Quirks and quacks

>> Medical intuitive Marilyn Parkin rides the electromagnetic wave

by NAOMI BLOCH

Exhausted after five hours of phone interviews from her homebase in B.C., Marilyn Parkin seems a little tuckered out when I ask if she would use her special gift on me. Parkin, who works as a medical intuitive, says that "because energy is totally transferable" she can tap into my energy field and tell me why my body is feeling the way that it's feeling as long as she has my permission. "The individual body works on the same principles as the Earth's magnetic poles--the positive and negative," Parkin informs me. "And ideally the body's designed to function at its best with positive energy flowing through it."

Apparently, since we live in an electromagnetic universe, Parkin can interpret conditions in my physical body through "the energy field"--despite being over 3,500 kilometres away and knowing no more about me than my name and occupation. Fortuitously, the first stage of my assessment goes well. On a scale of 1-10, my energy balance rate is around 2-3. "What that is, is how a body is relating to the mind and vice versa," she explains. "Ten being you're completely off balance."

The next step is a rating of my chronic-fatigue/fibromalgia-type energy. There's a pregnant pause in our phone conversation, during which I find myself holding my breath, possibly in order to avoid further muddling the electromagnetic energy readings which must be off the charts what with all the sunlight, computers, cell phones, surveillance systems and communications satellites transmitting signals between here and my energy medicine practitioner out West.

Parkin releases a long sigh. "Here we run into a little bit of a problem," she confesses. "For as much as you've got the knowledge of the understanding, how and what and connecting with the signals your mind's putting out, you don't always put that into practice. What I mean by that is, personality-wise, you kind of run yourself short." But Parkin doesn't get around to giving me a numerical rating this time; instead, she cuts the assessment short.

Realm of rationality

For $175 (payable by all major credit cards) Parkin can be contacted via her Web site for an assessment. The process, she says, can be quite a draining experience for her and a normal report can be as long as six typewritten pages. "I'm actually tapping into a different energetic dimension and it takes a fair amount of energy out of me," apologizes Parkin.

"Once I realized my ability to do this, I had to come to some level of understanding because it didn't fit into my realm of logic and rationality," she says. She began to achieve that level of understanding around five years ago, after attending a lecture and workshop by a New Zealand magnetic healing guru named Colin Lambert. Lambert claims to heal patients by acting as a kind of energy transformer, drawing out the negative energy created when a group of cells becomes "out of phase" with all the others, forming resistance to the positive energy in his hands.

"I'm now doing a doctorate degree in energy medicine specializing in medical intuition," says Parkin, who has a B.A. in sociology and psychology and experience as a licensed practical nurse. "Energy medicine is actually taught at two different places, and I'm affiliated with both." As it turns out, the two places are closely related. Based in South Dakota, Holos University's energy medicine graduate program is actually a college within the other institution, Greenwich University. Greenwich is an entirely Internet-based enterprise currently headquartered in Norfolk Island, an Australian territory and tax haven.

New-age physics

Greenwich University has bounced around the globe more times than the average military brat, rejected as a sham by New Zealand, California and Hawaii among other locations before finding its current home in the South Pacific paradise. The institution has been rejected by Australia's academic accreditation board, and readily admits that its degrees are not recognized by any other professional organization in the world.

But Parkin insists that the discipline is legitimate. "I'm sure chiropractors in the '50s and '60s were where energy medicine is now." And, she reminds me, the physics of electromagnetism is a real science, despite her inability to clearly relate the physics to her practice. "There's some larger-scale electrical, magnetic... force. There's some way that this energy transfers and is transported."

Though she claims "many studies" support energy medicine's validity, she admits, "I personally would not like to even see it classified as a science. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist." To Parkin, the purpose of medical intuition is to help people function with positive energy and empower themselves. "Generally, right now, people who are kind of at their wits' end are coming to somebody like me. They've gone wherever they can go and are still not feeling well. And, yes, there is that spiritual element of needing to find some peace within their life. I think we all have that."

Parkin will be in town offering a $50, two-day "Intuitive Healing" workshop at the Kiné-Concept Institute Massage Therapy School, April 26-27. Call 482-4485 or go to Parkin's site, www.mmedicalintuitive.com for details