LAUSR

We appreciate the thorough review of our article and take this opportunity to clarify the concerns raised by Dr Rodrigues. An important point that readers shall keep in mind is the exploratory nature of the study presented in “Transcriptional Changes in Cancer Cells Induced by Exposure to a Healing Method” by Beseme et al. The goal was to determine what, if any, transcriptional effects were induced by exposing transformed cells in culture to the Bengston Healing Method (BHM) in order to identify a potential delivery method of BHM. Bengston Healing Method is probably widely unknown to the scientific and medical community, and we felt compelled to explain briefly the nature of this method. In doing so, we acknowledge that we cited some of our previous work, a point raised by the author of the comment; when reviewing published literature, it becomes evident that this is a common practice and that there is no malicious intent. Specifically, references 6 and 7 describe the method of healing that is the subject of investigation. Without these references, the reader would lack information that the authors consider critical for the understanding of the current study. The strategy adopted in this study was to expose transformed cells to BHM and compare gene expression of these cells to nonexposed cells. Previous experiments conducted by several of the authors showed no changes between unenergized cotton and no cotton when investigating expression of cancerrelated genes in transformed cells. Importantly, the necessary information is described in the paper; the reader is aware of the controls used and has the available tools to reproduce or interpret the results of this study. We tested the expression of 167 genes and performed simple comparative analyses between exposed and nonexposed cells. Dr Rodrigues suggests that applying Bonferroni correction would result in finding no statistical significance in any experiments. We respectfully disagree with this statement: Conceptually, if a is set at .05, we would expect 5% of the 167 (ie, 8-9 out of 167) statistical tests actually performed to reach minimum significance by chance alone. In actuality we found 37 instances of reaching statistical significance with a fold change >1.5. We agree that there is a case to be made for applying corrections for multiple comparisons in order to reduce the chances of type I errors and that the exploratory nature of the research allowed us some flexibility. Changes in genes expression were considered relevant for discussion if they were superior to 1.5-fold, as highlighted in the abstract. We appreciate the thorough review and thank Dr Rodrigues for noticing the typographical error in the result section, where we state that the changes in expression were <2. We do not think that it takes away the meaning and the conclusions of our study. Among the genes tested, our results indicated an increase in ACLY expression when cells were exposed to a recording of BHM, with a peak at 24 hours, and a tendency to decrease under exposure to the hands-on method. An increase in ACLY expression has been shown to promote cancerous phenotype, implying a deleterious effect of BHM. Importantly, this set of results suggests that BHM induces a biological activity, illustrated by the variations in ACLY expression upon exposure to BHM. This information is central to answer the primary objective of this study, which was to determine whether BHM induces any effect. The relationship between our results and the activity of BHM in vivo has yet to be investigated. Hypothetically, dose and length of