G2: Health: The Mind Instructor: The tabloids have feted his ‘miracle’
cures for paralysis and spinal injuries but the medical establishment
has dismissed Hratch Ogali as a quack. Tanya Gold sits in on a surgery
and asks whether healing really works
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Nov 30, 2004
TANYA GOLD
Last week I received an email from Euan MacDonald, a 30-year-old
former City worker who has motor neurone disease. The email was about
Hratch Ogali – the “Mind Instructor” – a healer feted by the tabloids
for his “miracle” cures for spinal injuries and paralysis but
ostracised by the medical establishment. MacDonald has been his
patient for a year. “As this is a progressive condition, results are
difficult to measure,” MacDonald wrote. “Who knows if I would be
better, worse or the same had I not gone to see Hratch? What I can say
with certainty is that with Hratch’s help I am living without fear.”
In Ogali’s gleaming yellow studio in Marylebone, just off Harley
Street, Alessia is sitting on a bed, wearing a faded Juicy Couture
tracksuit. The room is crowded with equipment for physical and
motivational therapy: a multi-gym, a climbing frame and a miniature
jungle of plants. Diagrams of the skeletal system and the muscular
system frown down. Ogali is massaging Alessia’s legs, looking, he
says, “for active nerves. There is always an active nerve somewhere.”
He taps her foot with a metal rod and squints. “They start
responding.” He carries her to a vibrating power plate. “You’re
getting heavier,” he smiles.
“No,” Alessia replies.
“Get up and walk,” he shouts. But Alessia can’t; she was paralysed
when the private jet in which she was flying crashed.
“I moved to London because of Hratch,” Alessia says. “My family would
fly any doctor in the world to Rome to see me. Doctors came from all
over Italy, from Cuba and from Germany. My father is a brain
surgeon. So after the accident I knew. I didn’t need to be told. If
you break your spinal cord you don’t walk.” Hratch grunts, without
looking up, “You will walk again.”
Ogali used to be a jeweller. Then, he says, “life presented me with a
different task”. He was born in Syria to Armenian parents but he grew
up in Jordan. He came to London in 1962 and met his wife, Tracey, who
persuaded him to become a healer. “My experiences were unique in
life,” he says. “Unusual. I can’t identify the first person I healed
because people always came to me; always talked about a difficulty of
some kind and I always had the advice. Wherever I went this was the
case.”
He places a walking frame by the bed and tells Alessia to stand. “Go –
go – go!” he commands. “Come on! On your toes. Push! Push! Hold
tight. Hold tight.” She stands. After four weeks of daily treatment,
Ogali says, “Alessia is improving. It will all get repaired and these
feet will start feeling and we will get you up and walking. How’s
that? Is that a good plan?”
I watch Ogali “mind instruct” a man with Parkinson’s disease. “Back to
normal; back to normal,” he says as the man struggles to his
feet. “Let it be active; let it be alive. Don’t let yourself
disappear. Think; think.” Ogali pauses his incantation, strokes his
moustache and stares violently at his patient. “Breathe into your
brain through your nose and let it go down your spinal cord. Tell
yourself, “I want my life back – not tomorrow, not after lunch, but
now!” Fight! Fight! Fight! Don’t feel sorry for yourself and don’t
make yourself weak.” Eventually the patient stands, touching Ogali’s
little finger and they breathe, simultaneously, with triumph. The
patient’s wife turns to me. “He has a positive attitude and a will
now,” she says. “Before he met Hratch, he couldn’t care less.”
The next patient is Florence. She came to England from Nigeria in 1964
to work as a social worker and was diagnosed with the virus GBS in
2000. “It began wi th weak fingers at half past eight in the morning,”
she tells me, struggling to enunciate; the virus gifted her with a
speech impediment. “By midnight I had lost all feeling.”
Ogali’s flirtatious incarnation has emerged. He skips out of the
consulting room, hugs Florence and demands, “You must get well because
I haven’t had any proper Nigerian food in this country and you must
make it for me.” She purses her lips, moodily, at him. “Don’t behave
like an old woman,” he chides and wheels her over to the adapted
exercise bike. “Faster! Faster!’ he commands. Florence sweats, gasps,
and mentions a hip problem. “This stuff with hips; don’t make it up,”
he spits. “You don’t need a hip replacement. You haven’t done any
exercise for four years; that is all that is wrong with your hip. Next
week you will stand.”
I ask Florence if Ogali’s therapies are helpful. “My legs are
stronger,” she says. “I’m now able to stand. I’m happier and more
enthusiastic.” What, I ask her, is this mysterious ‘mind control’?
“‘Mind control’ is just focusing on what I’m doing. In my sessions
with Hratch (which cost pounds 100 an hour), I just say to myself,
‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.’ I imagine I am running a
marathon and I am heading for the finishing line. I’m going to stand
up. I’m going to walk.” I watch her eyes. She believes it.
After the last patient has been kissed goodbye, I ask Ogali how he
learnt ‘mind instruction’. “First I investigated psychics, mediums,
and the telepathic world,” he says, rolling a cigarette and watching
his small son bicycle across the consulting room. “Then I taught
myself conventional medicine. I opened myself up so I can understand
it all. My questions always took me directly to where I could get the
answers from. When I see my patients, I move through my mind so I
understand exactly what they feel. I enter their energy and I bring
myself into such focus that I feel their ailment myself. I use their
instinctive memory, of walking and of health. I resolve the
difficulties from the depth of the unconscious mind.”
Ogali is writing a series of books on disease and remedy. His literary
agency, he tells me, used to represent Sigmund Freud. Ogali insists
that his methods can be taught and, if his principles are eventually
accepted by the medical establishment and the government, a small army
of mind instructors will march out from his mews.
For now, this is unlikely. Ogali’s campaign for recognition by the NHS
has failed; his letters to the Department of Health are unanswered. In
neurological circles, he is dismissed as a quack who prescribes
nothing more powerful than counterfeit hope.
Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsular
Medical School in Exeter explains the medical establishment’s mistrust
of “alternative” healers and “miracle” cures. “It is impossible to
make judgments with anecdotal evidence,” he tells me. “Anecdotes are
meaningless. It is only through proper research that our knowledge
advances. Hratch Ogali should provide proper evidence with clinical
trials. If he is potent then everyone should benefit from him. I am
not saying he is a crook – it is possible he has a power – but if he
wants recognition he shouldn’t go through the media. He should go
through science.”
Then why, I ask Ernst, do Ogali’s patients’ testify to recovery? My
desk is covered with letters from them, exalting his
methods. “Motivational healing like Ogali’s raises patient
expectation,” Ernst says. “Their belief in the possibility of recovery
is increased by the healer’s intervention and this belief can move
mountains. But it is wrong,” he adds, “to make patients believe that
there is a supernatural power that can heal.” He then explains the
placebo effect. “When there is residual function,” he says, “and if
you are told incessantly that you will be better then you will be
better. But it is unreliable and it is not unique to Ogali.”
Ernst tells me the story of the Spiritual Healer experiment, which
took place in Exeter five years ago. “We teamed five spiritual healers
with five actors pretending to be spiritual healers,” he says. “After
they had learnt to be spiritual healers the actors had the same effect
on the patients as the healers.” He clears his throat. “If anything,
they were a little better.”
But Ogali’s belief in his ability to heal is absolute; his patients
are his evidence. “If you focus,” he says, “you learn that you possess
all sorts of powers that are natural. Psychic power is
natural. Telepathic power is natural. We all possess this strength
but the will and the concentration and the determination to overcome
must be absolute.” He blows cigarette smoke to the roof of his
consulting room. “It is within us.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress