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The Story of Anthony William
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The Story of Anthony William
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| Medical Medium - Anthony William .pdf |
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This Story is from the Above Book
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AN UNEXPECTED GUEST
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This Story is from the Above Book
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AN UNEXPECTED GUEST
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My story begins when I’m four years old. As I’m waking up one Sunday morning, I hear an elderly man speaking. His voice is just outside my right ear. It’s very clear. He says, “I am the Spirit of the Most High. There is no spirit above me but God.”
I’m confused and alarmed. Is someone else in my room? I open my eyes and look around, but don’t see anybody.
Maybe someone’s talking or playing a radio outside, I think. I get up and walk to the window.
There are no people—it’s too early in the morning. I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m not sure I want to.
I run downstairs to be with my parents and feel safe. I don’t say anything about the voice.
But as the day goes on, a feeling builds up —that I’m being watched. In the evening I settle into my chair at the dinner table. With me are my parents, my grandparents, and some other family members.
As we’re eating, I suddenly see a strange man standing behind my grandmother. He has gray hair and a gray beard, and is wearing a brown robe. I assume he’s a family friend who’s come to join our meal. Instead of sitting down with us, though, he keeps standing behind my grandmother . . . and looking only at me.
When none of my family reacts to his presence, I slowly realize that I’m the only one who sees him.
I look away to see if he’ll disappear. When I look back, he’s still there staring at me. His mouth doesn’t move, but I can hear his voice by my right ear. It’s the same voice I heard when waking up.
This time he says, in a calming tone, “I am here for you.” I stop eating. “What’s wrong?” my mom asks. “You’re not hungry?” I don’t answer, just keep looking at the man, who lifts his right arm and waves for me to come over to my grandmother. Feeling an undeniable instinct to follow his instruction, I climb out of my chair and walk to Grandma.
He takes my hand and puts it on my grandmother’s chest while she’s eating. Grandma backs away with a start. “What are you doing?” she asks. The gray man looks at me. “Say ‘lung cancer.’” I’m at a loss. I don’t even know what lung cancer means. I try to say it, but it comes out as a mumble. “Do it again,” he tells me. “Lung.” “Lung,” I say. “Cancer.” “Cancer,” I say.
My entire family is staring at me now. I’m still focused on the gray man. “Now say, ‘Grandma has lung cancer.’” “Grandma has lung cancer,” I say. I hear a fork clatter on the table. The gray man pulls my hand from Grandma and gently places it at my side.
Then he turns and starts climbing steps that weren’t there before. He looks back at me and says, “You will hear from me all the time, but you may never see me again. Not to worry.” He continues climbing until he steps through the ceiling of my house—and now does disappear.
My grandmother stares at me. “Did you say what I thought you said?” There’s a panic at the table. What just happened doesn’t make sense for a number of reasons—starting with the fact that, as far as we know, Grandma is fine.
She hasn’t noticed any problems or seen any doctors. The next morning I wake up . . . and hear the voice again:
“I am the Spirit of the Most High. There is no spirit above me but God.” Just like the previous morning, I look around but don’t see anyone. From that day on the same thing happens every morning, without fail. Meanwhile, my grandmother is shaken by what I said to her.
Even though she feels fine, she makes an appointment for a general checkup.
A few weeks later she visits her doctor—and a chest X-ray reveals that she has lung cancer. THE VOICE As the mysterious visitor continues to greet me every morning, I start to pay attention to what he sounds like.
His crystal-clear voice is somewhere between baritone and tenor —a bit on the low side, but not very low. It has depth and resonance. Even though he’s near my right ear, his speech has the stereo effect of surround sound. It’s hard to gauge his age.
Sometimes he sounds like an exceptionally strong, healthy 80-year-old, matching the gray man I saw at dinner. At other times he sounds thousands of years old. You might say he has a soothing voice. Yet I can’t get used to his presence.
Other mediums sometimes hear inner voices, but mine isn’t internal. It’s a voice directly outside my right ear, as if someone were standing next to me. I can’t will it to go away. I can physically block it.
When I put my hand in front of my ear, I can make the voice sound very faint. As soon as I move my hand away, he’s at full volume again. I ask him to stop talking to me. At first I’m polite about it. Then I’m not. It doesn’t matter what I say, though. He talks whenever he wants to.
SPIRIT OF THE MOST HIGH
I start calling the voice by name, Spirit of the Most High. Sometimes I call him Spirit for short, or Most High. By age eight I hear Spirit continually throughout the day.
He tells me about the physical health of anyone I encounter. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I’m told about the aches, pains, and illnesses of whomever’s nearby, and also what the person needs to do to become better. The relentlessness of this ongoing and intimate information is extremely stressful. I ask Spirit to stop telling me these things I don’t want to know. He tells me that he’s trying to teach me as much as possible, and that we can’t spare a moment.
When I tell him it’s too demanding, he ignores me. I learn that I can engage in some conversation with him, though. When I’m old enough to pose some fundamental questions, I ask, “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? And why are you here?” Spirit replies, “First I will tell you what I am not. “I am not an angel.
And I am not a person. I was never a human being. I am not a ‘spirit guide,’ either. “I am a word.” I blink fast, trying to take this in. All I can think to ask is, “Which word?” Spirit replies, “Compassion.” I’m not sure how to respond. But I don’t need to. Spirit keeps talking. “I am literally the living essence of the word compassion. I sit at the fingertip of God.” “Spirit, I don’t understand. Are you God?” “No,” the voice replies. “At the fingertip of God sits a word, and that word is compassion. I am that word. A living word.
The closest word to God.” I shake my head. “How can you be just a word?” “A word is an energy source. Certain words hold great power. God pours light into words such as I and instills us with the breath of life. I am more than a word.” “Is there anyone else like you?” I ask. “Yes: Faith. Hope. Joy. Peace. And more.
They are all living words, but I sit above all of them, because I am the closest to God.” “Do these words speak to people, too?” “Not as I do to you. These words are not heard by the ear. They live in each person’s heart and soul. As do I. Words such as joy and peace do not stand alone in the heart. They require compassion to be complete.” “Why can’t peace be enough by itself?” I ask.
Many times since Spirit entered my life, I’ve wished for peace and quiet. “Compassion is the understanding of suffering,” Spirit replies. “There is no peace, joy, or hope until those who suffer are understood. Compassion is the soul of these words; without it, they are empty. Compassion fills them with truth, honor, and purpose. “I am compassion. And no other sits above me but God.” Trying to make sense of this, I ask, “Then what is God?” “God is a word. God is love, which is above all other words.
God is also more than a word. Because God loves all. God is the most powerful source of existence. “People can love. But people do not love all others unconditionally. God does.” It’s too much for me to process. I end the conversation with one personal question: “Do you talk to anyone else?” Because if you do, I’m thinking, I’m going to seek them out so I don’t have to feel so alone. “The angels and other beings look to me for guidance. I provide all who care to listen with the lessons and wisdom of God,” Spirit says. “But on earth, I speak directly only to you.”
ME AND MY SHADOW
As you might imagine, this is a lot to absorb at age eight. There are other mediums who’ve had shocking things happen at a young age. None of their experiences quite match mine. Being able to hear a spirit voice clearly at all times, and freely engage in conversation with it, is extraordinary even among mediums.
Even more unusual is for that voice to speak outside my ear, so that it’s an independent source separate from my thoughts. It’s essentially having someone follow me around everywhere— someone who keeps telling me things I really don’t want to hear about the health of everyone around me. The upside is, I receive health information that’s incredibly accurate—much more so than any other medium alive. Plus I’m regularly informed about my own health, which is a great rarity.
Even the most famous mediums in history normally couldn’t read their own conditions. I’m also given insights into health that are decades ahead of what’s known by medical communities. A major downside is that I have no privacy. When I’m eight years old, I spend a week building a dam in a stream by my house. Spirit tells me it’s a bad idea, that it will flood the neighbor’s lawn. “It’ll be fine,” I say. Then a downpour comes, the stream rises—and it floods the neighbor’s lawn. As the man from the house yells at me, I hear in my ear, “I told you. You didn’t listen to me.” Of course, that just makes the situation worse. Spirit is constantly watching my every move, and telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.
It makes having any kind of normal childhood nearly impossible. That same year I build the dam, I know in great detail about the physical and emotional health of my best friend, the little girl I have a crush on, and even my teacher—who’s struggling through an awful relationship with her boyfriend. I can read every bit of it, and it’s agonizing. Not one to offer empty comfort, Spirit tells me to expect worse. “Your biggest challenges are yet to come.” “What do you mean?”
I ask. “Only one or two people per century are given this gift,” he says. “It is not a typical intuitive or psychic ability. It is something that most fail to survive. You will find it almost unbearable not to be able to live like a normal person, never mind a normal teenager. “Eventually you will see almost nothing but the suffering of others. You will somehow have to find a way of becoming comfortable with that.
Otherwise, the chances are you will end your life.”
READING BODIES
Spirit becomes both my best friend and my albatross. I appreciate that he’s training me for a job the higher powers have chosen for me. Still, the stress he puts me under is extraordinary. One day he tells me to go to a large, beautiful cemetery near my home. “I want you to stand over that grave,” he says, “and figure out how the person died.” That’s quite a request to make of an eight-year-old. At this point, though, I’ve been so bombarded with the health information of both friends and strangers that I try to view this as just one more case.
And with Spirit’s help, I’m able to do what he asks. This adds another dimension to the gift: not only does Spirit verbally inform me of what’s wrong with someone’s health, he also helps me visualize physical scans of the person’s body. I spend years in different cemeteries performing this exercise with hundreds of corpses.
I become so good at it that I can almost instantly sense if someone’s died of heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, car accident, suicide, or murder. Along with this, Spirit teaches me to look very deeply into the bodies of the living. He promises that once this training is concluded, I’ll be able to scan and read anyone with extreme accuracy.
Whenever I get tired or want to do something more fun, Spirit tells me, “Someday you’ll be performing scans on people that will mean the difference between life and death. You will be able to tell if a person’s lungs are about to collapse, or an artery is about to clot and shut down someone’s heart.” Once, I reply, “Who cares? Why does it matter? Why should I care?” “You must care,” Spirit responds. “What all of us do here on earth matters. The good works you perform matter to your soul. You must take this responsibility seriously.”
SELF-HEALING
At age nine, while other boys are riding bikes and playing baseball, I’m constantly witnessing disease in the people around me and listening to Spirit tell me what’s needed for them to get better. I’m learning what adults do wrong for their health and exactly what actions they should take to heal . . . but seldom do. At this point I’m so filled with health-related knowledge and training that it’s hard not to start applying it. One opportunity arises when I get sick myself. Eating out with my family one evening, I ignore Spirit’s usual dietary recommendations and eat a dish that gives me food poisoning. For two weeks, I lie in bed unable to keep anything down.
My parents take me to the doctor’s office and even the ER one night when it gets really bad, but the fever and the pain in my gut don’t stop. Finally Spirit cuts through my delirium and tells me it’s E. coli. He gives me a direct order to go to my great-grandfather’s house and pick a box of heirloom pears from his tree. Spirit says I’m to eat nothing but these ripe pears, and I’ll heal. I do as he says and recover rapidly.
FIRE HIM, GOD
At age ten, I try to go over Spirit’s head and deal directly with his boss. I figure I can’t tell God what I want through prayer because Spirit will hear me.
So I climb some of the highest trees I can find to get as close to God as possible and carve messages in their trunks. One of the first messages is, “God, I love Spirit, but it’s time we cut out the middle man.” This is followed by some frank questions: “God, why do people have to be sick?” “God, why can’t you fix everybody?” “God, why do I have to help people?” While these seem to me very reasonable things to ask, I receive no answers. So I find some even more dangerously tall trees, and I climb to the highest branches in hopes that my recklessness will get God’s attention.
This time I carve requests for direct action: “God, please give me back silence.” “God, I don’t want to hear Spirit anymore. Make him go away.” As I carve in the words, “God, let me be free,” I lose my foothold and almost slip off the branch. Not that kind of free! I think. I inch my way back down to safety, defeated. None of these messages makes any difference. Spirit just keeps talking to me. If he’s aware of my attempts to subvert his authority, he’s gracious enough not to mention it. There’s more important work at hand.
FIRST CLIENTS
At age 11, I want to do something productive and fun that’ll take my mind off the voice by my ear, so I get a job carrying clubs at a golf course. My gift is not so easily abandoned, though. While caddying, I can’t help telling golfers about their conditions. I often know about their stiff joints, bad knees, sore hips, hurt ankles, tendonitis, and more before they do.
So I say, “Your swing’s a little off, but that’s not surprising considering your carpal tunnel situation,” or “You’d do better if you dealt with your inflamed left hip.” They look at me with amazement and ask, “How did you know that?” Then they request advice on how to get better, and I tell them what to eat, what changes to make to their behavior, therapies to try, and so on.
After caddying for several years, I crave a change. I decide that if I’m going to recommend food and supplements for healing, I might as well work in a place that sells them. So I get a job as stock boy in a local supermarket. My clients come by whenever they like, and I take time out of replenishing shelves to help them. The owner of the supermarket doesn’t mind that my work for him is periodically interrupted, because I’m bringing in new customers.
Besides, he’s a client, too. It’s a little odd to conduct health consultations in a supermarket aisle. It’s also difficult, because supplements are barely available yet and the variety of food is limited. Spirit keeps explaining that in a couple of decades, stores will supply many more options for people’s health. In the meantime, he helps me get creative with healing plans —and I love being able to walk a client to exactly what she needs to buy to get better.
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT GUILT
At age 14, I sometimes sit in a bus or a train, pick up on some health issue with the guy in front of me, and tap him on the shoulder to tell him about it. At times the response is gratitude. Other times the reaction is to accuse me of invading his privacy, stealing his medical records, or worse. That’s a lot of distrust and hostility to deal with—especially for a boy going through puberty.
As I grow older, I learn to be careful about who I try to help unasked. If I see someone regularly, I still feel impelled to share what I know. So I develop the habit of first reading her emotional state to determine whether she’s approachable. That cuts down on the number of uncomfortable situations. If someone is a stranger, I’ll usually keep whatever I’m seeing to myself.
This becomes a burden, though. When I’m a teen, I start feeling even more accountable for my actions. So if someone is in danger of kidney disease, or has cancer, and I do nothing, part of me feels it’s my fault if the person ends up seriously ill or dead. When this is multiplied hundreds of times a day, the sense of guilt and responsibility becomes overwhelming.
ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
As my teenage years continue, life becomes more difficult. For instance, most people watch television to relax and escape. But when I watch, I get a health reading on everyone on the screen. I automatically scan the condition of every person I see who needs help, whether they know they have a condition or not. When that happens over and over, TV is draining, not fun. It’s even worse when I go to a movie theater. I’m uncontrollably reading the health of every person in my row, the row in front of me, the row in back of me, and so on.
And that’s not the end of it. I read the health of the people in the movie. I’m able to determine the condition of each actor during the time the film was shot, as well as the health of the actor in the present moment. Imagine what it’s like to be on a movie date and get bombarded by medical information about the people around you and up on the big screen. Considering the last thing most teens want is to feel different from everyone else, this period is especially rocky.
My feelings of alienation and being overwhelmed by responsibility lead to some rebellious teen impulses. I pursue various ways to escape my “gift.” I start spending a lot of time in the woods. I find nature soothing, and especially appreciate the absence of other people. With the help of Spirit, I learn to identify different species of birds during the day.
At night he teaches me the names of stars—both what scientists call them and the names God has given them. It’s not fully an escape, though, because Spirit also teaches me how to recognize herbs and foods growing around me—red clover, plantain, dandelion, burdock root, wild rose hips and petals, wild apples, wild berries—and how to use them for healing. I also develop an interest in repairing cars. I like fixing up mechanical objects because they don’t require me to become emotionally involved.
Even if I fail to repair a junker Chevy with a bad engine, I never feel remotely as awful as I do when I can’t help people because they’re in too advanced a stage of disease to be healed. But this hobby doesn’t go as planned, either. People start noticing what I’m doing and coming over: “Wow, that’s amazing! Can you fix my car?”
I don’t have it in me to say no—especially since Spirit is doing the hardest part, which is figuring out what’s wrong. One day when I’m 15, my mother and I stop at a station to get gasoline. I walk into the garage and find a bunch of mechanics staring at a car as if they’re trying to solve a puzzle. “What’s going on?” I ask.
One of the men says, “We’ve worked on this car for weeks. It should run perfectly. But we can’t get it to start.” Spirit immediately tells me the solution. “Open up the wire harness in the back of the firewall,” I pass along to the mechanics. “Buried in dozens of other wires you’ll find a white one that’s broken. Put that wire together and the car will run fine.”
“That’s ridiculous!” says another of the men. “What’s the harm in checking?” asks the first one. So they go in— and sure enough, there’s a white wire broken in half. They look at me with their jaws hanging open. “Are you the owner of this car?” asks the skeptical mechanic. “Or are you a friend of his?” “No,” I reply. “I just have a knack for these things.” In a minute they fix the wire and try the car again.
It starts up perfectly. One of the mechanics starts dancing around. Another calls it “a miracle.” Word gets around, and soon a bunch of garages in my town, and also several neighboring towns, use me as the go-to guy for troubleshooting seemingly unfixable vehicles. When I show up to assist on a job, the mechanics who called me—much older guys with years of experience—are always incredulous. “What’s this 15-yearold doing here?” they all ask. When I get the job done, though, they change their minds. So instead of escaping responsibility, I gain more.
On top of healing people, I become a car doctor. The last straw is when I realize how emotional people are about their cars. A lot of times, they’re even more invested in their cars’ well-being than in their own health. At that point cars stop being fun for me. I try some other rebellious activities. For example, I join a rock band, because loud music helps drown out Spirit’s voice.
Spirit does not appreciate this. He patiently waits until I’m finished making a racket, then resumes his commentary on the health of those around me. Nothing really works to make my gift go away. It becomes increasingly clear that I’m stuck with Spirit and my ability—and can’t escape the path that’s been laid out for me.
STARTING TO COMMIT
By the time I’m a young man, thanks to my training with Spirit, I’ve indirectly read and scanned thousands of people and helped hundreds along the way. One day I think, Okay, this is the hand I’ve been dealt. I have a special purpose. I just have to accept it—for now. I also think, This can’t possibly go on forever. At some point I’ll have fulfilled my responsibilities and will be set free to live a normal life. Spirit has never said any such thing to me, yet I need to believe it to keep going.
In my early 20s, I begin doing in earnest what Spirit has repeatedly told me is my destiny. I open my door to sick people who come for help, discover the true root causes of their illnesses, and tell them what they need to do to become healthy.
And despite my griping about the various stresses I’ve endured, it’s fulfilling work. It feels good to help people. In fact, sometimes what I can do is so empowering that I let the feeling of being all-knowing go to my head. A good example is the time my neighbor approaches me about his wife, who can’t walk or use her legs. She’s been to dozens of doctors, and none of them have helped.
My neighbor tells her, “Look, Anthony seems to know a lot about this stuff. Let’s take a chance.” Under my care, within a year she’s able to walk again. I’m in my garden pulling up some onions when my neighbor comes around. “I just want to thank you again, Anthony,” he says. “We went all over the country to meet top experts, and they couldn’t do a thing. It doesn’t make any sense—somehow you knew exactly what was wrong and what she needed.
I don’t know how it’s possible. You’re not even a doctor.” I look at him with onions in my hand and say, “It’s because I’m always right. I can fix any problem because there’s nothing I’m wrong about. Just remember that—I’m always right and will always be right.” Then I turn around, walk a few feet, and step on a rake that slaps me in the face so hard it knocks me out.
As I lie on the ground, my concerned neighbor rushes to my side and stands over me. In my dazed state I think he’s my constant companion. “Spirit?” I ask. Spirit of the Most High replies, “I’m always right. You’re always wrong. Remember that. I’m always right. You’re always wrong.” Whenever I get cocky, I think of that moment. It’s a reminder that while some of the things I do as a healer with the help of Spirit might be considered miraculous, I’m still a regular guy who can make lots of poor decisions when flying solo.
THE TURNING POINT
When I’m a young adult, Spirit assumes I’ve passed the crisis point that led others with my gift over the centuries to end their lives. He assumes I’ve accepted that using my abilities to heal people is what I’ll do for the rest of my life. Which goes to show that even Spirit of the Most High can’t predict everything when it comes to free will.
THE DOG STORY
One day in late fall, I’m at a retreat by the water with no one but my girlfriend—who’ll eventually become my wife—and my dog, August (short for Augustine). I’ve had August for a year and am very close to her. She replaced my family dog, who was with me for 15 years. Just like that dog, August is essential to my sanity. We’re sitting by a large, deep bay.
The water is icy cold, and the current is strong. It’s our last day. With great reluctance, we start getting ready to leave the peaceful isolation of this place. Suddenly, with no warning, my dog jumps into the bay. I sense she picked up on my feelings. This is her way of saying, “We don’t have to go. Let’s stay here and keep playing.” Unfortunately, both the cold and the current take hold of her. She immediately starts slipping from us. We stand on the shore, screaming at August to come back. I throw stones into the water to try to lead my dog back to me.
This is our special signal—whenever I splash stones in the shallows, she returns to shore. But today, the current pulls her farther and farther away. August goes 50 feet out. I see her struggling to get back and losing the battle. Then the cold freezes her so thoroughly that she stops paddling . . . and goes straight down.
I toss off my jacket, boots, and pants, and jump into the freezing water. I’ve swum 15 feet out when Spirit of the Most High says, “If you keep going, you are not going to make it.” “It doesn’t matter!” I yell. “I’m not abandoning August. I have to save my dog.” I swim another 15 feet—and then the merciless cold takes over. My body goes numb. Spirit says, “You’ve done it now. You cannot turn back, and you cannot go forward. This is it.” “Really? You rob me of a normal, peaceful life, I dedicate my whole being to your work of healing, and this is all I get from you? You say, ‘This is it,’ and leave us to die?”
All the angst and anger I’ve suppressed since I was four years old comes pouring out. I let Spirit have it about my years of pent-up frustration over this continual torture I’ve always had to accept as a “gift”: being set apart from everyone else, knowing too much about everyone at way too early an age, and being told what I had to do with my life instead of given even the slightest choice.
I tell Spirit, “I put up with a lot—sacrificing my childhood, experiencing everybody’s pain and suffering, taking responsibility for healing thousands of strangers, and draining myself physically and mentally every day. And now you’re telling me I can’t even protect my own family? “No, dammit!” I shout as the freezing waves threaten to engulf me. “If this is how you want me to end, Spirit, so be it. I’m getting my dog back, or I’m going down with her.”
A very long second passes. Numb and exhausted, I realize that I may have finally pushed things too far. A few more moments without help, and I’ll be following my dog August into the depths below. I turn my head toward the shore to get one last glimpse of the girl I planned to spend the rest of my life with. Spirit says, “You need to swim out twenty more feet.” In shock, I shout, “How?” To my great surprise, I feel renewed strength. I resume swimming. In my mind, I continue to yell at Spirit that I deserve to survive this with my dog.
Otherwise we should both die. Spirit says, “I will get you to your dog. In return, you must commit to me. We go through this life the way we’re supposed to. You accept that it is by the holy power of God you are destined to do this work for the rest of your life.” “Okay!” I shout. “Deal. Let me find August, and I’ll work for you with no complaints ever again.” I swim the additional 20 feet. Spirit says, “Hold your breath and go eight feet down, then open your eyes.” As I hold my breath, a surge of power courses through my body.
All of a sudden I can feel my legs again. I swim what feels like eight feet down, open my eyes—and see an angel. I’ve never encountered an angel before. I’m seeing what looks like a woman who has no trouble breathing underwater, with a glorious source of light behind her, light radiating from her eyes, and huge, beautiful wings of light growing out of her back. There’s no question she’s a divine being. And in her arms is August, surrounded by a beautiful, peaceful light.
For a moment, it feels like time stands still. My vision is surprisingly clear underwater, and I have no fear or trouble holding my breath. I grab my dog by her collar. Then something pushes me upward with her. We both reach the surface of the water. The bay is still icy cold, and the current is still trying to violently pull us away from land and life. The wind is blowing strong. When I open my eyes again, I see Spirit for a moment standing right above the water. It’s the only time I’ve seen Spirit since the first day he appeared to me at age four. “We don’t have much time,” he says. “The angel is leaving.” Just as I register once again that all could have been lost, another surge of power charges through my body.
As I start swimming back through the frigid waters—holding onto August, who seems lifeless— it feels almost as if I’m being pulled across the 50 feet to safety. My dog and I soon make it back to shore—and to my girlfriend, who is crying with relief. As I drag myself and my dog up to the rocky sand, I cry in agony— not because I’m feeling the initial stages of hypothermia, but because I’m afraid my dog is gone. All I can think is, Let her still be alive. She opens her eyes, gasps for air, and comes to life. The sun appears from behind the clouds, and a streak of light races across the water and shines on my dog August. I look at the light and say, “Spirit, thank you.”
And I realize: this is the first time since Spirit entered my life that I’ve ever thanked him for anything. The battles I’ve waged with Spirit of the Most High since I was four years old have to end. It’s time for me to acknowledge the cards I’ve been dealt. Even before this point, people in need have been coming to me in droves. With this pledge, I wholly dedicate myself to helping them, without qualification and for the rest of my life. I don’t have to pretend the abilities I’ve been granted are a problem-free blessing. Yet I stop complaining and finally accept who I am. That’s when I truly assume my role as the Medical Medium.
THE PROCESS
Once I commit to my calling, I develop a routine for fulfilling it as efficiently as possible. I don’t need to be in the same room with a person to perform a reading, so I arrange to speak with clients by phone. This allows me to help anyone in the world, regardless of location, and it minimizes the transition time between clients. I’ve helped tens of thousands of clients this way. When I perform a scan, Spirit creates a very bright white light that lets me see into the client. While that’s critical for obtaining what I need as the Medical Medium, the intensity of the light creates a kind of “snow blindness” that impairs my vision in the real world, and it accumulates as the day goes on.
When I’m finished working, it takes 30 to 60 minutes for my sight to return to normal. (As a side note, I bring my assistant with me whenever I go somewhere that will have a lot of people and voices, because I’ll usually lose a substantial portion of my sight due to “automatic” readings. For example, whenever I have to fly somewhere, I end up inadvertently reading everyone on my plane.
By the time we land I’m completely blind, so I need my assistant to lead me around until the effect wears off.) A deep and comprehensive reading of a client’s condition takes only about three minutes. However, I have to spend 10 to 30 minutes explaining what I’ve discovered and my advice for healing, especially for new clients. Sometimes I need to spend time bolstering or “reconstructing” a client. That’s because I deal with more than just people’s physical illnesses.
SOUL, HEART, AND SPIRIT
When I perform a reading, I go beyond a person’s physical health. I also examine the client’s soul, heart, and spirit. These are three entirely different components of one’s being that always get grouped together. The first component is the soul. This is the consciousness of a person, or what some call “the ghost in the machine.” Your soul resides in your brain, where your soul stores your memories and experiences.
When you pass from this mortal realm, your soul carries those memories as it moves onward. Even if someone has a brain injury or brain disease that keeps him or her from remembering certain things, the soul will bring all the memories with it when that person passes on. Your soul also stores your hope and your faith, both of which help keep you on the right path. Ideally, you should have a fully intact soul.
Over the course of life’s hardships, though, a soul can become fractured and even lose pieces of itself. This is caused by traumatic events, such as the death of a loved one, betrayal by a loved one, or betrayal of oneself. When I scan a client, fractures in her or his soul resemble cracks in a cathedral window. I can tell where the fractures are, because that’s where the light comes streaming through. As for a soul with missing pieces, it’s like a house at night that’s meant to have all of its lights on . . . except some of its rooms are stuck in the dark. This soul damage can result in a loss of energy, or even loss of life force. That’s why it’s important to be aware of it. Sometimes a client’s problem isn’t physical—rather, it’s an affliction of the soul.
A person with soul damage is vulnerable. If you ever hear a friend say, “I’m not ready for another relationship, I’m still hurting from my breakup,” she’s acknowledging that she has soul damage, and that her soul needs time to heal before she risks putting herself out there again. Along the same lines, if you ever observe someone hungrily pursuing spiritual learning in any form—religion, spiritual gurus, selfhelp books, meditation retreats—it may be because that person’s soul has been damaged, and she or he is instinctively searching for ways to make it healthy and complete again. That’s a critical job for each of us—when your time here ends, your soul should be sufficiently intact to survive its journey beyond the stars, where God will receive it.
The second component of one’s being is the physical heart. This is where your love, compassion, and joy reside. Having a healthy soul doesn’t necessarily make you a whole person. You can have an unblemished soul and a broken, injured heart. Your heart serves as the compass for your actions, guiding you to do the right thing when your soul becomes lost. Also, your heart is a kind of safety net that can compensate for soul damage. When your soul suffers fractures and losses, a strong heart will get you through until your soul has managed to heal.
Your heart keeps a record of your good intentions, too. This means you can have a battered soul and a warm, loving heart. In fact, it’s common for someone’s heart to grow larger as a result of the roller-coaster ride her or his soul has gone through. Great losses can lead to deeper understanding . . . and greater love and compassion.
The third key component I look at when I scan a client is that person’s spirit—which in this context refers to someone’s will and physical strength. Your spirit is not your soul. They are two separate parts of you. It’s your spirit that enables you to climb, run, and fight. Even if your soul’s been battered and your heart is faint, your spirit can keep you physically going while you look for opportunities to heal.
For example, sometimes I’ll tell a very ill client to start walking, go out to watch birds, and look at sunsets. That helps the client regain her or his spirit, and that can be the start to rebuilding the heart and soul. Every human being is different, with individual experiences, feelings, and soul states. To be a compassionate healer, you have to adapt to each unique condition and personality to alleviate that person’s pain and suffering. Spirit tells me this compassion is the most important element in healing.
THE ONE AND ONLY MEDICAL MEDIUM
While there are obvious disadvantages to having a voice continually talking into my ear, there are also huge advantages. Because Spirit is distinct and separate from me, it doesn’t matter if on a given day I’m feeling upset or ill or bored. Spirit is unaffected by my emotions and will consistently provide an accurate reading of each client’s health. I’m not an intuitive who needs to get into a certain headspace or has good days and bad days performing my job.
Some clients ask me, “Should I take off my jewelry to allow you to get you a better read?” It doesn’t matter if they’re wrapped in tinfoil; I’m going to be able to get the answers they need and find out what’s wrong. Another way I’m different from most mediums is that I have no problem getting information about the health of my family and friends, or about my own health. Again, because Spirit is separate from me, all I have to do is ask, and he tells me what I want to know. This is one of the things that makes me unique.
One day a skeptical reporter demands I diagnose her on the spot: “I want you to tell me where it hurts. Does it hurt in my toe? My leg? My stomach? Does it hurt in my arm? My butt? Do I even hurt at all? Let’s see what your voice says.” Spirit immediately tells me, “She does hurt. She hurts on the left side of her head. Chronic migraines torment her.” I reach over, touch the left side of her head, and say, “Spirit tells me you hurt here.” She starts crying. That’s the caliber of instant accuracy Spirit provides.
If I get a call at 2 A.M. from a client whose daughter is about to go into emergency surgery and the client wants to know if it’s the right choice, I have to be able to tell the doctor in one minute if that little girl merely has a bad case of food poisoning, or if her appendix is about to explode. I have to be able to tell whether someone’s recovering or is bleeding internally, if a child’s fever is due to the flu or meningitis, if someone is suffering from heat sickness or is about to have a stroke. Spirit delivers this information every time.
Padre Pio and Edgar Cayce, those famous mystical healers of the 20th century,
were the only two mediums in recent history who accessed the level of compassion that Spirit demands of me. Their work as compassionate healers was in some ways similar to mine. However, our strengths and gifts are unique to each of us. No other medium does what I do. No one else alive has a spirit voice providing profound on-target health information with crystal clarity. I’ve devoted my life to this work. It’s who I am. And it’s the gift I will use to provide you with the medical information in the chapters that follow.
I’m confused and alarmed. Is someone else in my room? I open my eyes and look around, but don’t see anybody.
Maybe someone’s talking or playing a radio outside, I think. I get up and walk to the window.
There are no people—it’s too early in the morning. I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m not sure I want to.
I run downstairs to be with my parents and feel safe. I don’t say anything about the voice.
But as the day goes on, a feeling builds up —that I’m being watched. In the evening I settle into my chair at the dinner table. With me are my parents, my grandparents, and some other family members.
As we’re eating, I suddenly see a strange man standing behind my grandmother. He has gray hair and a gray beard, and is wearing a brown robe. I assume he’s a family friend who’s come to join our meal. Instead of sitting down with us, though, he keeps standing behind my grandmother . . . and looking only at me.
When none of my family reacts to his presence, I slowly realize that I’m the only one who sees him.
I look away to see if he’ll disappear. When I look back, he’s still there staring at me. His mouth doesn’t move, but I can hear his voice by my right ear. It’s the same voice I heard when waking up.
This time he says, in a calming tone, “I am here for you.” I stop eating. “What’s wrong?” my mom asks. “You’re not hungry?” I don’t answer, just keep looking at the man, who lifts his right arm and waves for me to come over to my grandmother. Feeling an undeniable instinct to follow his instruction, I climb out of my chair and walk to Grandma.
He takes my hand and puts it on my grandmother’s chest while she’s eating. Grandma backs away with a start. “What are you doing?” she asks. The gray man looks at me. “Say ‘lung cancer.’” I’m at a loss. I don’t even know what lung cancer means. I try to say it, but it comes out as a mumble. “Do it again,” he tells me. “Lung.” “Lung,” I say. “Cancer.” “Cancer,” I say.
My entire family is staring at me now. I’m still focused on the gray man. “Now say, ‘Grandma has lung cancer.’” “Grandma has lung cancer,” I say. I hear a fork clatter on the table. The gray man pulls my hand from Grandma and gently places it at my side.
Then he turns and starts climbing steps that weren’t there before. He looks back at me and says, “You will hear from me all the time, but you may never see me again. Not to worry.” He continues climbing until he steps through the ceiling of my house—and now does disappear.
My grandmother stares at me. “Did you say what I thought you said?” There’s a panic at the table. What just happened doesn’t make sense for a number of reasons—starting with the fact that, as far as we know, Grandma is fine.
She hasn’t noticed any problems or seen any doctors. The next morning I wake up . . . and hear the voice again:
“I am the Spirit of the Most High. There is no spirit above me but God.” Just like the previous morning, I look around but don’t see anyone. From that day on the same thing happens every morning, without fail. Meanwhile, my grandmother is shaken by what I said to her.
Even though she feels fine, she makes an appointment for a general checkup.
A few weeks later she visits her doctor—and a chest X-ray reveals that she has lung cancer. THE VOICE As the mysterious visitor continues to greet me every morning, I start to pay attention to what he sounds like.
His crystal-clear voice is somewhere between baritone and tenor —a bit on the low side, but not very low. It has depth and resonance. Even though he’s near my right ear, his speech has the stereo effect of surround sound. It’s hard to gauge his age.
Sometimes he sounds like an exceptionally strong, healthy 80-year-old, matching the gray man I saw at dinner. At other times he sounds thousands of years old. You might say he has a soothing voice. Yet I can’t get used to his presence.
Other mediums sometimes hear inner voices, but mine isn’t internal. It’s a voice directly outside my right ear, as if someone were standing next to me. I can’t will it to go away. I can physically block it.
When I put my hand in front of my ear, I can make the voice sound very faint. As soon as I move my hand away, he’s at full volume again. I ask him to stop talking to me. At first I’m polite about it. Then I’m not. It doesn’t matter what I say, though. He talks whenever he wants to.
SPIRIT OF THE MOST HIGH
I start calling the voice by name, Spirit of the Most High. Sometimes I call him Spirit for short, or Most High. By age eight I hear Spirit continually throughout the day.
He tells me about the physical health of anyone I encounter. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I’m told about the aches, pains, and illnesses of whomever’s nearby, and also what the person needs to do to become better. The relentlessness of this ongoing and intimate information is extremely stressful. I ask Spirit to stop telling me these things I don’t want to know. He tells me that he’s trying to teach me as much as possible, and that we can’t spare a moment.
When I tell him it’s too demanding, he ignores me. I learn that I can engage in some conversation with him, though. When I’m old enough to pose some fundamental questions, I ask, “Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? And why are you here?” Spirit replies, “First I will tell you what I am not. “I am not an angel.
And I am not a person. I was never a human being. I am not a ‘spirit guide,’ either. “I am a word.” I blink fast, trying to take this in. All I can think to ask is, “Which word?” Spirit replies, “Compassion.” I’m not sure how to respond. But I don’t need to. Spirit keeps talking. “I am literally the living essence of the word compassion. I sit at the fingertip of God.” “Spirit, I don’t understand. Are you God?” “No,” the voice replies. “At the fingertip of God sits a word, and that word is compassion. I am that word. A living word.
The closest word to God.” I shake my head. “How can you be just a word?” “A word is an energy source. Certain words hold great power. God pours light into words such as I and instills us with the breath of life. I am more than a word.” “Is there anyone else like you?” I ask. “Yes: Faith. Hope. Joy. Peace. And more.
They are all living words, but I sit above all of them, because I am the closest to God.” “Do these words speak to people, too?” “Not as I do to you. These words are not heard by the ear. They live in each person’s heart and soul. As do I. Words such as joy and peace do not stand alone in the heart. They require compassion to be complete.” “Why can’t peace be enough by itself?” I ask.
Many times since Spirit entered my life, I’ve wished for peace and quiet. “Compassion is the understanding of suffering,” Spirit replies. “There is no peace, joy, or hope until those who suffer are understood. Compassion is the soul of these words; without it, they are empty. Compassion fills them with truth, honor, and purpose. “I am compassion. And no other sits above me but God.” Trying to make sense of this, I ask, “Then what is God?” “God is a word. God is love, which is above all other words.
God is also more than a word. Because God loves all. God is the most powerful source of existence. “People can love. But people do not love all others unconditionally. God does.” It’s too much for me to process. I end the conversation with one personal question: “Do you talk to anyone else?” Because if you do, I’m thinking, I’m going to seek them out so I don’t have to feel so alone. “The angels and other beings look to me for guidance. I provide all who care to listen with the lessons and wisdom of God,” Spirit says. “But on earth, I speak directly only to you.”
ME AND MY SHADOW
As you might imagine, this is a lot to absorb at age eight. There are other mediums who’ve had shocking things happen at a young age. None of their experiences quite match mine. Being able to hear a spirit voice clearly at all times, and freely engage in conversation with it, is extraordinary even among mediums.
Even more unusual is for that voice to speak outside my ear, so that it’s an independent source separate from my thoughts. It’s essentially having someone follow me around everywhere— someone who keeps telling me things I really don’t want to hear about the health of everyone around me. The upside is, I receive health information that’s incredibly accurate—much more so than any other medium alive. Plus I’m regularly informed about my own health, which is a great rarity.
Even the most famous mediums in history normally couldn’t read their own conditions. I’m also given insights into health that are decades ahead of what’s known by medical communities. A major downside is that I have no privacy. When I’m eight years old, I spend a week building a dam in a stream by my house. Spirit tells me it’s a bad idea, that it will flood the neighbor’s lawn. “It’ll be fine,” I say. Then a downpour comes, the stream rises—and it floods the neighbor’s lawn. As the man from the house yells at me, I hear in my ear, “I told you. You didn’t listen to me.” Of course, that just makes the situation worse. Spirit is constantly watching my every move, and telling me what I should and shouldn’t do.
It makes having any kind of normal childhood nearly impossible. That same year I build the dam, I know in great detail about the physical and emotional health of my best friend, the little girl I have a crush on, and even my teacher—who’s struggling through an awful relationship with her boyfriend. I can read every bit of it, and it’s agonizing. Not one to offer empty comfort, Spirit tells me to expect worse. “Your biggest challenges are yet to come.” “What do you mean?”
I ask. “Only one or two people per century are given this gift,” he says. “It is not a typical intuitive or psychic ability. It is something that most fail to survive. You will find it almost unbearable not to be able to live like a normal person, never mind a normal teenager. “Eventually you will see almost nothing but the suffering of others. You will somehow have to find a way of becoming comfortable with that.
Otherwise, the chances are you will end your life.”
READING BODIES
Spirit becomes both my best friend and my albatross. I appreciate that he’s training me for a job the higher powers have chosen for me. Still, the stress he puts me under is extraordinary. One day he tells me to go to a large, beautiful cemetery near my home. “I want you to stand over that grave,” he says, “and figure out how the person died.” That’s quite a request to make of an eight-year-old. At this point, though, I’ve been so bombarded with the health information of both friends and strangers that I try to view this as just one more case.
And with Spirit’s help, I’m able to do what he asks. This adds another dimension to the gift: not only does Spirit verbally inform me of what’s wrong with someone’s health, he also helps me visualize physical scans of the person’s body. I spend years in different cemeteries performing this exercise with hundreds of corpses.
I become so good at it that I can almost instantly sense if someone’s died of heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver disease, car accident, suicide, or murder. Along with this, Spirit teaches me to look very deeply into the bodies of the living. He promises that once this training is concluded, I’ll be able to scan and read anyone with extreme accuracy.
Whenever I get tired or want to do something more fun, Spirit tells me, “Someday you’ll be performing scans on people that will mean the difference between life and death. You will be able to tell if a person’s lungs are about to collapse, or an artery is about to clot and shut down someone’s heart.” Once, I reply, “Who cares? Why does it matter? Why should I care?” “You must care,” Spirit responds. “What all of us do here on earth matters. The good works you perform matter to your soul. You must take this responsibility seriously.”
SELF-HEALING
At age nine, while other boys are riding bikes and playing baseball, I’m constantly witnessing disease in the people around me and listening to Spirit tell me what’s needed for them to get better. I’m learning what adults do wrong for their health and exactly what actions they should take to heal . . . but seldom do. At this point I’m so filled with health-related knowledge and training that it’s hard not to start applying it. One opportunity arises when I get sick myself. Eating out with my family one evening, I ignore Spirit’s usual dietary recommendations and eat a dish that gives me food poisoning. For two weeks, I lie in bed unable to keep anything down.
My parents take me to the doctor’s office and even the ER one night when it gets really bad, but the fever and the pain in my gut don’t stop. Finally Spirit cuts through my delirium and tells me it’s E. coli. He gives me a direct order to go to my great-grandfather’s house and pick a box of heirloom pears from his tree. Spirit says I’m to eat nothing but these ripe pears, and I’ll heal. I do as he says and recover rapidly.
FIRE HIM, GOD
At age ten, I try to go over Spirit’s head and deal directly with his boss. I figure I can’t tell God what I want through prayer because Spirit will hear me.
So I climb some of the highest trees I can find to get as close to God as possible and carve messages in their trunks. One of the first messages is, “God, I love Spirit, but it’s time we cut out the middle man.” This is followed by some frank questions: “God, why do people have to be sick?” “God, why can’t you fix everybody?” “God, why do I have to help people?” While these seem to me very reasonable things to ask, I receive no answers. So I find some even more dangerously tall trees, and I climb to the highest branches in hopes that my recklessness will get God’s attention.
This time I carve requests for direct action: “God, please give me back silence.” “God, I don’t want to hear Spirit anymore. Make him go away.” As I carve in the words, “God, let me be free,” I lose my foothold and almost slip off the branch. Not that kind of free! I think. I inch my way back down to safety, defeated. None of these messages makes any difference. Spirit just keeps talking to me. If he’s aware of my attempts to subvert his authority, he’s gracious enough not to mention it. There’s more important work at hand.
FIRST CLIENTS
At age 11, I want to do something productive and fun that’ll take my mind off the voice by my ear, so I get a job carrying clubs at a golf course. My gift is not so easily abandoned, though. While caddying, I can’t help telling golfers about their conditions. I often know about their stiff joints, bad knees, sore hips, hurt ankles, tendonitis, and more before they do.
So I say, “Your swing’s a little off, but that’s not surprising considering your carpal tunnel situation,” or “You’d do better if you dealt with your inflamed left hip.” They look at me with amazement and ask, “How did you know that?” Then they request advice on how to get better, and I tell them what to eat, what changes to make to their behavior, therapies to try, and so on.
After caddying for several years, I crave a change. I decide that if I’m going to recommend food and supplements for healing, I might as well work in a place that sells them. So I get a job as stock boy in a local supermarket. My clients come by whenever they like, and I take time out of replenishing shelves to help them. The owner of the supermarket doesn’t mind that my work for him is periodically interrupted, because I’m bringing in new customers.
Besides, he’s a client, too. It’s a little odd to conduct health consultations in a supermarket aisle. It’s also difficult, because supplements are barely available yet and the variety of food is limited. Spirit keeps explaining that in a couple of decades, stores will supply many more options for people’s health. In the meantime, he helps me get creative with healing plans —and I love being able to walk a client to exactly what she needs to buy to get better.
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT GUILT
At age 14, I sometimes sit in a bus or a train, pick up on some health issue with the guy in front of me, and tap him on the shoulder to tell him about it. At times the response is gratitude. Other times the reaction is to accuse me of invading his privacy, stealing his medical records, or worse. That’s a lot of distrust and hostility to deal with—especially for a boy going through puberty.
As I grow older, I learn to be careful about who I try to help unasked. If I see someone regularly, I still feel impelled to share what I know. So I develop the habit of first reading her emotional state to determine whether she’s approachable. That cuts down on the number of uncomfortable situations. If someone is a stranger, I’ll usually keep whatever I’m seeing to myself.
This becomes a burden, though. When I’m a teen, I start feeling even more accountable for my actions. So if someone is in danger of kidney disease, or has cancer, and I do nothing, part of me feels it’s my fault if the person ends up seriously ill or dead. When this is multiplied hundreds of times a day, the sense of guilt and responsibility becomes overwhelming.
ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
As my teenage years continue, life becomes more difficult. For instance, most people watch television to relax and escape. But when I watch, I get a health reading on everyone on the screen. I automatically scan the condition of every person I see who needs help, whether they know they have a condition or not. When that happens over and over, TV is draining, not fun. It’s even worse when I go to a movie theater. I’m uncontrollably reading the health of every person in my row, the row in front of me, the row in back of me, and so on.
And that’s not the end of it. I read the health of the people in the movie. I’m able to determine the condition of each actor during the time the film was shot, as well as the health of the actor in the present moment. Imagine what it’s like to be on a movie date and get bombarded by medical information about the people around you and up on the big screen. Considering the last thing most teens want is to feel different from everyone else, this period is especially rocky.
My feelings of alienation and being overwhelmed by responsibility lead to some rebellious teen impulses. I pursue various ways to escape my “gift.” I start spending a lot of time in the woods. I find nature soothing, and especially appreciate the absence of other people. With the help of Spirit, I learn to identify different species of birds during the day.
At night he teaches me the names of stars—both what scientists call them and the names God has given them. It’s not fully an escape, though, because Spirit also teaches me how to recognize herbs and foods growing around me—red clover, plantain, dandelion, burdock root, wild rose hips and petals, wild apples, wild berries—and how to use them for healing. I also develop an interest in repairing cars. I like fixing up mechanical objects because they don’t require me to become emotionally involved.
Even if I fail to repair a junker Chevy with a bad engine, I never feel remotely as awful as I do when I can’t help people because they’re in too advanced a stage of disease to be healed. But this hobby doesn’t go as planned, either. People start noticing what I’m doing and coming over: “Wow, that’s amazing! Can you fix my car?”
I don’t have it in me to say no—especially since Spirit is doing the hardest part, which is figuring out what’s wrong. One day when I’m 15, my mother and I stop at a station to get gasoline. I walk into the garage and find a bunch of mechanics staring at a car as if they’re trying to solve a puzzle. “What’s going on?” I ask.
One of the men says, “We’ve worked on this car for weeks. It should run perfectly. But we can’t get it to start.” Spirit immediately tells me the solution. “Open up the wire harness in the back of the firewall,” I pass along to the mechanics. “Buried in dozens of other wires you’ll find a white one that’s broken. Put that wire together and the car will run fine.”
“That’s ridiculous!” says another of the men. “What’s the harm in checking?” asks the first one. So they go in— and sure enough, there’s a white wire broken in half. They look at me with their jaws hanging open. “Are you the owner of this car?” asks the skeptical mechanic. “Or are you a friend of his?” “No,” I reply. “I just have a knack for these things.” In a minute they fix the wire and try the car again.
It starts up perfectly. One of the mechanics starts dancing around. Another calls it “a miracle.” Word gets around, and soon a bunch of garages in my town, and also several neighboring towns, use me as the go-to guy for troubleshooting seemingly unfixable vehicles. When I show up to assist on a job, the mechanics who called me—much older guys with years of experience—are always incredulous. “What’s this 15-yearold doing here?” they all ask. When I get the job done, though, they change their minds. So instead of escaping responsibility, I gain more.
On top of healing people, I become a car doctor. The last straw is when I realize how emotional people are about their cars. A lot of times, they’re even more invested in their cars’ well-being than in their own health. At that point cars stop being fun for me. I try some other rebellious activities. For example, I join a rock band, because loud music helps drown out Spirit’s voice.
Spirit does not appreciate this. He patiently waits until I’m finished making a racket, then resumes his commentary on the health of those around me. Nothing really works to make my gift go away. It becomes increasingly clear that I’m stuck with Spirit and my ability—and can’t escape the path that’s been laid out for me.
STARTING TO COMMIT
By the time I’m a young man, thanks to my training with Spirit, I’ve indirectly read and scanned thousands of people and helped hundreds along the way. One day I think, Okay, this is the hand I’ve been dealt. I have a special purpose. I just have to accept it—for now. I also think, This can’t possibly go on forever. At some point I’ll have fulfilled my responsibilities and will be set free to live a normal life. Spirit has never said any such thing to me, yet I need to believe it to keep going.
In my early 20s, I begin doing in earnest what Spirit has repeatedly told me is my destiny. I open my door to sick people who come for help, discover the true root causes of their illnesses, and tell them what they need to do to become healthy.
And despite my griping about the various stresses I’ve endured, it’s fulfilling work. It feels good to help people. In fact, sometimes what I can do is so empowering that I let the feeling of being all-knowing go to my head. A good example is the time my neighbor approaches me about his wife, who can’t walk or use her legs. She’s been to dozens of doctors, and none of them have helped.
My neighbor tells her, “Look, Anthony seems to know a lot about this stuff. Let’s take a chance.” Under my care, within a year she’s able to walk again. I’m in my garden pulling up some onions when my neighbor comes around. “I just want to thank you again, Anthony,” he says. “We went all over the country to meet top experts, and they couldn’t do a thing. It doesn’t make any sense—somehow you knew exactly what was wrong and what she needed.
I don’t know how it’s possible. You’re not even a doctor.” I look at him with onions in my hand and say, “It’s because I’m always right. I can fix any problem because there’s nothing I’m wrong about. Just remember that—I’m always right and will always be right.” Then I turn around, walk a few feet, and step on a rake that slaps me in the face so hard it knocks me out.
As I lie on the ground, my concerned neighbor rushes to my side and stands over me. In my dazed state I think he’s my constant companion. “Spirit?” I ask. Spirit of the Most High replies, “I’m always right. You’re always wrong. Remember that. I’m always right. You’re always wrong.” Whenever I get cocky, I think of that moment. It’s a reminder that while some of the things I do as a healer with the help of Spirit might be considered miraculous, I’m still a regular guy who can make lots of poor decisions when flying solo.
THE TURNING POINT
When I’m a young adult, Spirit assumes I’ve passed the crisis point that led others with my gift over the centuries to end their lives. He assumes I’ve accepted that using my abilities to heal people is what I’ll do for the rest of my life. Which goes to show that even Spirit of the Most High can’t predict everything when it comes to free will.
THE DOG STORY
One day in late fall, I’m at a retreat by the water with no one but my girlfriend—who’ll eventually become my wife—and my dog, August (short for Augustine). I’ve had August for a year and am very close to her. She replaced my family dog, who was with me for 15 years. Just like that dog, August is essential to my sanity. We’re sitting by a large, deep bay.
The water is icy cold, and the current is strong. It’s our last day. With great reluctance, we start getting ready to leave the peaceful isolation of this place. Suddenly, with no warning, my dog jumps into the bay. I sense she picked up on my feelings. This is her way of saying, “We don’t have to go. Let’s stay here and keep playing.” Unfortunately, both the cold and the current take hold of her. She immediately starts slipping from us. We stand on the shore, screaming at August to come back. I throw stones into the water to try to lead my dog back to me.
This is our special signal—whenever I splash stones in the shallows, she returns to shore. But today, the current pulls her farther and farther away. August goes 50 feet out. I see her struggling to get back and losing the battle. Then the cold freezes her so thoroughly that she stops paddling . . . and goes straight down.
I toss off my jacket, boots, and pants, and jump into the freezing water. I’ve swum 15 feet out when Spirit of the Most High says, “If you keep going, you are not going to make it.” “It doesn’t matter!” I yell. “I’m not abandoning August. I have to save my dog.” I swim another 15 feet—and then the merciless cold takes over. My body goes numb. Spirit says, “You’ve done it now. You cannot turn back, and you cannot go forward. This is it.” “Really? You rob me of a normal, peaceful life, I dedicate my whole being to your work of healing, and this is all I get from you? You say, ‘This is it,’ and leave us to die?”
All the angst and anger I’ve suppressed since I was four years old comes pouring out. I let Spirit have it about my years of pent-up frustration over this continual torture I’ve always had to accept as a “gift”: being set apart from everyone else, knowing too much about everyone at way too early an age, and being told what I had to do with my life instead of given even the slightest choice.
I tell Spirit, “I put up with a lot—sacrificing my childhood, experiencing everybody’s pain and suffering, taking responsibility for healing thousands of strangers, and draining myself physically and mentally every day. And now you’re telling me I can’t even protect my own family? “No, dammit!” I shout as the freezing waves threaten to engulf me. “If this is how you want me to end, Spirit, so be it. I’m getting my dog back, or I’m going down with her.”
A very long second passes. Numb and exhausted, I realize that I may have finally pushed things too far. A few more moments without help, and I’ll be following my dog August into the depths below. I turn my head toward the shore to get one last glimpse of the girl I planned to spend the rest of my life with. Spirit says, “You need to swim out twenty more feet.” In shock, I shout, “How?” To my great surprise, I feel renewed strength. I resume swimming. In my mind, I continue to yell at Spirit that I deserve to survive this with my dog.
Otherwise we should both die. Spirit says, “I will get you to your dog. In return, you must commit to me. We go through this life the way we’re supposed to. You accept that it is by the holy power of God you are destined to do this work for the rest of your life.” “Okay!” I shout. “Deal. Let me find August, and I’ll work for you with no complaints ever again.” I swim the additional 20 feet. Spirit says, “Hold your breath and go eight feet down, then open your eyes.” As I hold my breath, a surge of power courses through my body.
All of a sudden I can feel my legs again. I swim what feels like eight feet down, open my eyes—and see an angel. I’ve never encountered an angel before. I’m seeing what looks like a woman who has no trouble breathing underwater, with a glorious source of light behind her, light radiating from her eyes, and huge, beautiful wings of light growing out of her back. There’s no question she’s a divine being. And in her arms is August, surrounded by a beautiful, peaceful light.
For a moment, it feels like time stands still. My vision is surprisingly clear underwater, and I have no fear or trouble holding my breath. I grab my dog by her collar. Then something pushes me upward with her. We both reach the surface of the water. The bay is still icy cold, and the current is still trying to violently pull us away from land and life. The wind is blowing strong. When I open my eyes again, I see Spirit for a moment standing right above the water. It’s the only time I’ve seen Spirit since the first day he appeared to me at age four. “We don’t have much time,” he says. “The angel is leaving.” Just as I register once again that all could have been lost, another surge of power charges through my body.
As I start swimming back through the frigid waters—holding onto August, who seems lifeless— it feels almost as if I’m being pulled across the 50 feet to safety. My dog and I soon make it back to shore—and to my girlfriend, who is crying with relief. As I drag myself and my dog up to the rocky sand, I cry in agony— not because I’m feeling the initial stages of hypothermia, but because I’m afraid my dog is gone. All I can think is, Let her still be alive. She opens her eyes, gasps for air, and comes to life. The sun appears from behind the clouds, and a streak of light races across the water and shines on my dog August. I look at the light and say, “Spirit, thank you.”
And I realize: this is the first time since Spirit entered my life that I’ve ever thanked him for anything. The battles I’ve waged with Spirit of the Most High since I was four years old have to end. It’s time for me to acknowledge the cards I’ve been dealt. Even before this point, people in need have been coming to me in droves. With this pledge, I wholly dedicate myself to helping them, without qualification and for the rest of my life. I don’t have to pretend the abilities I’ve been granted are a problem-free blessing. Yet I stop complaining and finally accept who I am. That’s when I truly assume my role as the Medical Medium.
THE PROCESS
Once I commit to my calling, I develop a routine for fulfilling it as efficiently as possible. I don’t need to be in the same room with a person to perform a reading, so I arrange to speak with clients by phone. This allows me to help anyone in the world, regardless of location, and it minimizes the transition time between clients. I’ve helped tens of thousands of clients this way. When I perform a scan, Spirit creates a very bright white light that lets me see into the client. While that’s critical for obtaining what I need as the Medical Medium, the intensity of the light creates a kind of “snow blindness” that impairs my vision in the real world, and it accumulates as the day goes on.
When I’m finished working, it takes 30 to 60 minutes for my sight to return to normal. (As a side note, I bring my assistant with me whenever I go somewhere that will have a lot of people and voices, because I’ll usually lose a substantial portion of my sight due to “automatic” readings. For example, whenever I have to fly somewhere, I end up inadvertently reading everyone on my plane.
By the time we land I’m completely blind, so I need my assistant to lead me around until the effect wears off.) A deep and comprehensive reading of a client’s condition takes only about three minutes. However, I have to spend 10 to 30 minutes explaining what I’ve discovered and my advice for healing, especially for new clients. Sometimes I need to spend time bolstering or “reconstructing” a client. That’s because I deal with more than just people’s physical illnesses.
SOUL, HEART, AND SPIRIT
When I perform a reading, I go beyond a person’s physical health. I also examine the client’s soul, heart, and spirit. These are three entirely different components of one’s being that always get grouped together. The first component is the soul. This is the consciousness of a person, or what some call “the ghost in the machine.” Your soul resides in your brain, where your soul stores your memories and experiences.
When you pass from this mortal realm, your soul carries those memories as it moves onward. Even if someone has a brain injury or brain disease that keeps him or her from remembering certain things, the soul will bring all the memories with it when that person passes on. Your soul also stores your hope and your faith, both of which help keep you on the right path. Ideally, you should have a fully intact soul.
Over the course of life’s hardships, though, a soul can become fractured and even lose pieces of itself. This is caused by traumatic events, such as the death of a loved one, betrayal by a loved one, or betrayal of oneself. When I scan a client, fractures in her or his soul resemble cracks in a cathedral window. I can tell where the fractures are, because that’s where the light comes streaming through. As for a soul with missing pieces, it’s like a house at night that’s meant to have all of its lights on . . . except some of its rooms are stuck in the dark. This soul damage can result in a loss of energy, or even loss of life force. That’s why it’s important to be aware of it. Sometimes a client’s problem isn’t physical—rather, it’s an affliction of the soul.
A person with soul damage is vulnerable. If you ever hear a friend say, “I’m not ready for another relationship, I’m still hurting from my breakup,” she’s acknowledging that she has soul damage, and that her soul needs time to heal before she risks putting herself out there again. Along the same lines, if you ever observe someone hungrily pursuing spiritual learning in any form—religion, spiritual gurus, selfhelp books, meditation retreats—it may be because that person’s soul has been damaged, and she or he is instinctively searching for ways to make it healthy and complete again. That’s a critical job for each of us—when your time here ends, your soul should be sufficiently intact to survive its journey beyond the stars, where God will receive it.
The second component of one’s being is the physical heart. This is where your love, compassion, and joy reside. Having a healthy soul doesn’t necessarily make you a whole person. You can have an unblemished soul and a broken, injured heart. Your heart serves as the compass for your actions, guiding you to do the right thing when your soul becomes lost. Also, your heart is a kind of safety net that can compensate for soul damage. When your soul suffers fractures and losses, a strong heart will get you through until your soul has managed to heal.
Your heart keeps a record of your good intentions, too. This means you can have a battered soul and a warm, loving heart. In fact, it’s common for someone’s heart to grow larger as a result of the roller-coaster ride her or his soul has gone through. Great losses can lead to deeper understanding . . . and greater love and compassion.
The third key component I look at when I scan a client is that person’s spirit—which in this context refers to someone’s will and physical strength. Your spirit is not your soul. They are two separate parts of you. It’s your spirit that enables you to climb, run, and fight. Even if your soul’s been battered and your heart is faint, your spirit can keep you physically going while you look for opportunities to heal.
For example, sometimes I’ll tell a very ill client to start walking, go out to watch birds, and look at sunsets. That helps the client regain her or his spirit, and that can be the start to rebuilding the heart and soul. Every human being is different, with individual experiences, feelings, and soul states. To be a compassionate healer, you have to adapt to each unique condition and personality to alleviate that person’s pain and suffering. Spirit tells me this compassion is the most important element in healing.
THE ONE AND ONLY MEDICAL MEDIUM
While there are obvious disadvantages to having a voice continually talking into my ear, there are also huge advantages. Because Spirit is distinct and separate from me, it doesn’t matter if on a given day I’m feeling upset or ill or bored. Spirit is unaffected by my emotions and will consistently provide an accurate reading of each client’s health. I’m not an intuitive who needs to get into a certain headspace or has good days and bad days performing my job.
Some clients ask me, “Should I take off my jewelry to allow you to get you a better read?” It doesn’t matter if they’re wrapped in tinfoil; I’m going to be able to get the answers they need and find out what’s wrong. Another way I’m different from most mediums is that I have no problem getting information about the health of my family and friends, or about my own health. Again, because Spirit is separate from me, all I have to do is ask, and he tells me what I want to know. This is one of the things that makes me unique.
One day a skeptical reporter demands I diagnose her on the spot: “I want you to tell me where it hurts. Does it hurt in my toe? My leg? My stomach? Does it hurt in my arm? My butt? Do I even hurt at all? Let’s see what your voice says.” Spirit immediately tells me, “She does hurt. She hurts on the left side of her head. Chronic migraines torment her.” I reach over, touch the left side of her head, and say, “Spirit tells me you hurt here.” She starts crying. That’s the caliber of instant accuracy Spirit provides.
If I get a call at 2 A.M. from a client whose daughter is about to go into emergency surgery and the client wants to know if it’s the right choice, I have to be able to tell the doctor in one minute if that little girl merely has a bad case of food poisoning, or if her appendix is about to explode. I have to be able to tell whether someone’s recovering or is bleeding internally, if a child’s fever is due to the flu or meningitis, if someone is suffering from heat sickness or is about to have a stroke. Spirit delivers this information every time.
Padre Pio and Edgar Cayce, those famous mystical healers of the 20th century,
were the only two mediums in recent history who accessed the level of compassion that Spirit demands of me. Their work as compassionate healers was in some ways similar to mine. However, our strengths and gifts are unique to each of us. No other medium does what I do. No one else alive has a spirit voice providing profound on-target health information with crystal clarity. I’ve devoted my life to this work. It’s who I am. And it’s the gift I will use to provide you with the medical information in the chapters that follow.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_William#cite_note-CS-1
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In 2000, William and his wife Rachel Schutzman
opened a health food store in Machias, Maine called Earth Organic Market.[5][6]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_William#cite_note-CS-1
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In 2000, William and his wife Rachel Schutzman
opened a health food store in Machias, Maine called Earth Organic Market.[5][6]
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Stephanie Tisone began pursuing new answers to her health concerns in 2013. She was 33 and had already molded her life around nutrition for years, traveling from her home in Newtown, Pennsylvania, to Hawaii and Southeast Asia to meet other raw vegans. Her family has a history of cancer, and after testing positive for two gene mutations correlating to an increased risk for breast cancer, she thought reconfiguring her diet could help.
On the advice of the mother of a family for whom she had nannied, Tisone booked a consultation with Anthony William, known on social media and in his books as the Medical Medium. A 53-year-old former health food store owner from Connecticut, William claims that, at four years old, a spirit visited him and gave him the ability to scan bodies for disease by sight.
During Tisone’s hour-long $400 phone call with William, he said that heavy metals from vaccines caused her migraines and that the Epstein-Barr virus was hiding out in her liver. He recommended that she start a regimen of wild blueberries, spirulina, cilantro, zinc, and vitamin B12, and later said that high estrogen levels fueled her headaches.
William has said that negative energy can be a source of disease and that he can teach you to clear it; that he can give followers emotional support to rewire their brains and souls after post-traumatic stress disorder from long-term illness; that he can speak to the entity he calls the “Spirit of Compassion” on their behalf.
He has said that his information is decades ahead of science, that he knows if objects are hidden in the walls of old homes, and that he fell into a long coma after running past a chemical spill from an overturned truck. His former associates say that much of his follower base is made up of women dealing with chronic illness and pain.
“It actually tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it,” Tisone would later tell a friend. “That’s why Anthony’s approach is so empowering.” The diagnostic call buoyed her, and she started learning William’s vernacular. “The true cause of breast cancer is the Epstein-Barr virus,” he wrote in his 2017 book Thyroid Healing. In the coming years, Tisone and William developed a friendship, and he eventually dropped his consultation fees. She began to work for William as an occasional assistant, accompanying him on trips to visit clients and speak at events. She held out hope, she often told friends and family, that she could one day work for him full-time. (Through his counsel, William declined repeated requests to comment on the record for this story.)
Subscribe Now William is a frantic presence on his YouTube channel and social media accounts—he has 4 million Instagram followers. An article about his work published by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in 2015 became the site’s most read story that year. With his hair tied in its regular short ponytail, William showed up in a YouTube video with Novak Djokovic’s wife, Jelena; on a 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, waving his hands over Kim Kardashian and Kanye West; in a podcast interview with Kate Hudson.
He traveled to Los Angeles to make nighttime house calls for patrons. In 2019, publications including this magazine traced surging demand for celery juice among the wealthy and health-conscious to one of his signature recommendations.
William SHOWED UP in a YouTube video with Novak Djokovic’s wife, Jelena; on a 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, waving his hands over KIM KARDASHIAN AND KANYE WEST; in a podcast interview with Kate Hudson.
To some degree, William has drawn from folk tradition in his work. He has compared himself to Edgar Cayce, who claimed to be clairvoyant and became known as a founding father of New Age. William’s ascent has also coincided with the boom the wellness industry has undergone in the last decade as an ever-growing swath of consumers explores ideas like raw diets and detoxes. It’s been a boon to a now common brand of social media entrepreneur. For many followers, William has functioned as an amusement or a supplemental health source. To a certain percentage of true believers, though, the Medical Medium serves as community and identity.
AdvertisementAs William gained more exposure, experts began to warn against his pseudoscience. “Promoting the Medical Medium is no different than promoting anti-vaccine views or cleanses or coffee enemas,” Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco ob-gyn and leading Goop critic, told the online magazine Inverse in 2018. “The minimum is that people waste money, but there is great potential for harm with many of the therapies that are recommended and delays in diagnosis.” William often folds his defense against such critiques into his pitch. “I noticed that there’s this desperate, desperate need to take down the Medical Medium out there,” he recently said in an online chat group.
“STEPHANIE RELATED to Anthony as he said he was,” says a friend. “JUST UNDER GOD.”
Like other alternative health practitioners, William’s site includes standard disclaimer language:
“Anthony William…is not a licensed medical doctor, chiropractor, osteopathic physician, naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, pharmacist, psychologist, psychotherapist, or other formally licensed healthcare professional, practitioner or provider of any kind. Anthony William, Medical Medium does not render medical, psychological, or other professional advice or treatment, nor does it provide or prescribe any medical diagnosis, treatment, medication, or remedy.”
AdvertisementTisone’s belief in William never wavered. She was, according to her friends and family, a 30-something woman with a high emotional quotient, a lifelong student with a tendency to commit herself totally to various diet protocols or gurus. Where other of William’s millions of followers might treat his dictates as larks or view them as part of the vast online orbit of self-billed health experts, Tisone found herself transfixed. “Stephanie related to Anthony as he said he was,” says a friend. “Just under God.” Through her association with William, Tisone spent time at the homes of Robert De Niro and Demi Moore, where he would advise them to buy thousands of dollars in supplements. (Representatives for both actors declined to comment.)
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.Between 2014 and 2017, according to a record of Tisone’s text and voice messages obtained from her brother, Tisone and William kept in regular communication that was as steady as it was wide-ranging. They analyzed her health and his career progress; she asked him about the circumstances of actor Brittany Murphy’s death, and how to handle debt. Tisone also frequently texted with William’s wife, Rachel Schutzman, and several Medical Medium associates about various ailments and her understanding of William’s advice.
Before William started his current business, he and Schutzman ran a health food store in the roughly 2,000-person town of Machias, Maine. According to a 2001 report in local newspaper The Lubec Light, the shop marked the couple’s first retail venture since William began his career in natural healing in 1985. William eventually moved to Florida, where a Naples yoga studio advertised $12 medical intuitive readings with him. He began phone consultations as the Medical Medium in the early 2010s and saw his profile begin to rise. He performed a reading for Moore in 2014 and got a major break when the leading New Age publisher Hay House released Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness the following year.
Prefame Medical Medium clients remember William spending extra time on the phone with them consulting and gossiping about raw food gurus. “He talks in this sweet voice,” says one. As a published author, that availability shifted. “Books give credibility,” Janis Donnaud, a New York literary agent for health and cooking authors, says. “Something different than selling people supplements.” In 2016, William established an informal franchise system of health practitioners. These affiliates didn’t pay William but were steeped in his thinking and spread the word.
By then, William’s and Tisone’s social circles overlapped. She had become close with Phil McCluskey, a public speaker and author known in the raw food world for his 200-pound weight loss. At the beginning of 2015, McCluskey and his wife, Casey, an Australian former raw food coach and especially dedicated Medical Medium student, began helping William.
The McCluskeys own a supplement company in Florida named Vimergy that William often recommends. (Phil and Casey have described themselves as the Medical Medium’s director of operations and director of content and education, but both say they have never worked for William.) As William prepared his book debut, Tisone asked Phil McCluskey for help getting more work with William. He told Tisone they couldn’t because the team had increased its Facebook ad spend to push William’s book.
(McCluskey says he had checked with William’s team and was relaying this news on its behalf.)
The Medical Medium became a polished brand with textbook-style offerings. Even by the volatile standards of the health personality business, William’s full-fledged emergence looked sudden. “It just seemed to be there one day,” Donnaud says. “He has been working on this for a really long time,” the early client says, “and he has been trying to find fame and fortune.”
William began holding live events. One of his followers flew to attend the first one at the Sheraton Sand Key Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, in February 2016. She had been blowing through her savings trying to alleviate years of illness and had her first phone call with William the following week.
“Thousands of people were waiting to talk to him,” she remembers, “and here I was.” She thought she’d never speak with him again, but he texted her a few days later. “I couldn’t believe he was reaching out to me on a personal level,” she says. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” William eventually named the client as a practitioner on his referral page. That November, with De Niro and his family in the audience and Tisone volunteering at the event, she gave a testimonial to William onstage at Loews Hollywood Hotel.
AdvertisementWilliam became Hay House’s most successful author. He bought two new homes. Other self-styled medical intuitives flocked to him. Without William’s recognition, the follower turned practitioner says, “You’re just anyone else.” (William prefaced his online referral list with another disclaimer: “The names and associated links are provided for informational purposes only and are not intended to state or imply that Anthony William or Anthony William, Inc. recommends, endorses, supports, sponsors, or is in any way affiliated or associated with any person or entity listed below, or any linked website or content.”)
“You’re NOT ALLOWED to talk about your own level of connection with him,” a practitioner says, “so IT’S HARD TO KNOW about someone else’s.”
A vocal base of Medical Medium enthusiasts coalesced on Facebook and Reddit. They’d dissect William’s diet recommendations and share their own experiences. “We’re all a family at Medical Medium, and it’s the safest place,” he has said. “The family that’s been through hell and back. It’s the forgotten souls, I call ’em. It’s the people who have been swept under the carpet, who’ve been sick, and they’ve been through so much, and there’s no answers out there.” On camera, he wraps his eccentricities in a smiling benevolence. “I know everything about coconuts,” he once said. “I know it’s a bold statement, but it’s the truth.”
William’s closest acolytes maintained his mystique. “You’re not allowed to talk about your own level of connection with him,” the practitioner says, “so it’s hard to know about someone else’s.” In a 2015 text, he told Tisone, “No one cares about the truth!! Do you think that vaccines are the only screwup???” Shortly after publishing his first book, he told her to “write a review dude and retaliate the evil review someone just put up” on Amazon. “Maybe throw a comment telling person how wrong and they obviously didn’t read it.”
Tisone was 20 years old when she absorbed her first health book—by Suzanne Somers, the sitcom actor. It was 2000. The social media–enabled wellness boom was still years off, but long-thriving subcultures tied to New Age thought and alternative diets were spreading online. Tisone actively pursued her passions. She studied the raw food authors Douglas Graham and Don Bennett and the naturopath Robert Morse. She spent a season living in a commune with David Wolfe, a superfood enthusiast and conspiracy theorist.
By her 30s, Tisone liked to joke about how she’d never been kissed. She had the word Love tattooed on her arm and a gentle communion with kids, which friends attribute to her enduring state of wonder. Above all, they describe her as solicitous and devoted, a connector in the raw food community.
She met Sarma Melngailis at Pure Food & Wine, the aughts-era raw vegan hot spot in Manhattan that Melngailis opened before serving jail time for grand larceny and tax fraud.
Tisone met William in person for the first time in 2014, the year after her initial phone consultation, eventually landing some work with him as an ad hoc travel assistant. During their trips, she drove him around, ironed his shirts, and went on Whole Foods runs. They once got into a car accident on the way back from Moore’s home in Los Angeles.
As Tisone grew closer to William, she added further restrictions to her raw diet, cutting out nuts, seeds, and avocado. For dinner, she sometimes ate two heads of romaine lettuce with cayenne and lemon. She would tell friends and family that she couldn’t say too much about her work with William, but because they regularly texted, she could bring him their concerns. One family for whom Tisone nannied thought that vaccines had harmed their daughter’s health and tried introducing bone broth to her diet.
“Bone broth fad is by far the most retarded of all time,” William texted Tisone. “For some stupid demented reason people believe it does something for their body like the Druids did when they were sacrificing humans and making soup out of them in the dark ages of satanism.”
“Thank you for confirming my gut feeling,” she wrote back.
Tisone continued pursuing work with William, and she tried to broker a Medical Medium consultation for Timothy Schmit, the longtime bassist for the Eagles, whose wife she had met through a raw food friend. Some William associates thought of Tisone as too wide-eyed, according to one, but her responsibilities afforded her an air of uncommon proximity. “There’s very few that I trust in life,” William texted her. “And your the most.”
When William and Schutzman moved in April 2017, they gave Tisone a job preparing the house for their arrival. Despite her excitement, Tisone kept the gig quiet as best she could, telling her brother and parents not to let anyone else know. “This is super duper PRIVATE and so its really important you don’t share this with anyone,” Schutzman texted her.
The month prior, in March 2017, Tisone had texted Schutzman with a health development. “I’m assuming this isn’t anything to be worried about and prob just detox related,” she wrote. “I noticed a pretty large lump in my left breast today.” Schutzman responded, “Breast lumps can be lymph or node related if you’re detoxing, during your cycle, or under the weather, but you should always have it looked at by your physician, thermography scans are ok to get too if needed.”
“You can give it a week or two and see if it decreases in size or swelling too,” Schutzman added.
“Yes feels like detox I will do that and observe it over next week or 2,” Tisone replied. “I’ve done thermography in past so I am familiar with that So I’ll just keep an eye on it.” (A thermography scan is a painless test that measures skin temperature and doesn’t require radiation; the FDA and American Cancer Society have published warnings about using one as a diagnostic tool for breast cancer.)
A few days later, Tisone followed up with Schutzman. A New Jersey–based woman named Muneeza Ahmed has established herself as a leading voice in the Medical Medium community—she describes herself as the first practitioner in the world to be endorsed by William. Tisone had sought her input, and Ahmed told her that she thought it was an Epstein-Barr virus “activity packing in toxins into the cyst.” (“I did the best I could to keep up with the texts Steph sent and while I cared for her and always wanted to support her as a friend,” Ahmed says, “I would at times feel very overwhelmed by the sheer volume of texts and the large variety of topics she asked me about.” Ahmed also says that she told Tisone to see a doctor to address her lump—but that she understood her to have “EBV from mono as a kid.”)
Advertisement“Updating you on Muneeza’s opinion about my breast lump,” Tisone texted Schutzman, telling her she’d been advised to up her intake of chaga mushroom tea and that Ahmed was sending breast health massage oil from the beauty brand Living Libations. Ahmed offered Tisone a 10 percent discount on the $30 product.
Schutzman didn’t text back about Ahmed’s assessment, but about two weeks later, she told Tisone, “I wanted to give you a heads up that Ant & I won’t be able to answer any health related questions for the next month or so, all our energy will need to be on this move.”
While Tisone was readying the house, she told a friend in a voice message, “Anthony told me that my body is transforming since I’ve been here, like my health and everything has gotten a lot better.” When the couple got there in April, Tisone spent time with them before heading back to Pennsylvania.
Members of William’s inner circle at the time understood his attention as a commodity, and Tisone’s messages have a deferential tone. While Schutzman and William work closely together, in August, Tisone conveyed her awareness of a lump in her breast directly to William. “I have a quite large lump in my left breast since March, feels like I need to tell you,” she wrote, adding, “No worries if you can’t respond to this.”
William’s brushes with fame were becoming more common. He described Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor and The Apprentice, as one of his good friends to one early client, and told her that he only texted her, Moore, and other celebrities. In October 2017, along with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson, he appeared in Heal, a documentary about mind-body medicine directed by Kelly Noonan, who is married to private-equity billionaire Alec Gores. The following year, the couple and Town & Country editor in chief Stellene Volandes cohosted a book party in Los Angeles for the actor Roma Downey, who is married to Burnett. A guest recalls William sticking close by Sylvester Stallone’s side as the night wore on.
The testimonials on William’s site snowballed to include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Diane von Furstenberg, Naomi Campbell, Alexis Bledel, James Van Der Beek, Calvin Harris, Rashida Jones, Kelly Rutherford, Lisa Rinna, Carla Gugino, Pharrell Williams, Hilary Swank, and Adam Sandler. His co-signs could range from spirited (Swank’s and Sandler’s representatives vouch for theirs) to something more like a framed headshot at the dry cleaners (Van Der Beek’s rep says he wrote his eight years ago) to aspirational (William listed Sophia Bush in the acknowledgments of four of his books; a rep says the actor was never a client but they once met when she accompanied a friend to the friend’s consultation).
William soon hit the peak of his own celebrity. “So your name came up from my cousin sending me screenshots of your Instagram, and then other people just sending me your name,” Kim Kardashian told him on the 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. He proceeded to tell the reality star that copper in her liver was causing outbreaks of her chronic psoriasis.
Steven Novella, a neurologist and the founding editor of the site Science-Based Medicine, sees William as part of a lineage of health-oriented operators including Cayce and Franz Mesmer, the late 18th-century physician who practiced hypnotism and befriended Mozart and Marie Antoinette.
“People who are either wealthy or celebrities aren’t necessarily scientists, or even very smart, and so they become targets,” Novella says. “These kinds of people will prey upon them because they know that their endorsement is worth a lot.”
William’s nonfamous clientele also span a spectrum of belief. While there are die-hard converts such as Tisone, there are those who approach his practice with something of a wink. There are happy customers and vocal proponents as well as those who have gone all in on the Medical Medium but walked away unsatisfied. Dee Sclafani, a piano teacher in Richmond, Virginia, discovered William in 2013, the same year as Tisone, when she suddenly couldn’t make it through one of her regular runs. She soon found William online.
Sclafani initially viewed William in messianic terms and proposed to him that she make a documentary about his life. She referred friends to him, and one decided that she would book a session as long as Sclafani would join her on the call to calm her nerves. But Sclafani drifted as the cumulative consultation fees ballooned and he became scarce: “I tried these supplements and spent a ton of fucking money.”
“You’re coming from a desperation energy,” she says, “and that’s not a good energy to come from.”
‘Bro I’m [not] doing good at all,” Tisone texted William in July 2017. “Back in excruciating pain. It’s been weeks but way worse now. Sorry to bug you.” Hours later, she wrote, “Thank you for your support.
And yea think the stress you mentioned is financial stress. Praying for that to come to completion. I love you and I appreciate all you do for me.” Tisone sent photos of bumps on her skin a few days later and asked if she had shingles. William said she had “baby shingles”—“which is what the back prob was originally”—and advised her to take vitamin C and lysine.
Tisone sought out a number of other alternative health practitioners to address various subsets of her symptoms. She spoke remotely to Teshna Beaulieu, a chiropractor and a self-described specialist in quantum neurology and neuro-emotional technique; Tienko Ting, the author of Natural Chi Movement: Accessing the World of the Miraculous; and several Medical Medium devotees. Tisone conveyed many of the assessments she received to William.
In August, Tisone couldn’t get up. She had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor at her parents’ house and her back pain had become unmanageable. She kept the lump from her family, later texting William that she was not up front with her father because his sister had breast cancer. Tisone discussed the growth and all other manner of health issues with others, but at this moment of crisis, she went directly to William.
They exchanged 156 voice messages between August 30 and September 3. They discussed several opinions Tisone had by then received and whether she would get an MRI. She did not at that time.
As her concern grew, Tisone often back-channeled to try to understand the thicket of health ideas contained in William’s messages and phone calls. “Sweetheart in your audio you said Ant didn’t know why you have nausea,” Casey McCluskey texted her. “But he does know. Maybe you didn’t hear him correctly love. Do you want me to text you the reason?” (McCluskey says that all of Tisone’s friends knew that her nausea was from migraines.)
“Did you ever have a lump in your breast?” Tisone texted McCluskey in July. “I think I told you I have one right? Since March.”
Tisone spent decades in the ALTERNATIVE HEALTH ECOSYSTEM, and it’s difficult to get a full picture of the advice she followed. “Just want to make sure you know I DON’T HAVE A DOC that’s overseeing all this,” she texted William.
“Yeah you told me,” McCluskey responded. “It will go, just takes time especially while you’re having a viral flare.”
“Stephanie had told me during that time that she had seen a doctor multiple times,” McCluskey says. “She also told me she had a viral issue.” By this point, Schutzman had already told Tisone breast lumps can be “lymph or node related” but that she should have it looked at, and Ahmed had spoken about it with her. A couple of weeks later, Tisone reminded William of the lump. She became unable to work.
Her father, a manager for government construction projects, covered most of her health costs, and a friend sent her money throughout 2017 to buy supplements. That August, she stunned her health community friends by missing the annual Woodstock Fruit Festival, and one of them came to visit her. She shared with the friend that she had a breast lump but assured her that she was talking to William.
‘Sorry to bug you again but these things I am legitimately worried about,” Tisone texted William toward the beginning of October. She was vomiting and her throat was starting to feel swollen.
“Think we will find a dr to come to house,” he wrote. “Let’s look tomorrow.”
“If you get so bad and can’t breathe, you can always call emergency,” he said a few minutes later. “But I think it’s just acids burning throat.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about having a doctor come here to draw blood,” Tisone texted. She didn’t have health insurance and didn’t “want to get trapped and fall down the rabbit hole.”
“I understand,” he responded. “How is it.”
Tisone had spent nearly two decades in the alternative health ecosystem, and by her own account, it’s difficult to get a full picture of the advice she followed. “Just want to make sure you know I don’t have a doc that’s overseeing all this,” she later texted William. “Just a mish mash of random people.”
Her reliance on this community was broader than William, but time and again she returned to him. “Haven’t heard from anthony,” Tisone texted a friend and former William assistant, “but Tienko says there is a virus in my intestines.” She asked William if a chiropractor correctly identified her slipped disc and he said she did. She told him that Beaulieu had used her neuro-emotional technique over FaceTime. “Yayyyyyy!!!!!,” he responded, adding, “That can help a sensitive nervy girl like you.”
Tisone followed up a few days later about whether she should get blood work, and William said she should because her sodium level could have dropped from vomiting. She said she was vomiting less and asked if she still needed to.
William responded in a series of voice messages. “You’re dealing with the shingles virus, tried and true, like 100%,” he said in one. “I mean, that’s the virus that flared up your disc, everything else.”
If a doctor could come and draw blood, he said, it might make her family feel better. “I think your family really needs you to see you get at least a little support,” he said, adding, “They could lose perspective over time, even though it’s a slipped disc keeping you from getting up.”
Later that week, Tisone’s nipple began to bleed. She sent William a photo of stains on her shirt and asked if she had a hiatal hernia. “You didn’t have one months ago when I looked,” he responded, “but now that you vomit this much it’s possible.”
Tisone’s doctor was forthright about how much time she had left; she responded by asking if someone could contact William to check.Courtesy Tony Tisone.When she asked what he thought of her bleeding “from my left nipple on same breast as cyst,” he responded, “I’m not liking that at all”; “but don’t want you worried right now”; “just get your back better”; “as your back gets better then the vomiting should stop”; “it should come together.”
“Does it have to do with the cyst?” she texted. “Prob not,” he told her.
It had been about seven months since Tisone texted Schutzman about a lump in her breast. William and Tisone had exchanged hundreds of text and voice messages about her health. According to the phone records reviewed for this story, William never told her not to see a doctor. On at least several occasions, he suggested she seek other medical help. Over the same period, he told her he could do a bacterial scan on her, and she asked him to ask the Spirit of Compassion if there was “anything pressing on the nerves that we can’t see with an MRI?”
Tisone wasn’t getting any better. She had blood drawn the week after her nipple began bleeding and told William that her breast was throbbing where the cyst was. “When did the breast get this bad,” he asked. After Tisone sent the results of her blood test, William wrote to her, “Can’t fuck around with that,” and said to get a thermography scan and ultrasound. Schutzman arranged to have a new mattress, bed frame, bedding, and pillows sent to her.
Tisone sought more clarity the following week. She told William in a voice message she didn’t want to go to the hospital unless “you honestly agree that that is necessary” and that “you made it clear what I need to do for my breasts.”
“Steph it is important to have the breast looked at and cared for for sure,” William responded in a text. “It’s always wonderful too that your family knows your reaching out for care, they must be very very worried about you so don’t be afraid of getting attention from a doc on the breast.”
About a week and a half later, in mid-November, Tisone texted him the results of her thermography scan, which showed an array of elevated temperatures. She sent him more blood work, and they started discussing mammograms and biopsies. She asked him to join her on a call with a doctor she was now speaking with, and he said he couldn’t. “When we talk next about my breast can it be on the phone and can we ask spirit to help us see what’s happening??” Tisone asked. “Thank you I love you.” He didn’t respond. She wrote again the next day after a family doctor called her with X-ray and blood results.
“What is a compression fracture?”; “I’m kind of freaking out”; “I need a plan”; “My goal and vision is that spirit and yourself will rd and scan me and will put me on a perfect protocol and my breast will heal itself with nothing invasive.”
The next day, Schutzman texted her, “It’s been super hectic the past few weeks but I will make sure Ant gets back to you ASAP.”
William never texted her again, but Casey McCluskey relayed a thought in December: “I think all the vomiting and all the immobility has just given you a ton of pain. That’s what Anthony said it would be a few days ago.” (McCluskey says that she didn’t speak to William about Tisone specifically and that it was a general conversation.)
Ahmed and McCluskey say they believed Tisone’s family didn’t want William involved, and McCluskey says she understood that the family took Tisone’s phone away. Tisone texted with Schutzman a few times the following year. Tisone and McCluskey corresponded throughout the course of that year. Tisone’s brother says her family never took her phone away or sought to limit her contact with William.
In December, Tisone’s family, now aware of the lump, took her for a biopsy. Before the results came back, she had a seizure that sent her to the hospital. Doctors induced a coma for three days, and she learned that she would never walk much again. She had stage IV metastatic breast cancer, which had eroded her spine.
“They’re assuming it’s tumors which is not smart as the radiation can cause problems,” McCluskey texted her. (McCluskey says she was echoing another Tisone friend’s fear.)
Most of the friends who took care of Tisone after her cancer diagnosis had some tie to the Medical Medium world. In August 2018, one of them made a trip to the beach with her. “She always was hopeful,” the friend says. William’s disappearance hurt and confused Tisone, but she kept faith that he had the answers. Her doctor told friends and family that they needed to be honest.
He had been forthright about how much time she had left, and Tisone responded by asking if someone could contact William to check. “I’m always behind you,” she once texted him. “It’s my purpose.”
In November 2018, Tisone died of breast cancer. She was 38 years old.
In her final weeks, the pain of William’s absence lingered. “I don’t want to die Can you PLEASE talk to anthony for me,” she texted McCluskey five days before her death. “Maybe he will have a solution or something.” McCluskey responded that she was sorry; she says she wasn’t sure if the text was from Tisone.
News of Tisone’s death began to circulate.
William offered another medical personality an unsolicited clarification that he wasn’t responsible. A bit over a year after Tisone died, a friend wrote about her on Instagram. Sarah (a pseudonym) still mostly stuck to William’s methods.
She previously did work for Medical Medium, and was close enough to William that in 2018, they discussed her business proposal for a health retreat that never materialized. Her father had died shortly after Tisone, and in her post, Sarah reflected on their contrasting circumstances. Her father had undergone traditional cancer treatment, while Tisone “did all the healing protocols you can think of” and “was guided personally” by William.
Ahmed and Kimberly Spair, another health coach touting William’s name, responded to Sarah’s post by sending letters to their respective followings. Their notes covered similar ground and used much of the same language. Spair said that Tisone was not under William’s care or a client of his and advised her followers to look past Sarah’s post. “Vulnerability is real during healing, and the last thing we need is a story to be twisted and throw us into fear, doubt, and adrenal spiral,” she wrote.
After seeing the letters, Sarah aired her distress in a blog post.
“The only people who knew Steph that are still connected with Anthony are the ones who are making money,” she wrote. (Both Ahmed and Spair say they’ve never received money from William.) Still, she remained conflicted: “It was Steph’s decision not to see a doctor. She’s responsible for that,” she wrote, but maintained that William “built a relationship with her based on this mutual belief that he had perfect information about her health.” She told the story of Tisone’s illness and death at greater length and elaborated on Tisone’s closeness with William—even if she had stopped paying for sessions. “Yes, it’s a fact that Steph wasn’t a client of Anthony’s,” she wrote. “But now do you see how she was so much more than that?”
The back-and-forth among William affiliates set off debates across the network of Facebook groups formed around interpreting his work. The month after Ahmed’s and Spair’s letters, he did a live stream on the platform. “I’ve always known about the paid trolls out there,” William said. He claimed that two women reached out to him and told him that a “corporation or this entity or group or some kind of association or something” contacted multiple people and offered “not a little bit of money, like a large amount of money” to “make up slanderous stories, tall tales, crazy claims to weaken Medical Medium credibility.”
Afew months after Sarah’s blog post, in June 2020, Ken Turkel, a lawyer retained by William who has represented Hulk Hogan and Sarah Palin in their battles against Gawker Media and The New York Times, sent cease-and-desist letters to her and others who posted about Tisone’s death. “As you supposedly know,” Turkel wrote, “Mr. William considered Stephanie to be a friend, and for you to imply that he played some role in her death devastated him.” Sarah had already removed the posts after the blowback. Turkel said that the record of text and voice messages would show that William had told Tisone to seek traditional care from a doctor, but did not include them out of privacy concerns. The matter began to die down.
Over the last few years, as both William’s celebrity glow and the online discussion of Tisone dissipated, he has settled into a life of professional proximity to fame. He struck up a public friendship with Tony Robbins. Miranda Kerr told New York magazine that his book Cleanse to Heal “transformed the way I think about food.” In August 2020, he wore dark sunglasses as he appeared on an episode of the short-lived podcast In My Feels.
Cohosted by Noah Cyrus, the show had previously featured interviews with the life coach Jay Shetty and the business influencer Gary Vaynerchuk. William advised Cyrus to take up spirulina, cilantro, and wild blueberries. He talked about aliens on his podcast and posted a juice shot recipe for chemtrail exposure. “You can come and go as you please,” William recently said in an online chat group, “which you can’t do in a cult.”
Friends who knew both Tisone and William continue to reckon with the role he played in her life, as well as the extent to which they went along with it. One recalls a maxim that William texted Tisone: “It’s loving others and having compassion for others that’s more important. So don’t go too crazy loving yourself.”
“He never said this shit to me,” the friend says.
One practitioner I spoke to told me she abandoned her association with the Medical Medium after coming to terms with Tisone’s death. She still keeps tabs on William on social media. “There’s a new group after us,” she says. “A new inner circle.”
Nonetheless, she says, “I still feel best when I do what he recommends.”
This story has been updated.
On the advice of the mother of a family for whom she had nannied, Tisone booked a consultation with Anthony William, known on social media and in his books as the Medical Medium. A 53-year-old former health food store owner from Connecticut, William claims that, at four years old, a spirit visited him and gave him the ability to scan bodies for disease by sight.
During Tisone’s hour-long $400 phone call with William, he said that heavy metals from vaccines caused her migraines and that the Epstein-Barr virus was hiding out in her liver. He recommended that she start a regimen of wild blueberries, spirulina, cilantro, zinc, and vitamin B12, and later said that high estrogen levels fueled her headaches.
William has said that negative energy can be a source of disease and that he can teach you to clear it; that he can give followers emotional support to rewire their brains and souls after post-traumatic stress disorder from long-term illness; that he can speak to the entity he calls the “Spirit of Compassion” on their behalf.
He has said that his information is decades ahead of science, that he knows if objects are hidden in the walls of old homes, and that he fell into a long coma after running past a chemical spill from an overturned truck. His former associates say that much of his follower base is made up of women dealing with chronic illness and pain.
“It actually tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it,” Tisone would later tell a friend. “That’s why Anthony’s approach is so empowering.” The diagnostic call buoyed her, and she started learning William’s vernacular. “The true cause of breast cancer is the Epstein-Barr virus,” he wrote in his 2017 book Thyroid Healing. In the coming years, Tisone and William developed a friendship, and he eventually dropped his consultation fees. She began to work for William as an occasional assistant, accompanying him on trips to visit clients and speak at events. She held out hope, she often told friends and family, that she could one day work for him full-time. (Through his counsel, William declined repeated requests to comment on the record for this story.)
Subscribe Now William is a frantic presence on his YouTube channel and social media accounts—he has 4 million Instagram followers. An article about his work published by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in 2015 became the site’s most read story that year. With his hair tied in its regular short ponytail, William showed up in a YouTube video with Novak Djokovic’s wife, Jelena; on a 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, waving his hands over Kim Kardashian and Kanye West; in a podcast interview with Kate Hudson.
He traveled to Los Angeles to make nighttime house calls for patrons. In 2019, publications including this magazine traced surging demand for celery juice among the wealthy and health-conscious to one of his signature recommendations.
William SHOWED UP in a YouTube video with Novak Djokovic’s wife, Jelena; on a 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, waving his hands over KIM KARDASHIAN AND KANYE WEST; in a podcast interview with Kate Hudson.
To some degree, William has drawn from folk tradition in his work. He has compared himself to Edgar Cayce, who claimed to be clairvoyant and became known as a founding father of New Age. William’s ascent has also coincided with the boom the wellness industry has undergone in the last decade as an ever-growing swath of consumers explores ideas like raw diets and detoxes. It’s been a boon to a now common brand of social media entrepreneur. For many followers, William has functioned as an amusement or a supplemental health source. To a certain percentage of true believers, though, the Medical Medium serves as community and identity.
AdvertisementAs William gained more exposure, experts began to warn against his pseudoscience. “Promoting the Medical Medium is no different than promoting anti-vaccine views or cleanses or coffee enemas,” Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco ob-gyn and leading Goop critic, told the online magazine Inverse in 2018. “The minimum is that people waste money, but there is great potential for harm with many of the therapies that are recommended and delays in diagnosis.” William often folds his defense against such critiques into his pitch. “I noticed that there’s this desperate, desperate need to take down the Medical Medium out there,” he recently said in an online chat group.
“STEPHANIE RELATED to Anthony as he said he was,” says a friend. “JUST UNDER GOD.”
Like other alternative health practitioners, William’s site includes standard disclaimer language:
“Anthony William…is not a licensed medical doctor, chiropractor, osteopathic physician, naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, pharmacist, psychologist, psychotherapist, or other formally licensed healthcare professional, practitioner or provider of any kind. Anthony William, Medical Medium does not render medical, psychological, or other professional advice or treatment, nor does it provide or prescribe any medical diagnosis, treatment, medication, or remedy.”
AdvertisementTisone’s belief in William never wavered. She was, according to her friends and family, a 30-something woman with a high emotional quotient, a lifelong student with a tendency to commit herself totally to various diet protocols or gurus. Where other of William’s millions of followers might treat his dictates as larks or view them as part of the vast online orbit of self-billed health experts, Tisone found herself transfixed. “Stephanie related to Anthony as he said he was,” says a friend. “Just under God.” Through her association with William, Tisone spent time at the homes of Robert De Niro and Demi Moore, where he would advise them to buy thousands of dollars in supplements. (Representatives for both actors declined to comment.)
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.Between 2014 and 2017, according to a record of Tisone’s text and voice messages obtained from her brother, Tisone and William kept in regular communication that was as steady as it was wide-ranging. They analyzed her health and his career progress; she asked him about the circumstances of actor Brittany Murphy’s death, and how to handle debt. Tisone also frequently texted with William’s wife, Rachel Schutzman, and several Medical Medium associates about various ailments and her understanding of William’s advice.
Before William started his current business, he and Schutzman ran a health food store in the roughly 2,000-person town of Machias, Maine. According to a 2001 report in local newspaper The Lubec Light, the shop marked the couple’s first retail venture since William began his career in natural healing in 1985. William eventually moved to Florida, where a Naples yoga studio advertised $12 medical intuitive readings with him. He began phone consultations as the Medical Medium in the early 2010s and saw his profile begin to rise. He performed a reading for Moore in 2014 and got a major break when the leading New Age publisher Hay House released Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness the following year.
Prefame Medical Medium clients remember William spending extra time on the phone with them consulting and gossiping about raw food gurus. “He talks in this sweet voice,” says one. As a published author, that availability shifted. “Books give credibility,” Janis Donnaud, a New York literary agent for health and cooking authors, says. “Something different than selling people supplements.” In 2016, William established an informal franchise system of health practitioners. These affiliates didn’t pay William but were steeped in his thinking and spread the word.
By then, William’s and Tisone’s social circles overlapped. She had become close with Phil McCluskey, a public speaker and author known in the raw food world for his 200-pound weight loss. At the beginning of 2015, McCluskey and his wife, Casey, an Australian former raw food coach and especially dedicated Medical Medium student, began helping William.
The McCluskeys own a supplement company in Florida named Vimergy that William often recommends. (Phil and Casey have described themselves as the Medical Medium’s director of operations and director of content and education, but both say they have never worked for William.) As William prepared his book debut, Tisone asked Phil McCluskey for help getting more work with William. He told Tisone they couldn’t because the team had increased its Facebook ad spend to push William’s book.
(McCluskey says he had checked with William’s team and was relaying this news on its behalf.)
The Medical Medium became a polished brand with textbook-style offerings. Even by the volatile standards of the health personality business, William’s full-fledged emergence looked sudden. “It just seemed to be there one day,” Donnaud says. “He has been working on this for a really long time,” the early client says, “and he has been trying to find fame and fortune.”
William began holding live events. One of his followers flew to attend the first one at the Sheraton Sand Key Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, in February 2016. She had been blowing through her savings trying to alleviate years of illness and had her first phone call with William the following week.
“Thousands of people were waiting to talk to him,” she remembers, “and here I was.” She thought she’d never speak with him again, but he texted her a few days later. “I couldn’t believe he was reaching out to me on a personal level,” she says. “This was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” William eventually named the client as a practitioner on his referral page. That November, with De Niro and his family in the audience and Tisone volunteering at the event, she gave a testimonial to William onstage at Loews Hollywood Hotel.
AdvertisementWilliam became Hay House’s most successful author. He bought two new homes. Other self-styled medical intuitives flocked to him. Without William’s recognition, the follower turned practitioner says, “You’re just anyone else.” (William prefaced his online referral list with another disclaimer: “The names and associated links are provided for informational purposes only and are not intended to state or imply that Anthony William or Anthony William, Inc. recommends, endorses, supports, sponsors, or is in any way affiliated or associated with any person or entity listed below, or any linked website or content.”)
“You’re NOT ALLOWED to talk about your own level of connection with him,” a practitioner says, “so IT’S HARD TO KNOW about someone else’s.”
A vocal base of Medical Medium enthusiasts coalesced on Facebook and Reddit. They’d dissect William’s diet recommendations and share their own experiences. “We’re all a family at Medical Medium, and it’s the safest place,” he has said. “The family that’s been through hell and back. It’s the forgotten souls, I call ’em. It’s the people who have been swept under the carpet, who’ve been sick, and they’ve been through so much, and there’s no answers out there.” On camera, he wraps his eccentricities in a smiling benevolence. “I know everything about coconuts,” he once said. “I know it’s a bold statement, but it’s the truth.”
William’s closest acolytes maintained his mystique. “You’re not allowed to talk about your own level of connection with him,” the practitioner says, “so it’s hard to know about someone else’s.” In a 2015 text, he told Tisone, “No one cares about the truth!! Do you think that vaccines are the only screwup???” Shortly after publishing his first book, he told her to “write a review dude and retaliate the evil review someone just put up” on Amazon. “Maybe throw a comment telling person how wrong and they obviously didn’t read it.”
Tisone was 20 years old when she absorbed her first health book—by Suzanne Somers, the sitcom actor. It was 2000. The social media–enabled wellness boom was still years off, but long-thriving subcultures tied to New Age thought and alternative diets were spreading online. Tisone actively pursued her passions. She studied the raw food authors Douglas Graham and Don Bennett and the naturopath Robert Morse. She spent a season living in a commune with David Wolfe, a superfood enthusiast and conspiracy theorist.
By her 30s, Tisone liked to joke about how she’d never been kissed. She had the word Love tattooed on her arm and a gentle communion with kids, which friends attribute to her enduring state of wonder. Above all, they describe her as solicitous and devoted, a connector in the raw food community.
She met Sarma Melngailis at Pure Food & Wine, the aughts-era raw vegan hot spot in Manhattan that Melngailis opened before serving jail time for grand larceny and tax fraud.
Tisone met William in person for the first time in 2014, the year after her initial phone consultation, eventually landing some work with him as an ad hoc travel assistant. During their trips, she drove him around, ironed his shirts, and went on Whole Foods runs. They once got into a car accident on the way back from Moore’s home in Los Angeles.
As Tisone grew closer to William, she added further restrictions to her raw diet, cutting out nuts, seeds, and avocado. For dinner, she sometimes ate two heads of romaine lettuce with cayenne and lemon. She would tell friends and family that she couldn’t say too much about her work with William, but because they regularly texted, she could bring him their concerns. One family for whom Tisone nannied thought that vaccines had harmed their daughter’s health and tried introducing bone broth to her diet.
“Bone broth fad is by far the most retarded of all time,” William texted Tisone. “For some stupid demented reason people believe it does something for their body like the Druids did when they were sacrificing humans and making soup out of them in the dark ages of satanism.”
“Thank you for confirming my gut feeling,” she wrote back.
Tisone continued pursuing work with William, and she tried to broker a Medical Medium consultation for Timothy Schmit, the longtime bassist for the Eagles, whose wife she had met through a raw food friend. Some William associates thought of Tisone as too wide-eyed, according to one, but her responsibilities afforded her an air of uncommon proximity. “There’s very few that I trust in life,” William texted her. “And your the most.”
When William and Schutzman moved in April 2017, they gave Tisone a job preparing the house for their arrival. Despite her excitement, Tisone kept the gig quiet as best she could, telling her brother and parents not to let anyone else know. “This is super duper PRIVATE and so its really important you don’t share this with anyone,” Schutzman texted her.
The month prior, in March 2017, Tisone had texted Schutzman with a health development. “I’m assuming this isn’t anything to be worried about and prob just detox related,” she wrote. “I noticed a pretty large lump in my left breast today.” Schutzman responded, “Breast lumps can be lymph or node related if you’re detoxing, during your cycle, or under the weather, but you should always have it looked at by your physician, thermography scans are ok to get too if needed.”
“You can give it a week or two and see if it decreases in size or swelling too,” Schutzman added.
“Yes feels like detox I will do that and observe it over next week or 2,” Tisone replied. “I’ve done thermography in past so I am familiar with that So I’ll just keep an eye on it.” (A thermography scan is a painless test that measures skin temperature and doesn’t require radiation; the FDA and American Cancer Society have published warnings about using one as a diagnostic tool for breast cancer.)
A few days later, Tisone followed up with Schutzman. A New Jersey–based woman named Muneeza Ahmed has established herself as a leading voice in the Medical Medium community—she describes herself as the first practitioner in the world to be endorsed by William. Tisone had sought her input, and Ahmed told her that she thought it was an Epstein-Barr virus “activity packing in toxins into the cyst.” (“I did the best I could to keep up with the texts Steph sent and while I cared for her and always wanted to support her as a friend,” Ahmed says, “I would at times feel very overwhelmed by the sheer volume of texts and the large variety of topics she asked me about.” Ahmed also says that she told Tisone to see a doctor to address her lump—but that she understood her to have “EBV from mono as a kid.”)
Advertisement“Updating you on Muneeza’s opinion about my breast lump,” Tisone texted Schutzman, telling her she’d been advised to up her intake of chaga mushroom tea and that Ahmed was sending breast health massage oil from the beauty brand Living Libations. Ahmed offered Tisone a 10 percent discount on the $30 product.
Schutzman didn’t text back about Ahmed’s assessment, but about two weeks later, she told Tisone, “I wanted to give you a heads up that Ant & I won’t be able to answer any health related questions for the next month or so, all our energy will need to be on this move.”
While Tisone was readying the house, she told a friend in a voice message, “Anthony told me that my body is transforming since I’ve been here, like my health and everything has gotten a lot better.” When the couple got there in April, Tisone spent time with them before heading back to Pennsylvania.
Members of William’s inner circle at the time understood his attention as a commodity, and Tisone’s messages have a deferential tone. While Schutzman and William work closely together, in August, Tisone conveyed her awareness of a lump in her breast directly to William. “I have a quite large lump in my left breast since March, feels like I need to tell you,” she wrote, adding, “No worries if you can’t respond to this.”
William’s brushes with fame were becoming more common. He described Mark Burnett, the producer of Survivor and The Apprentice, as one of his good friends to one early client, and told her that he only texted her, Moore, and other celebrities. In October 2017, along with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson, he appeared in Heal, a documentary about mind-body medicine directed by Kelly Noonan, who is married to private-equity billionaire Alec Gores. The following year, the couple and Town & Country editor in chief Stellene Volandes cohosted a book party in Los Angeles for the actor Roma Downey, who is married to Burnett. A guest recalls William sticking close by Sylvester Stallone’s side as the night wore on.
The testimonials on William’s site snowballed to include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Diane von Furstenberg, Naomi Campbell, Alexis Bledel, James Van Der Beek, Calvin Harris, Rashida Jones, Kelly Rutherford, Lisa Rinna, Carla Gugino, Pharrell Williams, Hilary Swank, and Adam Sandler. His co-signs could range from spirited (Swank’s and Sandler’s representatives vouch for theirs) to something more like a framed headshot at the dry cleaners (Van Der Beek’s rep says he wrote his eight years ago) to aspirational (William listed Sophia Bush in the acknowledgments of four of his books; a rep says the actor was never a client but they once met when she accompanied a friend to the friend’s consultation).
William soon hit the peak of his own celebrity. “So your name came up from my cousin sending me screenshots of your Instagram, and then other people just sending me your name,” Kim Kardashian told him on the 2019 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. He proceeded to tell the reality star that copper in her liver was causing outbreaks of her chronic psoriasis.
Steven Novella, a neurologist and the founding editor of the site Science-Based Medicine, sees William as part of a lineage of health-oriented operators including Cayce and Franz Mesmer, the late 18th-century physician who practiced hypnotism and befriended Mozart and Marie Antoinette.
“People who are either wealthy or celebrities aren’t necessarily scientists, or even very smart, and so they become targets,” Novella says. “These kinds of people will prey upon them because they know that their endorsement is worth a lot.”
William’s nonfamous clientele also span a spectrum of belief. While there are die-hard converts such as Tisone, there are those who approach his practice with something of a wink. There are happy customers and vocal proponents as well as those who have gone all in on the Medical Medium but walked away unsatisfied. Dee Sclafani, a piano teacher in Richmond, Virginia, discovered William in 2013, the same year as Tisone, when she suddenly couldn’t make it through one of her regular runs. She soon found William online.
Sclafani initially viewed William in messianic terms and proposed to him that she make a documentary about his life. She referred friends to him, and one decided that she would book a session as long as Sclafani would join her on the call to calm her nerves. But Sclafani drifted as the cumulative consultation fees ballooned and he became scarce: “I tried these supplements and spent a ton of fucking money.”
“You’re coming from a desperation energy,” she says, “and that’s not a good energy to come from.”
‘Bro I’m [not] doing good at all,” Tisone texted William in July 2017. “Back in excruciating pain. It’s been weeks but way worse now. Sorry to bug you.” Hours later, she wrote, “Thank you for your support.
And yea think the stress you mentioned is financial stress. Praying for that to come to completion. I love you and I appreciate all you do for me.” Tisone sent photos of bumps on her skin a few days later and asked if she had shingles. William said she had “baby shingles”—“which is what the back prob was originally”—and advised her to take vitamin C and lysine.
Tisone sought out a number of other alternative health practitioners to address various subsets of her symptoms. She spoke remotely to Teshna Beaulieu, a chiropractor and a self-described specialist in quantum neurology and neuro-emotional technique; Tienko Ting, the author of Natural Chi Movement: Accessing the World of the Miraculous; and several Medical Medium devotees. Tisone conveyed many of the assessments she received to William.
In August, Tisone couldn’t get up. She had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor at her parents’ house and her back pain had become unmanageable. She kept the lump from her family, later texting William that she was not up front with her father because his sister had breast cancer. Tisone discussed the growth and all other manner of health issues with others, but at this moment of crisis, she went directly to William.
They exchanged 156 voice messages between August 30 and September 3. They discussed several opinions Tisone had by then received and whether she would get an MRI. She did not at that time.
As her concern grew, Tisone often back-channeled to try to understand the thicket of health ideas contained in William’s messages and phone calls. “Sweetheart in your audio you said Ant didn’t know why you have nausea,” Casey McCluskey texted her. “But he does know. Maybe you didn’t hear him correctly love. Do you want me to text you the reason?” (McCluskey says that all of Tisone’s friends knew that her nausea was from migraines.)
“Did you ever have a lump in your breast?” Tisone texted McCluskey in July. “I think I told you I have one right? Since March.”
Tisone spent decades in the ALTERNATIVE HEALTH ECOSYSTEM, and it’s difficult to get a full picture of the advice she followed. “Just want to make sure you know I DON’T HAVE A DOC that’s overseeing all this,” she texted William.
“Yeah you told me,” McCluskey responded. “It will go, just takes time especially while you’re having a viral flare.”
“Stephanie had told me during that time that she had seen a doctor multiple times,” McCluskey says. “She also told me she had a viral issue.” By this point, Schutzman had already told Tisone breast lumps can be “lymph or node related” but that she should have it looked at, and Ahmed had spoken about it with her. A couple of weeks later, Tisone reminded William of the lump. She became unable to work.
Her father, a manager for government construction projects, covered most of her health costs, and a friend sent her money throughout 2017 to buy supplements. That August, she stunned her health community friends by missing the annual Woodstock Fruit Festival, and one of them came to visit her. She shared with the friend that she had a breast lump but assured her that she was talking to William.
‘Sorry to bug you again but these things I am legitimately worried about,” Tisone texted William toward the beginning of October. She was vomiting and her throat was starting to feel swollen.
“Think we will find a dr to come to house,” he wrote. “Let’s look tomorrow.”
“If you get so bad and can’t breathe, you can always call emergency,” he said a few minutes later. “But I think it’s just acids burning throat.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about having a doctor come here to draw blood,” Tisone texted. She didn’t have health insurance and didn’t “want to get trapped and fall down the rabbit hole.”
“I understand,” he responded. “How is it.”
Tisone had spent nearly two decades in the alternative health ecosystem, and by her own account, it’s difficult to get a full picture of the advice she followed. “Just want to make sure you know I don’t have a doc that’s overseeing all this,” she later texted William. “Just a mish mash of random people.”
Her reliance on this community was broader than William, but time and again she returned to him. “Haven’t heard from anthony,” Tisone texted a friend and former William assistant, “but Tienko says there is a virus in my intestines.” She asked William if a chiropractor correctly identified her slipped disc and he said she did. She told him that Beaulieu had used her neuro-emotional technique over FaceTime. “Yayyyyyy!!!!!,” he responded, adding, “That can help a sensitive nervy girl like you.”
Tisone followed up a few days later about whether she should get blood work, and William said she should because her sodium level could have dropped from vomiting. She said she was vomiting less and asked if she still needed to.
William responded in a series of voice messages. “You’re dealing with the shingles virus, tried and true, like 100%,” he said in one. “I mean, that’s the virus that flared up your disc, everything else.”
If a doctor could come and draw blood, he said, it might make her family feel better. “I think your family really needs you to see you get at least a little support,” he said, adding, “They could lose perspective over time, even though it’s a slipped disc keeping you from getting up.”
Later that week, Tisone’s nipple began to bleed. She sent William a photo of stains on her shirt and asked if she had a hiatal hernia. “You didn’t have one months ago when I looked,” he responded, “but now that you vomit this much it’s possible.”
Tisone’s doctor was forthright about how much time she had left; she responded by asking if someone could contact William to check.Courtesy Tony Tisone.When she asked what he thought of her bleeding “from my left nipple on same breast as cyst,” he responded, “I’m not liking that at all”; “but don’t want you worried right now”; “just get your back better”; “as your back gets better then the vomiting should stop”; “it should come together.”
“Does it have to do with the cyst?” she texted. “Prob not,” he told her.
It had been about seven months since Tisone texted Schutzman about a lump in her breast. William and Tisone had exchanged hundreds of text and voice messages about her health. According to the phone records reviewed for this story, William never told her not to see a doctor. On at least several occasions, he suggested she seek other medical help. Over the same period, he told her he could do a bacterial scan on her, and she asked him to ask the Spirit of Compassion if there was “anything pressing on the nerves that we can’t see with an MRI?”
Tisone wasn’t getting any better. She had blood drawn the week after her nipple began bleeding and told William that her breast was throbbing where the cyst was. “When did the breast get this bad,” he asked. After Tisone sent the results of her blood test, William wrote to her, “Can’t fuck around with that,” and said to get a thermography scan and ultrasound. Schutzman arranged to have a new mattress, bed frame, bedding, and pillows sent to her.
Tisone sought more clarity the following week. She told William in a voice message she didn’t want to go to the hospital unless “you honestly agree that that is necessary” and that “you made it clear what I need to do for my breasts.”
“Steph it is important to have the breast looked at and cared for for sure,” William responded in a text. “It’s always wonderful too that your family knows your reaching out for care, they must be very very worried about you so don’t be afraid of getting attention from a doc on the breast.”
About a week and a half later, in mid-November, Tisone texted him the results of her thermography scan, which showed an array of elevated temperatures. She sent him more blood work, and they started discussing mammograms and biopsies. She asked him to join her on a call with a doctor she was now speaking with, and he said he couldn’t. “When we talk next about my breast can it be on the phone and can we ask spirit to help us see what’s happening??” Tisone asked. “Thank you I love you.” He didn’t respond. She wrote again the next day after a family doctor called her with X-ray and blood results.
“What is a compression fracture?”; “I’m kind of freaking out”; “I need a plan”; “My goal and vision is that spirit and yourself will rd and scan me and will put me on a perfect protocol and my breast will heal itself with nothing invasive.”
The next day, Schutzman texted her, “It’s been super hectic the past few weeks but I will make sure Ant gets back to you ASAP.”
William never texted her again, but Casey McCluskey relayed a thought in December: “I think all the vomiting and all the immobility has just given you a ton of pain. That’s what Anthony said it would be a few days ago.” (McCluskey says that she didn’t speak to William about Tisone specifically and that it was a general conversation.)
Ahmed and McCluskey say they believed Tisone’s family didn’t want William involved, and McCluskey says she understood that the family took Tisone’s phone away. Tisone texted with Schutzman a few times the following year. Tisone and McCluskey corresponded throughout the course of that year. Tisone’s brother says her family never took her phone away or sought to limit her contact with William.
In December, Tisone’s family, now aware of the lump, took her for a biopsy. Before the results came back, she had a seizure that sent her to the hospital. Doctors induced a coma for three days, and she learned that she would never walk much again. She had stage IV metastatic breast cancer, which had eroded her spine.
“They’re assuming it’s tumors which is not smart as the radiation can cause problems,” McCluskey texted her. (McCluskey says she was echoing another Tisone friend’s fear.)
Most of the friends who took care of Tisone after her cancer diagnosis had some tie to the Medical Medium world. In August 2018, one of them made a trip to the beach with her. “She always was hopeful,” the friend says. William’s disappearance hurt and confused Tisone, but she kept faith that he had the answers. Her doctor told friends and family that they needed to be honest.
He had been forthright about how much time she had left, and Tisone responded by asking if someone could contact William to check. “I’m always behind you,” she once texted him. “It’s my purpose.”
In November 2018, Tisone died of breast cancer. She was 38 years old.
In her final weeks, the pain of William’s absence lingered. “I don’t want to die Can you PLEASE talk to anthony for me,” she texted McCluskey five days before her death. “Maybe he will have a solution or something.” McCluskey responded that she was sorry; she says she wasn’t sure if the text was from Tisone.
News of Tisone’s death began to circulate.
William offered another medical personality an unsolicited clarification that he wasn’t responsible. A bit over a year after Tisone died, a friend wrote about her on Instagram. Sarah (a pseudonym) still mostly stuck to William’s methods.
She previously did work for Medical Medium, and was close enough to William that in 2018, they discussed her business proposal for a health retreat that never materialized. Her father had died shortly after Tisone, and in her post, Sarah reflected on their contrasting circumstances. Her father had undergone traditional cancer treatment, while Tisone “did all the healing protocols you can think of” and “was guided personally” by William.
Ahmed and Kimberly Spair, another health coach touting William’s name, responded to Sarah’s post by sending letters to their respective followings. Their notes covered similar ground and used much of the same language. Spair said that Tisone was not under William’s care or a client of his and advised her followers to look past Sarah’s post. “Vulnerability is real during healing, and the last thing we need is a story to be twisted and throw us into fear, doubt, and adrenal spiral,” she wrote.
After seeing the letters, Sarah aired her distress in a blog post.
“The only people who knew Steph that are still connected with Anthony are the ones who are making money,” she wrote. (Both Ahmed and Spair say they’ve never received money from William.) Still, she remained conflicted: “It was Steph’s decision not to see a doctor. She’s responsible for that,” she wrote, but maintained that William “built a relationship with her based on this mutual belief that he had perfect information about her health.” She told the story of Tisone’s illness and death at greater length and elaborated on Tisone’s closeness with William—even if she had stopped paying for sessions. “Yes, it’s a fact that Steph wasn’t a client of Anthony’s,” she wrote. “But now do you see how she was so much more than that?”
The back-and-forth among William affiliates set off debates across the network of Facebook groups formed around interpreting his work. The month after Ahmed’s and Spair’s letters, he did a live stream on the platform. “I’ve always known about the paid trolls out there,” William said. He claimed that two women reached out to him and told him that a “corporation or this entity or group or some kind of association or something” contacted multiple people and offered “not a little bit of money, like a large amount of money” to “make up slanderous stories, tall tales, crazy claims to weaken Medical Medium credibility.”
Afew months after Sarah’s blog post, in June 2020, Ken Turkel, a lawyer retained by William who has represented Hulk Hogan and Sarah Palin in their battles against Gawker Media and The New York Times, sent cease-and-desist letters to her and others who posted about Tisone’s death. “As you supposedly know,” Turkel wrote, “Mr. William considered Stephanie to be a friend, and for you to imply that he played some role in her death devastated him.” Sarah had already removed the posts after the blowback. Turkel said that the record of text and voice messages would show that William had told Tisone to seek traditional care from a doctor, but did not include them out of privacy concerns. The matter began to die down.
Over the last few years, as both William’s celebrity glow and the online discussion of Tisone dissipated, he has settled into a life of professional proximity to fame. He struck up a public friendship with Tony Robbins. Miranda Kerr told New York magazine that his book Cleanse to Heal “transformed the way I think about food.” In August 2020, he wore dark sunglasses as he appeared on an episode of the short-lived podcast In My Feels.
Cohosted by Noah Cyrus, the show had previously featured interviews with the life coach Jay Shetty and the business influencer Gary Vaynerchuk. William advised Cyrus to take up spirulina, cilantro, and wild blueberries. He talked about aliens on his podcast and posted a juice shot recipe for chemtrail exposure. “You can come and go as you please,” William recently said in an online chat group, “which you can’t do in a cult.”
Friends who knew both Tisone and William continue to reckon with the role he played in her life, as well as the extent to which they went along with it. One recalls a maxim that William texted Tisone: “It’s loving others and having compassion for others that’s more important. So don’t go too crazy loving yourself.”
“He never said this shit to me,” the friend says.
One practitioner I spoke to told me she abandoned her association with the Medical Medium after coming to terms with Tisone’s death. She still keeps tabs on William on social media. “There’s a new group after us,” she says. “A new inner circle.”
Nonetheless, she says, “I still feel best when I do what he recommends.”
This story has been updated.
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