Bill Moyers’ Fantastic Voyage : Television: ‘Healing and the Mind,’ a PBS documentary series about alternative medicines, is predicated on the belief that the mind and body are one.

Bill Moyers, the boldly probing Capt. Kirk of TV journalists, is on PBS once again, nosing around in yet another universe of unconventional ideas.

This time Moyers is in the People’s Republic of China, where he notes that “health is not just an absence of illness, it’s a way of life.”

On the screen tonight, he is a fascinated observer, touring the herbal pharmacy at a hospital in Beijing that dispenses remedies ranging from herbs to deer antlers to. . . .

“That looks like a scorpion,” Moyers says. It is.

At another hospital, Moyers is introduced to chi, the energy force at the root of Chinese medicine, including acupuncture. “Show me how my chi flows,” he asks of a Dr. Zang, who then holds Moyers’ hand and applies pressure, getting an immediate response. “It’s hot,” Moyers says.

Thus unfolds tonight’s transfixing premiere of “Healing and the Mind,” a David Grubin documentary series about alternative medicines, predicated on the belief that the mind and body are one. Still in its “big event” programming mode, PBS is cramming this five-part series into a three-night cubbyhole.

Reported by co-executive producer Moyers, it airs at 8 tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday on KCET-TV Channel 28, KPBS-TV Channel 15 and KVCR-TV Channel 24.

Most of the series is spent at mainstream medical institutions in the United States. Only the first hour is devoted to China, where Moyers’ tour guide is Dr. David Eisenberg, a U.S. physician who was the first American medical exchange student to study in China after relations were normalized.

Eisenberg says the Chinese believe that the body’s basis and key to health is energy balance. Thus, in a sort of medical kung fu ballet, masses of Chinese are shown doing exercises, combining slow movements with meditation, designed to move and rearrange their energy. Later, a patient describes the feeling of flowing chi: “I feel light, so light. I don’t feel my own weight. I feel like I’m floating. My pain is gone.”

We see Dr. Zang use massage to stimulate the chi of a woman with fibrocystic breast disease. “The lumps are disappearing,” she says.

In another energy balancing sequence, a doctor waves his hands back and forth over a prone patient like a magician engaging in a levitation stunt. “The closest thing I’ve seen to this is people who claim to be faith healers in our culture,” says the impressed but still skeptical Moyers.

Yet as television, it’s all very seductive. Eisenberg himself doesn’t understand what happens when chi flows, and he advocates the use of Western science to determine whether this really works or whether the Chinese are being “deluded” by something ingrained in them for centuries.

Hard science is being applied to the mind/body connection theories that are persuasively articulated in tonight’s second hour, giving new resonance to such old saws as “the will to live” and “listen to your body.”

Is it actually possible that that the brain and the immune system communicate on some level? Cut to Minneapolis, where a girl with life-threatening lupus appears headed for recovery as a result of having her immune system “conditioned” to fight disease through taste and smell, the way a whiff of cod liver oil can trigger unpleasant childhood memories. Elsewhere, a young girl who suffers from migraines has learned to ease the pain by “using her mind” in conjunction with biofeedback from a computer.

Moyers is encouraged by Maryland neuroscientist Candace Pert to stop thinking of the mind speaking to the body as a separate entity. Finally, he gets it: “I’m talking to myself, I as a whole person.”

“Healing and the Mind” returns Tuesday with 90 minutes that at times resemble an infomercial, with a smooth-talking salesman and testimonials from satisfied customers. But there are no videos or audiocassettes for sale here. And the product is not a 30-day miracle fix-all course but mind-body “oneness,” achieved through a form of Buddhist meditation in a stress-reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

The clinic is operated by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who preaches that eating a single raisin can open powers of awareness. Patients who can’t find help elsewhere come to the clinic, and Kabat-Zinn says that 75% of them report “moderate to great improvement” in their condition.

Later in the segment, Moyers reports from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where Dr. David Spiegel is conducting a program in which women with metastatic breast cancer meet weekly to talk openly about their disease and their lives. Does merely expressing feelings improve physical health? In an earlier, similar study by Spiegel, women with advanced cancer who expressed themselves candidly lived double the usual life expectancy in such cases.

Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s episodes are as much about individual response to crises as about treatment. But although the final segment--centering on another group of cancer patients--is very moving and heartfelt, it also is largely repetitious of what preceded it, coming across as merely more variations on a theme. By that time you’re getting that old deja vu feeling.

Where “Healing and the Mind” uniquely succeeds is in redefining medicine and treatment in such a way that science becomes meaningful and understandable. And Moyers’ indispensable role in this process is to approach this information as the lay viewer’s surrogate, learning about it as we do.

This is television with a bedside manner, and simply watching makes you feel healthier.