Peter
Churchill is a manual therapist who specializes in the treatment of
chronic pain. He is a nationally certified massage and bodywork therapist
and is an adjunct faculty member and guest lecturer at Harvard Medical
School. Churchill is also an instructor for the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center and Harvard Medical School's annual symposium for Alternative
and Complementary Medicine hosted by Dr. David Eisenberg. When Body
& Soul filmed Lenny Zakim's treatments, Peter Churchill had
been working with Lenny for several years.

"I'm
a manual therapist using my hands to facilitate a healing response in
people. I specialize in people with chronic pain or people who have
had injuries that won't heal well; or people who have had illnesses
that are serious and are not responding to conventional therapies. And
so if a person has been fighting a chronic disease and has been having
pain for many years, their own body has begun to shut down in many ways
because of the pain and because of the stress and trauma of that, so
often I can find a way to open that obstructive energy in their body
and get that life force flowing again, and then they can begin to heal
much more quickly.

"I facilitate
the healing response in that person, and that's the distinction between
me and, say, a technician who's only working with the physical side
of a person. I work more with the physical and the energy side of a
person. When a person, when their life force has been blocked, there's
a tremendous tension in the body, and as you begin to undo that, the
tension goes out. If you could see it, you would see a kind of darker
energy come out of a person. When a person has cancer, it is the darkest,
most horrible energy that you can imagine.

"Real healing
always has to happen in the heart and in the energy system of the person,
and that includes their body, but it has to happen in that dimension,
or really not much occurs. So even an oncologist who's giving chemotherapy,
he's giving a physical substance, but the whole way it heals is that
it does something to the energy of the person. No drug in the world
ever heals anybody, and no healer who puts their hands on somebody ever
heals somebody. Both are just using different ways to open the energy
and life force in a person and then that heals them.

"If you ask
any doctor, any practitioner of any form of healing arts, from psychotherapy
all the way to surgery, anyone would honestly tell you in a candid moment,
that they really don't know how a person heals. It is absolutely a mystery.
Whether I'm using my hands or a brain surgeon is doing the most intricate
work inside a person's brain, everybody is being a facilitator or a
catalyst for this ability for the body to then regenerate itself.

"The whole
matter or alternative medicine versus conventional medicine is really
something that should be put behind us. That we're somehow fighting
for the same turf; the alternative medicine people saying conventional
medicine is no good because it does this and this, and the conventional
medicine camp saying that alternative medicine is not valid. We really
need to find people who are genuine servers of other people's health,
and those are the people that are going to make the difference. Yes,
there should be studies, and yes, there should be validation about what
we do, but helping people and seeing the results should be the most
important test."