques, one of the most fascinating is hypnotherapy, whose provenance goes back to Anton Mesmer in the Eighteenth Century. Now, as hypnotherapists are applying their unorthodox approaches to the AIDS crisis, some of their intriguing ideas are being confirmed through the new science of psychoneuroimmunology.

Professional hypnotherapist Rev. Michael Ellner is the President of HEAL (Health Education AIDS Liaison) in New York City. He has been working with people affected by AIDS since the mid-Eighties. Bud Weiss, also with HEAL, is a psychiatric social worker with a background in theatre. I spoke with them in Manhattan after attending a lively HEAL meeting in Greenwich Village which concluded with a hypnotic "debriefing". Michael began by talking about HEAL's origins when, as one of the earliest AIDS organizations, it provided whole foods and nutritious meals.

Michael Ellner: "HEAL was started by Jim Fouratt, Gene Fedorko and a number of others. At that time, nobody knew what AIDS was; there was a lot of superstition and fear. A number of the initial members had GRID diagnoses and were now seeing themselves as long-term survivors, coming to HEAL meetings to talk about being alive! This was the first time I'd heard there were survivors. It peaked my interest and I began talking with them and pursuing relationships. As a hypnotherapist, I was very interested in working with catastrophic illness. So I wanted to study these guys; I thought there was something remarkable there. I had been working at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio and one of the guys died of AIDS, which was a horrible experience. He died very isolated because he didn't want his family to know he was gay. This was disturbing to me. I went to the hospital to see the guy."

Michael shared his personal version of the Svengali fantasy, which soon turned into Lost Horizon: "He was a real gorgeous guy. I had thought he'd be a famous actor and I'd be his hypnotist. And here he was dying. He looked ninety years old. It was the sort of thing where you say to yourself, if there's any way I can help, I'd like to. I thought I might be able to teach people to meditate and use guided imagery; maybe I could teach people to use self-hypnosis. So I went to all the AIDS groups starting with GMHC. When I looked over their materials and listened to what they had to say, I began to think they were doing more harm than good. I heard things that were terrible!"

Ian Young: "Because this went against what you'd learned from hypnotherapy?"

Michael: "Yes. Totally against. People were encouraged to accept that their illness was terminal - which often led to more reckless behavior. And the support groups, instead of discussing what was good, what was working, were obsessed with symptoms, which just leads to hypochondria. There's a large body of work on this, starting with the Simontons. And Milton Erickson who was perhaps the most important hypnotherapist. So I went to a number of groups and I met Michael Callen and Michael Hirsch who were just starting the PWA Coalition. And Michael Hirsch had just given a talk at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center on how no-one was getting involved or trying to help. I told him, I've been trying to volunteer for about six months and have been very frustrated. Michael Hirsch told me, no-one here thinks much of hypnosis, you might as well be offering voodoo. He said, These people are afraid of everything, they're certainly not going to go to a hypnotist. But he told me about HEAL.

"In '87, I started leading meetings as a volunteer. They were very much like the meeting you heard tonight except we knew less. We acted as a social circle where we could talk and provide information in a safe environment. The idea of the meetings was to promote questioning. My idea was that just promoting questioning would promote self-empowerment. After a while, I became Executive Director of the group.

"The food project was a separate entity, probably our best program, quite extraordinary. It was initially called the HEAL Kitchen and then it spun off on its own as the Whole Foods Project. I was thrilled to be associated with it as most AIDS food projects provide comfort food that has very little nutrition or health value."

Bud Weiss: "And thousands of people every year die of malnutrition in the hospital, from eating only hospital food."

Ian: "Bud, how did you link up with HEAL?"

Bud: "As a social worker, I had worked with very disturbed kids and with street gangs. I worked in professional theater for a while, I taught psychodrama, and I was involved with hypnosis as a seminar director for the Milton Erickson Society. And I met Virginia Satir, an astounding woman, and through her, I became interested in cancer work. Eventually I spent some time with the Simontons in Texas and in a project based on their work and utilizing imagery and recognizing that dying was a way of living' cancer and so-called terminal diseases were a way of handling life stress. The Simontons had done a study of about 140 terminally ill patients; after five years they were all expected to be dead but instead, 70% of them were alive and 30% had no trace of cancer. They had been working on healing with their belief systems.

"Terminal illness is a legitimate way of killing yourself, and if the patient can get clear of that and start to image and see themselves getting better and contributing to life, they can recover. This learning has been around for a very long time. We create out existence and if we get clearer and clearer about it, we can make a difference in the world. But the cancer patients I was working with were older people in the world possible condition who weren't about to go on living. I was having to help the families to let go. Then AIDS came into the picture and I saw the same approach being used with AIDS that had failed with cancer! I thought, boy, here we go again! But I knew somebody had to be doing something different with AIDS and I had to find them. And when I walked into a HEAL meeting, I thought, Here it is."

Ian: "The first person I came across who had a different approach was Louise L. Hay, who has a Science of Mind background. And Science of Mind is based on the work of Phineas Quimby, who started out as a hypnotist. Later, through John Lauritsen, I discovered Casper Schmidt, who was a psychoanalyst and also did hypnotherapy."

Bud: "I was involved with Werner Erhard and Landmark. When I brought this material to Landmark, they were open to my being around with it because they respected me as a therapist; and they had experienced remission of tumors in large seminar groups and so on. But they would take AZT and are dead now"

Michael: "I spent a day with Larry LeShan, the father of mind/body medicine and I presented my AIDS material very carefully to him. He said it seems to make sense but he wouldn't do anything about it because he felt he was too old to be controversial."

Ian: "Hadn't heard of Bertrand Russell!"

Michael: "I took over as President of HEAL in 1992 and took HEAL in a new direction, challenging HIV and so on. I felt it would be irresponsible to know what we know and not do that."

Bud: "We talked about detoxifying the body, getting rid of parasites in a safe way and replacing them with good bacteria, then using antimicrotoxins, antibacterials, antifungals and anti-inflammatories - herbal substances, garlic, aloes, vitamins. Using green juices to deacidify the blood."

Michael: "Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine..."

Bud: "But Herbert Benson, head of the mind/body group at Harvard, in his book Timeless Healing, gives you all the studies and concludes that 70% of all healing is mental. It's belief systems, with spiritual attitudes as the most powerful piece. And with AIDS, even more than with cancer, you have so many people whose lives don't make sense. When they get an HIV+ diagnosis, it's a perfect out. I keep seeing this over and over: they now can become martyrs."

Ian: "And the AIDS system reinforces that because once you become HIV+, all kinds of percs accrue to you, you're welcomed and accepted into a community. Again and again you hear 'I never knew how much I was loved until I got AIDS'."

Bud: "It's a cult of dying that supports the drug industry, which is not all evil people, they're just locked into a way of thinking that supplies people - more and more, poor people - with death."

Michael: "America has a youth cult. And in the gay culture, I noted that I could not find any models for elderly gay people. And I heard dozens and dozens of people talking about how there was nothing more pathetic than a lonely old gay man. And people were agreeing left and right with that image, the terrible plight of the isolated, broken-down older gay man. Such a strong anti-ageing feeling. I began to wonder if AIDS was a solution to that image.

"When all this started, I didn't have any thoughts about gay and straight. I was a child of the 60's. I was open and positive sexually. Now that I'm doing this work, people assume I'm a gay man with AIDS and I had to confront how I felt. And I was embarrassed about being a heterosexual! Just in the way people were treated. Because until then, I didn't know how we treated people. I'd never been subject to anti-gay hate. I never imagined something like that. Now suddenly people were treating me like that. I found I wasn't embarrassed that someone thought I was gay but I was embarrassed about how people were treating each other. How mean and how threatened they were. It was even worse if they thought you had AIDS. Even health professionals were scared. No-one can describe discrimination to you; you have to experience it. Ironically, on the other side people were saying I was telling gays not to take AZT because I hate gays and want them to die!"

Bud: "Robert Bly, in his book The Sibling Society, talks about the real loss of connection between fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, and between grandparents and grandchildren. And a lot of the gay movement is an attempt to make up that link and really reclaim that and become devoted to one another. But there's no culture to support the reconnection. And so many men become disillusioned that it isn't happening and their lives become a meaningless search. The fantasy of a family is another attempt to create community. There's a desperation that things aren't working. You've really tried, you've risked everything, you've come out of the closet and what you want is still not available. And when the disease is presented, it's a way out. Parades are really an intense attempt to create community. For Gay Pride Day, the community is instantaneously created and there's a sense of belonging."

Michael: "I also began to learn about AZT and it occurred to me that AZT might well be causing pneumocystis pneumonia. I remembered the experience of prophylaxing against syphilis in the bathhouses; it appeared to work because it masked the symptoms of syphilis. So people would not be aware of their infections because the antibiotics masked them. So I thought that something similar might be going on with people taking Bactrim and AZT. The appearance would be that it was helping, but maybe instead it was only masking. Michael Callen believed in prophylaxis but failed to notice that all his doctor's other patients were dead. So I thought, is the doctor's treatment special or is Michael one of those unusual humans who can tolerate any treatment? He hated that."

Discussing the power of beliefs to affect people, Michael talked about the role of "trance logic" in hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion.

Michael: "In hypnosis demonstrations, people will eat an onion believing it to be an apple and experiencing it as an apple. When you bring the person out of the trance, in almost every case, they insist they weren't hypnotized and are shocked to see their actions on film. One hypnotist did an act called Moontalk. He hypnotized three people very quickly and told one he was an emissary from the Moon who could only speak Moontalk. The next was told he was the only person on Earth who could interpret Moontalk, and the third was told he'd be skeptical but polite. So the first person begins speaking total gibberish. The second person translates elaborately and the third person shakes his head. Afterwards, when they're asked how they could speak Moontalk, they say they studied it in school or their family used to live on the Moon or everyone speaks Moontalk on TV. So I began to see examples of trance logic.

"These are all parts of hallucinations. And there are two kinds of hallucinations - positive hallucinations where you see things that aren't there, and the more dangerous negative hallucinations where you don't see things that are right in front of you. And I noticed that many people I was showing evidence to (evidence that HIV doesn't cause AIDS for example) couldn't see what I was showing them. And I recognized trance logic. So many of them were hypnotized! And people can be very imaginative and creative in their trance logic. A couple of other hypnotists figured out the same thing for themselves - Jeremy Selvey of Project AIDS International is one."

Ian: "When you tried to discuss information with people and they don't even see it and pretend it's not right in front of their faces, what conclusions did you come to about why this was happening? How had they been programmed not to see these things?"

Michael: "The most common answer apparently has to do with the New York Times! I would ask, what would it take for you to look at this? They would say: if it was in the New York Times. So I started writing letters to the Times, calling them up, asking them especially about their contention that AIDS is always fatal. I'm probably just as vulnerable about my beliefs and just as fooled by them in other areas of my life. I just happened to luck into seeing something. I had a window. Winston Churchill said the average person often trips over the truth many times in his life but quickly gets up and continues on. I realized I was in a situation where I was stumbling on the truth. I was in the right place at the right time. And I couldn't ignore it or do nothing about it.

"Casper Schmidt predicted that AIDS could end around 1997 but that it was being artificially stoked, that there was a manipulation going on. But you know, sometimes a person says 'I came into this, it scared the hell out of me, but now I've taken charge of my life and health. I've fired my doctor and am responsible for myself.' And that can be very empowering."

Ian: "At some point the lightning has to strike. It might strike you but at least it illuminates the landscape so you can see it for the first time. Then if you're still alive you can pick yourself up and turn things around."

Michael: "And hypnosis is really the art of turning things around, the art of language."

Ian: "What about those who recover?"

Michael: "There are a lot of good stories. Usually, once people get back to health, they disappear. A few come back occasionally. But what happens is everyone leeches onto them. How many bowel movements do you have a day? What do you eat? They develop these little groups that they don't want. Others regain their health and go back to partying. And I notice that some people that I've admired over the years, who took charge of their lives, who stopped obsessing over T-cells, who didn't have any health challenges and could tell you why HIV didn't cause AIDS, as soon as viral load and protease inhibitors were introduced, they took the test, started taking inhibitors and stopped coming to HEAL. One woman said to me, 'It's easier to take the medicine than to fight with my doctor'."

Bud: "People get a shot of terror. They mobilize themselves to survive. But survival is not enough. It's only the first step. You've got to move outside yourself and be concerned with your community. That's why organizations don't work. They're only into survival, to survive no matter what! They'll kill in order to survive."

Michael: "To me, a crisis really means a turning point. It represents the opportunity for greatness. So I began to say, this is not the point of no return, it's a turning point. HEAL is experimental. If something doesn't work, we drop it. I don't want a following. In every other group you see hours and hours devoted to loyalty. To me it's insulting. If people go out saying Michael said..., they're missing the whole point. I want them to go out and say I think."

When I left Michael and Bud, I thought about a story Michael had told me. Members of HEAL were sharing information about how to heal their KS lesions. Some were trying shark cartilage, some vitamin C preparations in aloe gel, others urine therapy. Many of them put bandaids on their lesions to protect the applications. There was also one wiseguy who just wore a bandaid and didn't use any medication at all. His lesion went away just like the others'. Was it the power of suggestion, the notorious placebo effect? What, then, are the limits to the incredible power of the mind?

Michael Ellner's book Quantum Focus, on creative healing and states of excellence, is available through HEAL, PO Box 1103, Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 1103.

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