Bad Golf Swing? You May Need a Past-Life Checkup

The Santa Monica woman, who would rather not be named, could not be more excited about the work of Dr. Ed Wagner. She had heard glowing reports about this rather unusual health-care triple hyphenate (chiropractor-nutritionist-psychic) and decided to treat herself to a session, as a combination birthday present/hoot.

And that is how she came to learn that her husband was her brother and her son was her parent 400 years ago. Wagner also warned her that if she and her husband didn’t solve their karmic problems right now, they would come back together in another life.

“Oh, hell, I don’t want to come back with him again” is what she thought to herself. So she decided to play along. “And now I’m in total awe,” she gushes on the phone, because while sessions with a regular marriage counselor just angered her grouchy husband, seeing Wagner, she says, “is saving our marriage!” Plus, she adds giddily, “the treatments totally fixed his golf swing, which made him so happy that now our marriage has become alive!”

Odd diagnoses and unusual solutions are all a part of a day’s work for Wagner of Malibu, very much of Malibu. A licensed chiropractor since 1975, and a onetime business partner of Jack LaLanne’s, Wagner sees himself as sort of a present-day West Coast version of the legendary psychic healer Edgar Cayce. His celebrity-studded list of clients includes Arianna Huffington and Diana Ross.

“I think my ability to diagnose is based on my intent . . . which is to set every single person free so they can fulfill themselves on all levels” is how Wagner explains it. “I think that intent allows me to see what other doctors don’t see.”

Often, he says, to make a diagnosis, he’ll “just touch the patient, and wait. And I’ll usually get a vision. From there, I can start the process.”

“I never believed in past lives,” he says, soft-spoken and dignified in a white shirt and tweed pants, “but when I had patients that literally I’d done everything, and I know more than almost any doctor because I have a photographic memory . . . I had done every conceivable test and treatment. And the patient would still be stuck. So I just allowed myself one time to let my intuition and psychic ability perceive another dimension. That dimension was past lives.”

Michael Nash, a spokesman for a chiropractic college, acknowledges that it is common for chiropractors to make use of different kinds of treatments, depending on the individual’s approach. The idea that a psychic element might be useful does not sound out of the realm of the possible to him. “I have yet to hear of any chiropractic college that has incorporated a psychic element into its curriculum,” says Nash, director of communications for the Southern California University of Health Sciences, which includes the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic.

“I never believed in any of this kind of [junk] before,” says Lois Gibson, a Wagner devotee and the straight-talking wife of actor Henry Gibson. Dressed in a muumuu, she was standing in Wagner’s crowded waiting room in a large glass office complex on Pacific Coast Highway. It is decorated with--among other things--several huge amethyst crystals and a large rock engraved with the word “healer.”

“I mean, aromatherapy? Please!” Gibson continues in a pronounced New York accent as she launches into the story of how her husband had a health crisis, suddenly losing all his energy and 25 pounds in a week. No traditional doctor had any idea what was wrong. Wagner diagnosed creosote poisoning from work Gibson had done on the moorings of their house. Once he put the actor on a high-fat diet, within a week he was fine and the Gibsons joined the ranks of the converted.

This is not an inexpensive proposition, since Wagner charges $150 for an initial 20-minute visit and $65 for 10-minute follow-up visits. “But he works really fast,” says Kimberly Maxwell, his office manager. “He doesn’t like to spend more time than that with anyone because more time just gives them a chance to put up defense mechanisms,” she explains.

Wagner, a tall, lean, white-haired man in his 50s, has a seemingly endless supply of odd stories meant to serve as examples of the unusual corner he is occupying on the health-care block. Take, for instance, the strange case of the “successful TV writer” who came to him with, among other symptoms, very bad writer’s block--something not usually listed among the pathologies in the “Merck Manual of Medical Information.”

“My God, he was bottoming out,” Wagner explains. He began with a chiropractic examination, as he does with all new patients, then a series of reflexology tests. Wagner checked the guy’s diet, blood chemistry, brain chemistry. He looked at his emotional issues. But where he wound up was an area into which the average family doctor would not deign to venture. “I finally traced the problem to a great-grandparent of his who was a murderer . . . ,” Wagner explains calmly. “I said, ‘That is the issue that is blocking you.’ So the guy goes to talk to family members and finds out that down in the lineage, one of the grandparents killed the other, and that had never been resolved. It was a family secret. I found the blocked energy, we did a treatment upon it, and it released the whole family.”

Wagner has dozens of stories this unusual.

Take the one about the lady who called him when she was hospitalized for colitis. “They were going to do an ileostomy. She was going down the tubes.” He agreed to visit her in the hospital, even though it’s something he doesn’t like to do. After examining her, he told her that he could have her out of there in three days--if she agreed to follow his advice. “All you have to do is eat chocolate ice cream every day three times a day for 30 days, and nothing else.”

Of course, everyone in the hospital thought they were both crazy.

“But I knew her soul was suffering,” he says. “And in three or four days, all her pain had gone. It was a spontaneous healing.”

What exactly does he think is going on here, anyway? Wagner says he believes that the body is a binary computer consisting of thousands and thousands of yes/no switches that he knows how to check.

“I reprogram the body” is how he explains it. When this reporter requests a demonstration, Wagner asks, “Is anything bothering you?”

“Yes,” I tell him, “ I have a knee problem. An old running injury.”

He reads my energy meridians, moves my arms and legs around and asks me to resist his pressure and finally concludes that what is wrong with my knee is my largely nonexistent love life. He gives me a piece of paper on which he has written: “Being held back. Cannot see that you will ever experience or have . . . which would give fulfillment and joy and power. Love = threat.”

He suggests I meditate on it.

Then he runs a laser over me to try and change my troublesome love-repelling energy field.

The next day, one of Wagner’s associates takes a pass at readjusting my apparently pathetic heart chakra, using the Biotech 2000 machine--which involves me holding two glass tubes as they flash pink and blue argon gas for nine minutes. It is a very L.A.-in-the-21st-century science fiction kind of experience.

Much of this kind of thing would seem easy to discount were it not for Wagner’s many ardent, satisfied--and very vocal--customers. Kathy Christiansen, a clothing buyer who has been a loyal patient for the last 24 years, first visited Wagner when she was a 23-year-old model who was so plagued by allergies that she couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t speak and weighed only 62 pounds. “He saved my life,” she says with great devotion.

Which brings us back to the Santa Monica woman with the newly healed husband who did not want her name mentioned.

Her husband, she says, “just bought $30,000 worth of crystals, for protection! Dr. Ed came to our house to help us set them up. And my husband is so not the kind of guy who would do something like that. All I know is that my husband no longer looks at me with hate in his eyes,” she says with astonishment. “I don’t understand why this stuff is working. I just know it is.”