Consegrity® - Consilience Energy Mirrors - The Skeptic's Dictionary (original) (raw)

Consegrity is a Bridge to Wellness that has no counterpart in health care today. It is a non-contact approach that touches the heart of all aspects of Self: Mind, Body and Spirit. It supports the ability of the individual to clear, clean, organize and reorganize electromagnetic, vibrational systems, allowing the body to heal itself.*

note: This entry was mostly written when Mary Lynch was alive. I've added a couple of notes about her death and have tried to smooth out the writing, but there may be some rough spots. rtc

Consegrity® is a type of faith healing and energy medicine that was developed by Dr. Mary A. Lynch, a retired physician who died in 2012,* and Debra Harrison, amassage therapist who died in the summer of 2005 while being treated with Consegrity by Dr. Lynch (photo). Harrison died of untreated diabetes and faith in her own nonsense. Apparently, so did Mary Lynch.

When Harrison's mother advised her to go to a hospital about a year and a half before her death, "Mary Lynch took her to another room and told her NEVER to tell Debbie to go to a hospital again," according to Debbie's nephew, Noa Hawkins. He says:

Mary and Emily [Debra's daughter] have a firm belief that it was our concern for Debbie that killed her, our negative energy. They have repeatedly insinuated her death was our fault, because of negative energy.

After my grandmother's death, my two uncles and my mother went to see Debbie. Evidently, she was almost anorexic, barely awake, and drifted in and out of conversation. She refused all of their urgings to go to a hospital. That was the last time they saw her. (personal correspondence)

Debra Harrison's mother also became a student of Consegrity and despite showing signs of severe illness (great pain and jaundice) was advised against seeking medical attention by her daughter. Her mother eventually became so ill that she agreed to see a doctor in mid-May 2005. According to Chris Ducey, Harrison's brother:

The doctor took one look at her, admitted her into the hospital, did tests, CAT scans, MRI's, ultrasounds, and a biopsy. Results showed that she had a cancerous tumor the size of a grapefruit on her liver (obstructing her bile duct, hence her jaundice) and a cancerous tumor on her kidney. Both were inoperable due to being at an advanced stage. Debra was furious with all of us, stating that mom was "not sick," just detoxifying, and that the reason she was sick was because of our "negative energy" (read love and concern). [Debra said] that taking her to the doctor and having tests done put a "label" on what was wrong (although she maintained nothing was wrong) and the cancer manifested itself with the diagnosis. Hence, we caused the cancer.

She went on to say that she had been aware of the growth on mom's liver for many months, that it was "inactive cancer" (whatever that is) and that it never was cancer, and that she had "checked in" with mom and had cured her cancer.

Mary [Lynch] told mom that all of us were toxic and that we should all leave because we were killing her. We stayed with mom constantly up until she died on June 19th, 2005. (personal correspondence)

Such is the logic of those trying to rationalize the obvious failure of a magical therapy. Debra was in Europe when her mother died. According to Chris Ducey: "Mom and Debra were not the only ones to die while under the care of Consegrity. Obviously these people might have died anyway (everyone does eventually) or maybe seeking medical treatment would have helped them as it would have in Debra's case."

A few weeks after their mother's death, Chris saw Debra alive for the last time.

When we did see Debra on July 9th, she was so ill I didn't recognize her. And in my professional opinion, being a firefighter and EMT for the last sixteen years, I would have classified her as "extremely sick" (meaning she needed medical attention) and given her a ride to the hospital emergency room.

She went back to Kansas, was there for about two weeks, then went on a road trip with Mary for three weeks. They traveled from Kansas to New York, to Vancouver, Canada, to San Francisco then back to Kansas. She got back home on August 20th and died two days later on August 22nd.

According to Noa Hawkins, the coroner's report states that Harrison died of complications from untreated diabetes (personal correspondence). Chris Ducey says: "She died of diabetic ketoacidosis secondary to undiagnosed diabetes mellitus. The autopsy stated that the islets of Längerhans in her pancreas had atrophied" (personal correspondence).

What is this wonderful therapy, you might ask, that could not heal its founder or her mother? "Consegrity does nothing....it supports reflecting back to the client so they can clear, clean, organize, and reorganize who they are."* Like many "alternative" therapies, Consegrity allegedly does nothing itself; it supposedly makes it possible for the body to heal itself.

Here is what Harrison and Lynch were promising the world before their deaths:

Observing what works and what does not Consegrity emerged revealing what's possible in the human body's ability to heal. When the balance of the interactive energy fields around every system is disrupted, the human body adapts, overloads and breaks down.

Consegrity works with the electromagnetic, vibrational systems of the body by reflecting/mirroring in a way that supports neutralizing the disruption, thereby grounding the overload along fluid dynamics restoring balance at the level of the cause bridging management of healthcare and supporting optimum, viable health.

In simpler terms this Wellness Support Program has been found to enable an individual to step into Awareness, thereby increasing the ability of the body to shift state... Shift State...What is That? A feeling state that either supports you and your physical body... or not.

Question.... How do you choose to feel?

Consegrity Wellness Support Program can be taught to anyone and requires only that you are willing to expand your perspective of What is Possible.

According to the now-defunct Consegrity website, Consegrity is a word that "encapsulates" CONsciousness awareness; tenSEGRITY of the body — the ability to withstand tension and pressure; and CONsilience — "the ALL KNOWING aspect of us." They had a very lofty mission:

We choose to create an opportunity to provide personal growth, performance and expansion of awareness that we are all ONE. By observing what works and letting go of that which no longer serves us, we can, each and everyone, bring Order to Chaos, Unity to Mind/Body/Spirit and awaken to a planet reborn through remembering Who We Really Are.

Lofty indeed. Saving the planet, providing personal growth while making us aware that all is one. What they claim to have found by observation is that what works is believing that our trillions of cells will repair and rebuild themselves forever "if the environment around the cell stays clean and clear."

However, as we live life, our cells are exposed to physical, emotional, spiritual, inherited and/or environmental trauma. Between the two cells [see picture to the right], you can see the energy of accumulative trauma represented by the dots. When this energy satiates the cell to a certain point, communication is lost, tension builds and the cell undergoes a loss of tensegrity (the ability to balance tension and compression)....If the accumulative energy in the connective tissue is removed, the cell reverts to normal, the DNA unlocks and healing occurs. Clearing this extraneous energy is what Consegrity supports.*

Even if this were true, removing this extraneous energy can't be done by micro-liposuction or any other mechanical or chemical means. Consegrity claims that it uses consciousness at the DNA level to "clear extraneous energy." However, you can't clean up this energy debris by yourself. You need a trained expert in mirroring energy to do that for you. The healer allegedly feels the energy or "wisdom" of the patient's response at the cellular level and somehow mirrors this wisdom back to the body which rids itself of "extraneous energy," or some such thing.

Lynch and Harrison called their creation a "Bridge to Wellness" and claimed:

This Bridge to Wellness has been found to be effective in treating a wide range of health problems including: Low Back Pain, Headaches, Asthma, Allergies, Heart Disease, Cancer, HIV, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, Diabetes, Neurological Disorders, Depression, Eating Disorders, ADHD/ADD, and Learning Disabilities.*

If the founder of a quack therapy claims it is an effective treatment for diabetes and then dies of diabetes while being treated by her co-inventor of the quackery, one would think that that would be the end of the quackery. One might think that, however, only if one does not understand how far some people imbued with magical thinking will go to defeatcognitive dissonance and avoid admitting that they're deluded.

Dr. Lynch couldn't help Debra Harrison clear her extraneous energy, even though she was at her partner's side when she died. Presumably, Lynch and Harrison provided the best healing energy that Consegrity can give, but were unable to assist Harrison with lowering her blood sugar below 900 mg/dl, which is what it measured at her death. Below 110 mg/dl is considered normal.

As noted above, Mary Lynch did not admit that Consegrity failed. She blamed the negative energy of Harrison's family, those who loved her enough to try to get her to check into a hospital where she might have received proper treatment. This negative energy supposedly interfered with the healing. What negative energy is or how it might work was not discussed by Dr. Lynch.

Lynch was a graduate of Georgetown University Medical School. She specialized in orthopedic surgery and sports medicine before retiring in 2003. The Consegrity website (now shut down) claimed that "Consegrity also can increase Performance Potential in all Sports-Related fields."* It also claimed that Consegrity® works with animals and "is very beneficial in restoring balance to their health and reducing your veterinarian bills."*

Lynch became interested in energy medicine while on a quest after the death of a previous partner in a plane crash. She had been doing sports medicine for 15 years and was tired of dealing with symptoms. She wanted to "correct the underlying problems."* She studied the work of Dr. Harold Saxton Burr, whose Blueprint for Immortality is considered by some to be the foundational work for modern energy medicine.She was also influenced by Semyon Kirlian andMasaru Emoto. What did she learn?

When all is said and done, The [energy] field is all of it. We're a field that contains a body-mind. And when the field slows its vibration, it literally becomes our cellular tissues. But it's all energy and space, and mostly space. And that space is our unmanifested potential. It is all that we could be if we were not what we are. We are the result of our inherited patterns. And we know that we operate on less than 40% of our DNA right now, because the rest of it is stuck. You clear your DNA, and you're actually clearing your father's DNA and your son's DNA. So your gift you give others as that DNA opens up, is immense.*

In short, Lynch abandoned scientific medicine for a scientific-sounding form of mystical gibberish. What could it possibly mean to "operate on less that 40% of our DNA because the rest of it is stuck"? MaybeToby Alexander knows.

Harrison, on the other hand, was a graduate of theMyotherapy Institute of Utah. She also taught therapeutic touch and "was an educational instructor with the Upledger Institute introducing a new therapy calledSpinal Release...which became part of the Upledger curriculum." Harrison practiced "CranioSacral Therapy, Somato Emotional Release,Lymphatic Drainage, andVisceral Manipulation...."* She was also adept at Myofascial Release, Strain/Counter Strain, Zero Balancing, Cranial Fluid Dynamics, andOriental Amma Massage. She was the perfect mate for someone who had rejected scientific medicine in favor of mystical energy fields. Debra Harrison seems to have never met an energy field she didn't like.

As strange as the views of Lynch and Harrison are, it is hard to imagine anyone with stranger notions about health and disease than their mentor, John E. Upledger. He thinks he communes with something he calls the patient's "Inner Physician" and gets vital information from a magical friend:

By connecting deeply with a patient while doing CranioSacral Therapy, it was possible in most cases to solicit contact with the patient's Inner Physician. It also became clear that the Inner Physician could take any form the patient could imagine—an image, a voice or a feeling. Usually once the image of the Inner Physician appeared, it was ready to dialog with me and answer questions about the underlying causes of the patient's health problems and what can be done to resolve them. It also became clear that when the conversation with the Inner Physician was authentic, the craniosacral system went into a holding pattern (pp. 48-49).*

With such a mentor guiding her is it that hard to understand why Harrison would be attracted to an endless array of "alternative" therapies and imagine herself walking on the bridge to wellness?

The Consegrity website may have been shut down, but Dr. Lynch continued to sell the same snake oil under a different name:Consilience Energy Mirrors (CEM), where she proudly proclaimed that The Dream Continues when she set up her new shop and had her website redesigned. Chris Ducey, executor and trustee to the estate of Debra Harrison, claims that Consegrity, Inc. was shut down as a business decision. The company was in deep debt and could not afford to continue operating.* Mary Lynch blamed the family of Debra Harrison for shutting down Consegrity Inc.: "Their goal is to stop the process of Consegrity moving forward," she said* Lynch wrote:

As we have moved forward with the precession of the equinox, our willingness and ability to listen to the 'consilience' of the client's quantum field requires that we move to this more precise paradigm. And though I have the utmost respect for the tool 'Consegrity' and will use the name in reference and with respect I have chosen to embrace 'Energy Mirrors', as Consegrity held hostage can no longer serve me.

I do not claim to fully understand that previous passage, as it seems to have issued from a mind that has left terra firma, but I do understand that Lynch considered the word 'Consegrity' to have been taken hostage by the following notice on the Consegrity website:

The use of the Consegrity, Inc. name, logo, or curriculum, for purposes of representing "Consegrity, Inc." without express written permission from the Executor and Trustee of the Estate of Debra L. Harrison, is prohibited. Anyone in violation of this prohibition will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.*

Noa Hawkins sees things differently from Mary Lynch:

Before Debbie's death, Mary signed the farm (and everything) over to her. This was actually rather smart since there were some enormous debts that Mary would have inherited after Debbie's death, but managed to avoid. The company also had some extreme debt.

Such a move might also relieve Dr. Lynch of responsibility for any lawsuits that might be made against the company she and Harrison had formed. The "farm" was a real farm and office building in Wichita, Kansas, and a company called Energy Medicine Training Center, Inc., which owned the registered trademark for Consegrity. Dr. Lynch not only showed amazing foresight by signing over the company to Debra before her death, she was amazingly lucky as well. Debra Harrison had a $500,000 life insurance policy that named Mary Lynch as the beneficiary (Noa Hawkins and Chris Ducey, personal correspondence).

Mary Lynch may have been sincere in her belief that the cause of death of her Consegrity co-founder was the negative energy of those family members who loved Debra Harrison and tried to get her to go to a hospital. That belief is patently absurd, but Dr. Lynch may have sincerely believed it. To those who ask "What's the harm in believing absurd things?" I say consider the folly of Debra Harrison and Mary Lynch. Diabetes is a treatable disease; so is a toe infection.

Dr. Lynch's last FAQ described such things as what it's like to undergo this fabulous treatment:

If you are with the therapist during the session, you will remain fully clothed and just lie down quietly (and probably fall asleep), while the therapist mirrors your field so your field can clear extraneous energy. There is no difference in results between a distance session and a local session. A key component of success is your ability to communicate with the therapist about what is working and changing.*

Apparently, you have to be a lot better at communicating what is working than the co-founders of this magic, but at least you can get a good nap out of the session. And you can have the practitioner work her magic from thousands of miles away, as there is absolutely no difference in results between a session where the practitioner and patient are together and one where they are working at a distance from each other. This is probably the truest thing one can say about this quackery.

Is there any scientific basis for this therapy? According to the Consilience Energy Mirrors website FAQ:

Looking at Einstein’s theory that matter is energy, we provide a new paradigm that moves away from the medical model. The biological system that we call the physical body is made up of interactive energy fields that surround every cell and every system, which balance and support optimal health. When this balance is disrupted, the body adapts, overloads, and breaks down. This wellness program restores that balance and supports all biological systems.*

In other words, this promise is the same one repeated in numerous New Age energy healing scams: illness is due to some sort ofvital energy that is not balanced or not in harmony or some such thing. The therapy somehow identifies where the energy trouble is and restores it to where it should be. In this case it is "extraneous energy" that needs to be cleared out. That's the metaphysical gibberish, but how does it really work? It works, in part, by the so-called placebo effect. Traditional healers have known for millennia that if you can relax people or get them to believe you have the power to heal, they become suggestible and you can relieve their stress, ease their minds, and allow their bodies to heal themselves. In any case, most folks recover on their own from most illnesses and injuries. Why not take the credit? Bob Park explains very simply and clearly how the so-called placebo effect works for healers:

Once we are convinced of the healing power of a doctor or a treatment, something very remarkable happens: a sham treatment induces real biological improvement. This is the placebo effect. Healers have relied on the placebo effect for thousands of years, but until recently, it was usually referred to as the "mysterious" placebo effect. Scientists, however, are beginning to understand the complex interaction of the brain and the endocrine system that gives rise to the placebo effect.

People seek out a doctor when they experience discomfort or when they believe that something about their body is not right. That is, they suffer pain and fear. The response of the brain to pain and fear, however, is not to mobilize the body's healing mechanisms but to prepare it to meet some external threat. It's an evolutionary adaptation that assigns the highest priority to preventing additional injury. Stress hormones released into the bloodstream increase respiration, blood pressure, and heart rate. These changes may actually impede recovery. The brain is preparing the body for action; recovery must wait.

The first objective of a good physician, therefore, is to relieve stress. That usually involves assuring patients that there is an effective treatment for their condition and that the prospects for recovery are excellent—if they will just follow the doctor's instructions. Since we recover from most of the things that afflict us, the brain learns to associate recovery with visits to the doctor. Most of us start to feel better before we even leave the doctor's office. (Park 2001: 50-51)

Even the reduction of stress can't cure diabetes or cancer, but Consegrity, like all forms of faith healing, is still going to be successful very often. When it isn't, the failures are easily dismissed as due either to seeking the treatment too late or not having enough faith in the process or to the negative energy of others. Faith healing succeeds most of the time because most illnesses resolve themselves on their own. Most people would get better if they received no treatment at all (Hines 2003; Nickell 1998). Faith healing can even provide some dramatic moments that appear to be miracles because patients want the healing to succeed and their bodies can deceive them into thinking they've been cured when what they are experiencing is a temporary relief due to such things as the subjective nature of pain and the actual release of endorphins. Rarely are the alleged dramatic cures followed up, but when they are the "miracle" dissolves. (See Hines 2003, Nickell 1998, and Randi 1989 for many examples. Here's one from Nickell: A woman who throws off her back brace and claims her cancer is gone but she dies two months later after X-rays show that a "cancer-weakened vertebra had collapsed due to the strain placed on it during the demonstration" at a Kathryn Kuhlman "healing" [p. 135]. Here's another from Nickell: a child is given a year to live by doctors but a trip to Lourdes convinces his family he's been cured by the miraculous waters. He dies a year later of his leukemia without much hoopla [p. 151].)

Ailments that go away on their own after treatment by a faith healer are credited to the healer. Some people have been misdiagnosed and don't really have anything seriously wrong with them to begin with. The majority of successful faith healings, however, are probably due to the cooperation of the healer and the patient. Working together, believing in the treatment, strongly desiring the treatment to work, can not only relieve stress and bring about the curative effects of the power of suggestion, but also can lead the patient to give testimony that is exaggerated or even false in the desire to get well and to please the healer. The power ofsubjective validation is enormous and essential to many, if not most, faith healings.

In short, faith healers like Mary Lynch can't lose. They could use just about any treatment they like and probably get about a 75% approval rating even if they are without any knowledge or skill. Most of their patients will validate their treatments and there will be no follow-up so there will be few bothersome failures. They are likely to be showered daily with proclamations of gratitude and are thus led to believe in the efficacy of their healing power. Emil Freireich, M.D. goes further. He says, as long as a treatment is harmless to either a sick or well person, it "will always prove to be effective for virtually every patient with any serious disease" (emphasis added; quoted in Randi 1989: 9). If the treatment fails, there are the standard rationalizations mentioned above.

If, after reading this tale of death by faith, you still want to be a practitioner of this energy medicine that didn't even work for its co-creators, you can take a six-day basic course in energy mirroring for 1,500(pricesmayvary).Afterfinishingthebasiccourse,youcantakeoneoftheadvancedtwo−dayspecialtyclasses(Behavioral,Immune/Cancer,Circulatory,Musculoskeletal)for1,500 (prices may vary). After finishing the basic course, you can take one of the advanced two-day specialty classes (Behavioral, Immune/Cancer, Circulatory, Musculoskeletal) for 1,500(pricesmayvary).Afterfinishingthebasiccourse,youcantakeoneoftheadvancedtwo−dayspecialtyclasses(Behavioral,Immune/Cancer,Circulatory,Musculoskeletal)for600 each. Prices may change, of course. Given her track record with herself and her partner, this does not seem like such a bargain to me. Others disagree. One enthusiastic believer, Virginia Leslie, writes:

Dr. Mary Lynch and Deborah [sic] Harrison have created a model that pulls together vast sources of knowledge and call it Consegrity® Wellness. This energy medicine listens to Spirit and helps it shift acknowledging cause, releasing trapped energy, self-repairing the energetic grid, and neutralizing the charges that attracted trauma. Then you can renew. It takes varying amounts of time to reconnect dormant neural synapses, develop new chemical interactions, repair and create new cells, alter DNA, patch up holes in the grid, the things our Higher Consciousness has the innate ability to do!

Consegrity® uses your own Consciousness to heal, keeping the process clearer. It goes beyond clearing energy blocks to neutralizing the charge that magnetically pulled in the blocks, thereby avoiding recurrence. What is truly unique about this modality is that you don't give away your healing power to anyone.*

It sounds good in theory, if gibberish is what you seek. Many otherwise intelligent people are often attracted to such gibberish. We are prone to wishful thinking, "a willingness to endorse comforting beliefs and to accept, uncritically, information that reinforces our core attitudes and self-esteem" (Beyerstein 1999). We often see patterns that aren't really there and find significance incoincidental occurrences. Perception and memory are selective and often used to reinforce biases. We will find confirmation for our magical beliefs come hell or high water! Many people are searching for some way to be healthy without having to involve hospitals, physicians, surgery, or drugs. This is understandable. Not only is it possible that all the medical knowledge and skill in the world may be to no avail in your particular case, there is the possibility, however remote, that a medical mistake might be made. Rather than being cured, you might be harmed by malpractice or the unforeseen consequences of an infection or side-effects of a drug. Some people would rather risk everything on a swell-sounding bit of hopeful gibberish than expose themselves to the world of hospitals and physicians. The latter symbolize sickness and they believe by choosing the "alternative" path they are choosing wellness. There will always be a receptive audience for the faith healer.

Mary Lynch had a number of followers, including Debra Harrison's daughter, Emily. There are well over 100 certified Consegritists in the U.S. There are probably just as many CEM practitioners. It is unknown how many of them advise their clients to avoid medical doctors and, as a result of this unhealthy advice, how many early deaths they have contributed to.

Debra Harrison was 55 years old when she died. Mary Lynch was 63. One of Debra Harrison's nieces had many kind things to say about her aunt.

__________

*note I received the following, but cannot verify its accuracy. Anyone with information on Mary Lynch's death can contact me via the feedback page for the SD: "I was told by a friend of hers that she had a toe infection that she tried to 'treat' with Consegrity/EnergyMirrors, refused medical attention and antibiotics, then had surgery to amputate the toe, refused antibiotics again, left the hospital and died at home from septic shock."

further reading

reader comments

books and article

Hines, Terence. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books.

Nickell, Joe. (1993). Looking For A Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions & Healing Cures, Prometheus Books.

Park, Bob. (2001). Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Oxford University Press.

Randi, James. (1989). The Faith Healers (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

websites

An interview with Mary Lynch

A review of Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis [James L. Oschman]- by Harriet Hall, MD

Energy Healing: Looking in All the Wrong Places by Robert Todd Carroll

Social and judgmental biases that make inert treatments seem to work by Barry L. Beyerstein (1999)