Loveland woman tries to help patients, doctors by ‘reading’ fields of physical and emotional pain.

Christine Celek knew she was different when she looked around the classroom and realized none of the other 6-year-olds was drawing energy fields around their stick figures.

“That’s when I realized that not everyone saw what I see,” she says.

The 41-year-old Loveland woman still sees energy fields — and uses them to help the clients and doctors she works with pinpoint a number of physical and emotional ailments and treatments.

Mrs. Celek is a medical intuitive at the Alliance Institute for Integrative Medicine in Sycamore Township. She “reads” changes, fluctuations and leaks in a client’s energy field, or aura, to help diagnose illnesses and determine whether a treatment is working.

Her practice is on the extreme end of alternative and complementary medicine — a practice skeptics call “poppycock” and “mumbo jumbo.”

Mrs. Celek doesn’t provide treatment per se: She uses what she believes is an ability to see clients’ auras to help acupuncturists better target their treatment.

Sensing pain

It’s all about energy for Mrs. Celek. When some practitioners might mention inflammation or fatigue, she sees colors, and swells or dips in the energy field surrounding the body.

Working with acupuncturist Dr. Steven Amoils one afternoon, she helps guide the placement of the needles used in treatment. For one woman diagnosed with Lyme disease and neuropathy, she points to an area along the breast bone. “There’s a spot right here that is very concave,” she tells Dr. Amoils, the co-director of the institute. He places a needle in the spot.

She asks a woman being treated for a knee injury to remove a plastic sheet that’s covering her. “I can’t see through Mylar,” Mrs. Celek jokes.

Another woman is being treated for a muscle injury to her abdomen. “I see an area of hot, an area of inflammation,” Mrs. Celek tells Dr. Amoils. “It’s very red.” She points to a spot on the woman’s stomach, and Dr. Amoils places a needle there. The needle will “pull the inflammation out,” Mrs. Celek says.

Many energy healers say they can sense changes or fluctuations in the body’s energy healing, either feeling areas of hot or cold or feeling fluctuations the way the rest of us would feel mild electrical sensations, or seeing colors.

The ability to diagnose illnesses by “reading” a patient’s aura is rare: Dr. Amoils says Mrs. Celek is one of two people he knows with such an ability. The other is the Rev. Rosalyn Bruyere, founder of the Healing Light Center Church of Sierra Madre, Calif. The Rev. Ms. Bruyere has worked extensively with researchers at UCLA on energy healing.

Mrs. Celek sees illness in colors and symbols. Fibromyalgia appears as areas of redness (inflammation) throughout the body. Autism shows itself as “a purple cone of energy” emanating from the head, and a lopsided energy field — one side very dense, the other very light — surrounding the body. Cancer appears as a black area in the body, and high blood pressure shows itself as red spikes of energy coming out of the top of the patient’s head.

The first time she meets with clients, Mrs. Celek draws a chart of what she sees in their energy field. Those charts will serve as the base for illustrations for a book she and Dr. Amoils are writing.

Helping patients

Cindy Coggins, 51, of Blue Ash, began seeing Mrs. Celek shortly after her husband, John, was diagnosed with cancer. Mr. Coggins, who died in 1999, about a year and a half after he was diagnosed, was seeing an acupuncturist for pain treatment. Mrs. Celek helped direct that treatment and helped him track the progress of his disease and the treatments — traditional radiation and chemotherapy, along with complementary therapies — that he was receiving.

“John loved having Chris around. He’d ask her to explain things. “What do you see in me? What do you sense around me?’ It was fascinating for him. He kept describing a news feature he had seen once on using acupuncture in China for anesthesia for labor.”

Now Mrs. Coggins, a stockbroker, sees Mrs. Celek in conjunction with an acupuncturist to deal with stress “and to keep myself grounded.”

Working with Mrs. Celek helped her manage her grief over her husband’s death, Mrs. Coggins says.

“I knew the grief part was going to be very real, and there’s no way to get around it. You just have to get through it. I would go to her and say, “What do you see? Is there something I’m not dealing with that I should be?’ She would describe things. She would say, “You don’t have a lot of energy in your legs.’ And I would say, “No, all I’m doing is thinking all the time and doing paperwork and settling the estate.’ And we would work to re-balance the energy.”

Working with Mrs. Celek has made her more attuned to her own energy and to her children’s, Mrs. Coggins says. And it’s strengthened her spirituality.

Counselors Dr. Barb Hensley and Dr. Irene Giessl, directors of the Cincinnati Trauma Connection in Clifton, routinely refer clients to Mrs. Celek. Both have also seen Mrs. Celek as clients.

Dr. Giessl says Mrs. Celek can help clients track their progress through counseling. The theory is that a person’s emotional wellness affects their whole-body health, and emotional disturbances can influence the energy field. Someone troubled by unresolved anger, for example, will show high energy around the liver, Mrs. Celek says. Someone troubled by depression will have a very compact energy field that’s heavier at the bottom of the body than at the top.

A few years ago, Dr. Giessl and Mrs. Celek attended a workshop together. Dr. Giessl felt a little under the weather and asked Mrs. Celek what she saw. “She said, “It’s your cholesterol. Go get it checked.’ And she was right,” Dr. Giessl says.

East meets West

Mrs. Celek considers her ability a link between the ancient healing energy principles of acupuncture and Ayurvedic medicine and the modern diagnostic technology that powers Western medicine’s MRI and CT scans.

Dr. Amoils says her ability “validates all three systems.”

A study on Mrs. Celek’s abilities, titled “The Diagnostic Validity of Human Electromagnetic Field (Aura) Perception,” will appear in Medical Acupuncture, the journal of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture. Dr. Amoils and his wife, Dr. Sandi Amoils, teamed up with three other experts, including two radiologists, for the study, which compared the medical intuitive’s ability to diagnose lower back pain by reading patients’ energy fields to diagnostic images taken by MRI scans.

Mrs. Celek and an unnamed energy healer correctly diagnosed and located disc problems in eight of 14 patients whose MRIs confirmed the diagnoses. The study’s authors say the results are “clearly better than chance” and support the idea that humans can perceive the body’s energy field. The skill can be especially useful in helping identify and evaluate patient’s pain, the study says.

Skeptics doubtful

Even as medical intuitives are attracting interest for their work through s books by authors and healers like Dr. Caroline Myss and Dr. Judith Orloff, skeptics are quick to cast doubt on their alleged abilities.

Jack Raso, director of publications for the American Council on Science and Health in New York and editor of the organization’s journal, sums up his take on Mrs. Celek’s and her colleagues’ practices: “Poppycock! Stay away!”

Joe Nickell, senior research fellow for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in Amherst, N.Y., is just as direct about medical intuitives and other alternative therapists.

“I’m sure if I could invent something like waving a rose over your head, and I had the nerve to do that and charge money for it, that would no doubt cure some people,” he says.

He calls talk of energy fields and leaks and patterns “mumbo jumbo” and says there’s no hard science backing up medical intuitives’ work, or work by therapeutic touch therapists or other energy healers.

Mr. Nickell isn’t impressed by the institute’s study. “For them to study themselves is a little bit like having the Flat Earth Society study the curvature of the earth, in my opinion,” he says.

Factors like the placebo effect and the power of suggestion can help explain why patients feel better after seeing a medical intuitive or other practitioner whose effectiveness is undocumented, Mr. Nickell says. “Almost anything you do will get testimonials. That’s why snake oil worked so well. People didn’t buy the snake oil and say it didn’t work. They bought the snake oil and said they felt better.”

Mrs. Coggins doesn’t agree.

“These things happen that just reaffirm to you that there’s this whole other ability that our brain has that we don’t even touch. For me, she has gifts that God has given her that I’m so thankful for,” she says.