Creepy Dolls and Singing Plants

The time I "brainsurfed" a "healer."

This week I want to talk about people who are not licensed or certified in any modality, and yet they practice on the public anyway.

This is the story of the five weeks I spent in Minnesota with Suzanne, an uncertified, unlicensed “healer” who claimed she could help me.

The Treatment with Magic Machines

Suzanne switched on the stacks of devices that look more like laserdisc players than healing implements. She then picked up two tools, attached by cables to the machines, and drew closer to me, lying on a massage table. She dipped each in an open tub of cream and applied them to my bare skin, rubbing the microcurrent over my whole body.

It hurt. 

A lot.

As you can see in the video that I took of myself receiving the treatments, I believed in the efficacy of the treatments in the moment and I was grateful for her help.

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How I Came to Stay at “The Lodge”

Pain snuck up on me. And then it didn’t leave.

The pain was intense, somewhere deep and unknown in my right hip and shoulder.

I was a busy advertising executive. I had “great” insurance, but traditional doctors quickly turned to their prescription pads while suggesting I might need surgery. The practitioners who claimed they could help without pills and scalpels were never covered by these “great” plans. I had spent upwards of $10K out of pocket chasing this pain and it wasn’t getting better.

In a fit of burnout, I took off in the summer of 2017 on a nomadic adventure around America to understand what was happening to my homeland where many fellow citizens now believed in conspiracy theories. On this journey, I attended the first Red Pill Conference in Bozeman, Montana. 

The founder of the conference, G. Edward Griffith, is described as a conspiracy theorist and fringe scientist on Wikipedia. The two day conference had sessions like “Cancer has already been cured” in addition to subjects like “9/11 didn’t happen like THEY say it happened.” There were several people with booths set up sharing information on wellness devices and supplements next to tables shilling DVDs and books about the IRS and wind turbines.

Over one of the meals, I got to talking with a couple from Minnesota, Tim and Suzanne. It turned out that Suzanne was a healer who experienced a traumatic brain injury in a car accident about 15 years prior.

It was such a sad story. She had lived an incredible life before the accident. She told me how after she’d left the farm she grew up on, she’d traded up from her first job at a hamburger stand to selling vacuums by explaining she would excel because, “I could sell a hot fudge sundae to somebody who didn’t want one.”

She supported her first husband through medical school off of the vacuum sales and went on to sell real estate, making enough money to feel successful and owning several properties. She also owned a white, stretch limousine, just for taking out friends. I really admired her fun-loving spirit.

Suzanne lost everything as a result of the accident. 

After pursuing every angle through Western medicine for several years with no results, a friend heard about a “magic machine” she just had to try.

She claimed that the Acuscope/Myopulse machine healed her damaged brain. She told me, “I had felt like a smart person trapped in a stupid person’s brain. The treatments cured me.” 

She then felt compelled to help other people. She spent the remainder of her accident settlement acquiring her own Acuscope/Myopulse machines and began working on other people. She showed me testimonial videos she had taken on her phone with people thanking her for helping them.

When we met, she had ten years’ of experience working on people with various health issues and claimed fantastic results. Her greatest testimonial stood by her side: Tim, now her husband, had arrived on her doorstep one day, blind in one eye from a construction accident where a beam hit him on the side of the head and sent him flying in the air. A month of her treatments brought back 60% of his vision and he never left her side. 

Suzanne wanted to write a book about her experiences and the results she was seeing. When she found out I’d written one before, she proposed a trade: “Come to Minnesota. I will fix your pain and you can help me with my book.”

I am generally up for an adventure. I was curious and, as a nomadic freelancer, had no location based commitments and I had some relatives who had lived in Minnesota that I’d visited when I was a kid. Minnesota is best experienced in the summer and we were trying to visit most of the states. I found her “dontcha know” accent charming. My then-husband agreed to come along for the ride, for the story alone.

Given we met at the Red Pill conference, her lack of certification or license made sense to me: She and Tim consumed conspiracy theory media and expressed anti-government sentiments. They believed the IRS was a scam, why would they think any licensing board would be legitimate? I thought I could just leave if I felt unsafe.

We made a plan to meet Suzanne at her home about an hour and a half southwest of Minneapolis a few weeks later.

Suzanne referred to her home as “the lodge.” Set on the perimeter of one of Minnesota’s infinite lakes, the house boasted six bedrooms and a dedicated treatment room where she worked on clients with her machine. One of the two living rooms was converted to a convalescence room with more healing machines like a mechanical Japanese massage bed as well as a twin bed with a Bemer mat set on top, another magic machine, which claimed to improve circulation and facilitate healing in the body.

The Snake Oil

The instant I arrived, one of those clear signals from the Universe appeared.

Suzanne had many many collectible dolls set on every windowsill and side table throughout the house.

“What’s with all the dolls, Suzanne? Are you going to murder us?”, I asked. Half joking, but only half.

She revealed that a friend had left them to her after passing away and she used them as a projective tool with her clients when she could tell they were holding on to childhood trauma. She would invite the client to find a doll that resonated with their image of their childhood self to help surface long-forgotten memories.

Despite my trepidation, I spent five weeks with Suzanne at the lodge, mostly watching her work with frail people experiencing health crises like cancer. I received five treatments with her applying the painful electrified wands attached to the Acuscope/Myopulse machine to my entire body. The internet was slow and unreliable so any research to learn more about the machine had to wait.

As the time went on, several things became clear. 

Almost everyone she worked with was over 65. I began to realize none of them had done much introspective work and they all had led standard American lifestyles in the way they ate and did not exercise. The ones who thought Suzanne was a miracle worker all experienced cathartic releases of emotion, both crying and openly sharing stories of traumas long passed for the first time, including rape and other physical abuse.

The electric wands did seem to loosen some of my tissues. But I couldn’t tell if she just changed her pressure over the many passes over the skin while commenting, “See how much smoother that is now?”

I, personally, did not experience any type of emotional release from her treatments.

Over time, it became more apparent that Suzanne had not entirely healed from her traumatic brain injury. 

For example, Suzanne was obsessed with multi-level marketing. DreamTrips International was her gateway to building teams and taking vacations once she recuperated from the accident. When we met she was selling VoxxLife socks designed to improve health, the Kangen water system designed to alkalinize household drinking water, as well as the Bemer mat that she used everyday.

Then her friend Theresa came to visit.

Theresa brought her house plant, Trixie, and an electrode device that she attached to Trixie. This device enabled us to hear music generated from Trixie’s electric field that Theresa claimed was healing. A few of Suzanne’s friends came over one afternoon for a living room concert.

Learning Through Recovery

Although I liked Suzanne and Tim and enjoyed hearing their stories, when I left, my pain was still firmly in place.

And it’s important to note that Suzanne’s business is not illegal!

No one needs a license to practice bodywork in the state of Minnesota. This is also the case in California, where I live now, but there is the option to be certified with an FBI fingerprint background check. So when you see someone offering bodywork in California, you know they are certified when they list their certification number. Certified practitioners are required to do so on all marketing materials.

Even when states do have certifications and licenses, they have wildly different standards. For example, you need 500 hours of education in California to request a certification; you need 1200 in the state of New York.

This is a buyer beware situation.

And why I use quotations around the word “healer.”

The people I have met practicing modalities in which they have achieved certification /licensure rarely call themselves healers. In trainings of various modalities I have experienced, we are encouraged to realize we are simply facilitators, assisting the body to do what it does naturally.

We are traffic cops, directing the traffic to unclog the jams.

You can assist your own body to greater and lessor degrees with things like rebounding and movement. A traffic cop, facilitator-type will generally encourage these kinds of low cost or free self-care behaviors and teaches you things about your body.

“Healer” drips with ego.

So this is one clue - be wary of anyone claiming to be a healer.

When I left Tim and Suzanne, I drove onward to Minneapolis where I’d secured a freelance project.

Now with high-speed internet, I found a chiropractor in the area who used the Acuscope/Myopulse machine in their fully above-board practice. The word “healer” appeared zero times on their website.

I made an appointment and experienced the very gentle, not painful at all, application of the device. Perhaps it facilitated healing but there was no noticeable result from one session.

I’ve met many other people who have also done strange things in search of healing. One woman I interviewed about her healing journey estimated she’d spent $2,500 on crystals alone, on the advice of a practitioner whom she pays $275 per session.

It becomes a signal of privilege to even have these stories of Dumb Ways to Heal.

But as I have healed, I have learned to decode the signals among the modalities that have worked for me from those that have not.

It’s my belief that much of what I learned in massage school, such as anatomy, kinesiology, and how touch assists human health, could have been taught in 8th grade health class. Since it’s not, I share these body basics that were not covered in health class, week by week.

So that we might all evolve our discernment knowing “healers” pedal their wares among us.

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I have not spoken to Suzanne since leaving “the lodge.”

We are still connected on Facebook and while I do see her get together with Theresa and Trixie from time to time, she’s never managed to publish a book.