In the 17 years since the bewildering day that Charlie Goldsmith discovered what he calls his "gift," the 35-year-old energy healer from Melbourne, Australia, has been trying to get someone in the medical world to take him seriously. He has wanted to be of use, working with the formal sanction of doctors in hospitals. He has wanted to be recognized for what he knows he can do—not simply to justify the strange turn his life took when he was 18, but to shore up the credibility of a practice long plagued by fraud and religious superstition, and to make the experience of discovering and developing a healing gift like his less traumatic for other people. It's one thing to be teased by friends; it's another to be brushed off by the medical profession as a well-meaning but deluded screwball whose results probably have less to do with energy than with the placebo effects of his kind and empathetic manner, perhaps even his salubrious blue eyes and handsome surf-side looks. (When you Google Goldsmith, up pop Australian tabloid images of him and Miranda Kerr—let's get to that later.)

In Melbourne, Goldsmith brought a sheaf of testimonials to a hospital for integrated medicine; no one was interested. Knowing he possibly sounded crazy, he e-mailed specialists in infectious disease, emphasizing his desire to participate in research. One of the few replies he got was from a prominent doctor at the University of Adelaide, who told him: "Even if you can do what you say you can do, no one will ever fund a study." Goldsmith seldom drinks, but he tied one on that day.

"I wanted to be studied," he said. "I kept wondering, What is it going to take for people to stop and say, 'This is pretty compelling'? If you're good in tennis, if you're good in math, there's a path; there are people to talk to; you can prove yourself. If you're a healer, what's the path? You can work out of a second bedroom, but it's borderline illegal and you never have any real credibility."

It seemed not to matter that a former professional basketball player who'd had three knee surgeries and couldn't walk downstairs said that Goldsmith had gotten rid of his knee pain and that now he could play pickup games without anti-inflammatory medication. Or that a member of the Australian aerial ski team rehabbing a torn medial collateral ligament was able to bend her elbow, pain-free, after a healing session. Or that a 35-year-old named Adrian Waugh, who couldn't eat an undercooked egg without his throat constricting in 20 seconds and his face looking as if he'd been in a bar fight, tried one after a treatment and had no allergic reaction. ("Everything is still all good with my allergy—I'm actually about to eat eggs this morning," he e-mailed me in July, more than a year after his treatment.) Dozens of grateful patients have credited Goldsmith with curing herpes and alleviating pain caused by migraines, car crashes, arthritis, and phantom limbs.

The history of medicine is littered with testimonials touting methods and remedies that ultimately proved ineffective (or worse, harmful) or that produced results for reasons having less to do with practitioners' claims than with natural healing processes or placebo effects. Goldsmith knew any traction he'd get would have to come from data, not anecdotes. He doesn't charge for healing work, but when patients wondered how they might repay him, he would ask them to put a word in the ear of doctors or researchers they might know. After 15 fruitless years, he realized he had to change his approach.

"I expected people would go, 'Wow, this is amazing!' " he said. "But instead what I got were blank stares. I realized I was like a black musician in the 1930s trying to get a record company to listen to my music, and all the executives were saying, 'No one wants to hear your songs.' It suddenly clicked that if people heard me singing on the corner, then maybe a record company would be interested."

On a trip to Los Angeles, he went to a meeting of a herpes support group and offered free healing treatments. In the summer of 2013, he volunteered to give free healings at the YinOva Center, an acupuncture clinic in Manhattan. YinOva founder Jill Blakeway, a highly regarded practitioner, had started the in-hospital acupuncture service at NYU Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, a 450-bed inner-city teaching hospital that serves a predominantly Latino, Chinese, and Caribbean community. (Patients' bills of rights are posted in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.) Through her he met Kell Julliard, the assistant vice president for clinical research at Lutheran, who says he himself has had some experiences with healing energy that he's found "incontrovertible." Julliard was overseeing more than 120 clinical studies at the hospital and its affiliated clinics; after meeting with Goldsmith, he was intrigued enough to add one more.

Hands-on healing goes back thousands of years, but it's only in the last half century or so that the practice has been studied scientifically. In 1957, Bernard Grad, a Canadian biologist who is often called the father of hands-on healing research, began a series of experiments with a Hungarian healer named Oskar Estebany. To eliminate the role of suggestion and the placebo response, which can often confound healing studies on human subjects, Grad had Estebany work on plants and mice. He snipped patches of skin off anesthetized mice. Those that Estebany treated—he held his hands over them—healed more quickly than those he didn't treat. He was also able to delay the development of goiters in mice on iodine-deficient diets. Barley seeds watered with a saline solution that Estebany had held in his hands grew faster than seeds watered with a solution he did not touch, suggesting that the healer was somehow able to mitigate the growth-inhibiting effect of salt.

Some 200 studies have detailed the apparent effects of energy healers on the physiology of humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and cells in culture, and even on the activity of enzymes.

Today some 200 studies (published in peer-reviewed science journals but, for the most part, not in prominent medical ones) have detailed the apparent effects of energy healers on the physiology of humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and cells in culture, and even on the activity of enzymes. As pioneering medical researchers in the last two decades have explored how the mind can change the body—how objective physiological indices of health can be influenced by the subjective reality of emotions, thoughts, intentions, expectations, environmental conditions, beliefs, social relationships, and prayers—medical science has begun to appreciate the intricate reciprocity of psyche and soma. Standardized practices such as acupuncture, Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, and Reiki, which are based on the idea that positive changes can be promoted by balancing or adjusting the flow of energy in the body, are increasingly offered as complementary therapy for pain relief and other ailments in many hospitals and major medical centers, including Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, the Cleveland Clinic, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

And yet doctors interested in energy healing are often mocked as quacks and promoters of pseudoscience. To critics, it's not just that the mechanism of energy healing is poorly understood (as are the mechanisms of many mainstream therapies); it's that it isn't even plausible. Despite its palpable reality to healers and their patients, the so-called "subtle energy" of hands-on healers has never been directly measured, apart from the weak magnetic fields that permeate living organisms. It's an open question how a healer transmits energy—or even if energy is being transmitted. Beyond the clinical evidence of compelling effects, energy healing studies are tangled in the quandary of consciousness and often overlap with studies of the medical effects of prayer. Some of the most dogmatic critics insist energy healing is no different than faith healing, which has caused harm for centuries by framing many diseases, from cancer to epilepsy to diabetes, as the handiwork of evil spirits or the result of misalignment with divine perfection.

"What is neglected, disparaged, and dismissed by critics of energy medicine is the well-recognized placebo effect, which represents the power of self-healing," says Daniel J. Benor, MD, an American psychotherapist living in Canada and a leading advocate of an energy-based holistic approach to medicine; his four-volume Healing Research is the definitive compendium of healing studies. "Whatever else they may do," he says, "it is evident healers are experts in promoting self-healing."

If there is a typical energy healer, Charlie Goldsmith isn't it. Rare are healers pining to be tested. Rare, too, are ones who don't charge for their work. Goldsmith accepted money for healing a few times in the beginning, when he was young and had little income, but since then he has healed for free because it seemed the right thing to do, and it precluded criticism that he was in it for the money. He also has a robust day job: Shortly after his twentieth birthday, he started the first of three businesses, a marketing company called Cassette that now employs 55 people, with offices in Melbourne, Sydney, and Hong Kong, doing branding work for the likes of Nike, Topshop, and scores of Australian companies. He also created a health-food company called Celebrate Health, which he says was generating nearly $6 million (U.S.) in annual sales when he sold it in 2014. Last summer he launched Pumpy Jackson, a company that makes no-sugar-added chocolate products.

Unlike many healers, Goldsmith has never studied in the various energy healing schools; he shuns the fey lingo of auras, chakras, and meridians. His description of how he works makes energy healing seem as simple as watering a marigold or draining a sink. Watching him in action is like watching C-SPAN. "Hands-on healing" is something of a misnomer because most of the time he doesn't do anything with his hands—at NYU Lutheran he never physically touched a patient except on the few occasions when he introduced himself with a handshake. Some people can't feel his energy; those who can often describe it as a "tingling," a flush of heat, a draftlike coolness, a ghostly kinesthetic pressure. (Nothing highlights the poverty of language like trying to describe the subtleties of energy in the body; during the four years that I worked on a book, Afterwards You're a Genius: Faith, Medicine, and the Metaphysics of Healing, I often felt all I could do in the way of description was to "bludgeon the ineffable.")

What distinguishes Goldsmith from most healers I've known is how rapidly he works. He typically stands or sits next to a patient, asks where the trouble is, and then says, "Okay, one second." Where a Reiki or Therapeutic Touch healer will spend 10 or 20 minutes "combing" the energy around a patient's body, and practitioners in some of the more depth-oriented schools will work for an hour or two, Goldsmith closes his eyes, focuses on where the ailment is, and wraps up the treatment in about 30 seconds. Sometimes he extends a hand, but the only consistent sign that something is happening is the fluttering of his eyelids. He may repeat the process a second or third time, each equally brief. His father told him that if he ever did want to charge for healings, he ought to take longer because people wouldn't think they were getting their money's worth.

Goldsmith says his success doesn't depend on whether people can feel what he is doing or even if they think it's real: "I've healed people who don't believe in what I do, and I haven't been able to heal people who do." Experience has taught him that in 2 of every 10 cases, his energy has no effect—he doesn't know why. He doesn't diagnose problems; he depends on feedback from patients not only to know what's wrong and where the pain is, but to learn if they feel better. He has helped people cope with painful side effects of cancer but doubts he can treat it; it baffles him that he has been so effective at treating allergies, frozen joints, herpes outbreaks, and infections but can't do anything about the common cold. And he can't heal himself.

What impressed the doctors who worked with him at NYU Lutheran in September 2013, and again last May in a follow-up study, was his ability to relieve pain and the speed with which he achieved results. In the first study, doctors enrolled 32 patients with refractory pain—that is, pain not responding to medication. The patients had been hospitalized for a range of ailments, including kidney stones, herniated disks, urinary tract infections, diabetes, prostate cancer, an inflamed gallbladder, myeloid leukemia, fluid in the lungs, ischemic colitis, and fractured vertebrae. Over three weeks, Goldsmith addressed 50 distinct complaints; 38 times the patients reported "marked improvement" immediately post-treatment—a success rate of 76 percent.

Twenty-one of the patients also had problems other than pain, such as fever from gangrene, nausea, blood in the urine, herpes on the lip and tongue, and no range of motion in a knee. Of 29 total complaints, 23 showed marked improvement. Goldsmith was unable to affect the slurred speech of a 60-year-old Parkinson's patient, and he couldn't resolve the gangrenous condition in the left leg of a 76-year-old woman. But all in all, his success rate was nearly 8 for 10, the average he expected.

"It was all very foreign and strange at first," said Francois Dufresne, MD, the 36-year-old lead author of a paper on Goldsmith's 2013 work at NYU Lutheran, which was published in June in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. "What was most dramatic to me was Charlie's treatment of a 45-year-old woman who had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2003. The cancer was in her liver and spine and abdomen. She'd been in the hospital several days. She was on an opiate, but the pain was not well controlled. I went into her room with two other doctors. I spoke to her about the study—patients had to consent to the treatment—and I asked her what her level of pain was on a scale of 1 to 10. She said the pain in her mid-lower back was a 7. Charlie came in. He asked her where is the pain exactly, what does it feel like, what makes it better or worse. It was a brief conversation of about 30 seconds. He asked her to close her eyes. He put his hand over the right side of her abdomen about 10 inches away and closed his eyes. His eyelids fluttered. After about 15 or 20 seconds, he asked her how she was feeling. She said her pain decreased by about 30 percent. He tried again, and after another 15 to 20 seconds, she said she had no pain. I'm not sure what I thought. I wasn't confounded or floored, but maybe I should have been. Pain is very, very difficult to treat. The point is to get patients better, and if it happens by means that aren't fully understood, that's okay."

Pain is also tricky to study because it can be diminished by suggestion. Subjective pain ratings are not as persuasive to medical scientists as more objective measurements of disease, such as bacteria levels or white-blood-cell counts, or even the increased range of motion Goldsmith was able to foster in a patient's locked-up knee. But the 2013 study at NYU Lutheran was designed to test the feasibility of using an energy healer in a hospital, not to investigate the mechanism and efficacy of energy healing. The patients enrolled had an array of problems, not one common complaint. There was no "sham treatment" to compare to the actual one.

"We were studying only short-term effects, and we were using 'ordinary judgment' as a measure of patient benefit," Kell Julliard told me. "We needed to break ground. We didn't know under what conditions Charlie could work, what his effect size would be, how patients and physicians would respond. You need to know these things before you can begin to design randomized controlled trials."

Goldsmith's results made it easy for the doctors to look past the limitations of the study. "What was phenomenal was the rapid rate of change and the degree of change in the pain in many of the patients he treated," said one of the authors, Ramsey Joudeh, MD, a 31-year-old attending physician at NYU Lutheran. "Most of our narcotics decrease a patient's pain by 3 to 5 points. If you go from 10, meaning the worst pain you can imagine, to 5, that's significant. In some cases Charlie reduced a patient's pain from 10 to zero. He also treated people with infections where antibiotics were not effective. You could see the shift in a patient's status from stagnant to a rapid healing resolution. I can't quantify it, but I would say Charlie cut days off patients' hospital stays. Watching him work has been humbling in the most extreme way."

Take, for example, patient No. 16 in the 2013 study, a 70-year-old woman with end-stage metastatic colon cancer. She couldn't take medication for the nausea that was causing her to vomit six to eight times a day, any time she tried to eat or drink water. "My sense was to treat the water," Goldsmith recalled. "I said, 'I know you've had trouble eating and drinking. If I gave you a glass of water, could you try to drink it for me?' She was pretty skeptical, but agreed. I was about two meters away from a jug of water by her bed, and I put energy into the water as I would into a person. She drank it."

As the doctors noted in their published paper: "Patient was able to drink water without nausea immediately."

Goldsmith also treated water for patient No. 6, an 87-year-old woman who had a history of coronary artery disease, a pacemaker, a resected bowel, diverticulosis, anemia, and other troubles. She had come into the hospital with pain in her chest, shoulder, and upper abdomen as well as chronic pain in her mouth, neck, and head. In the room with the patient were Goldsmith; two doctors, Ian Kaiser and Yasaman Eslaamizad; and a fourth-year medical student, Tanuj Sood, who made the following notes:

The session began with Charlie energizing a cup of water that was already in the patient's room before he came. The patient then drank the water and was completely healed of the pain…in her left arm; however, the pain in her mouth, neck, and head still persisted.… Next, the patient ate some pudding which she states would typically give her severe epigastric pain. First, Charlie placed his hands over her sternal area without touching her, and then she proceeded to eat the entire…hospital size cup of pudding. After finishing the cup of pudding, she reported no pain at all. Finally, the patient complained of mouth pain that the patient reported to be a lump on the hard palate. After Charlie placed his hand over her head for a few seconds, the lump had decreased in size. Charlie repeated the maneuver with his hand over her head and shrunk the lump in her mouth completely. Finally, Charlie repeated the maneuver for the pain in the patient's neck and healed the patient of her neck pain. A few minutes after this session was over the patient got up and walked out of her room, into the hallway of the hospital, and back to her room. The patient states that this is the first time she has been able to walk without a cane for the past nine years.

The purported energizing of water makes quack-busters particularly apoplectic (the Grad/Estebany plant experiments with healer-treated water notwithstanding), and I asked Goldsmith why instead of treating patient No. 16 herself, he treated the water in her glass.

"Honestly? I was showing off," he said, flashing not just a bit of bluff Aussie confidence, but also a trace of the chronic exasperation he feels knowing that no matter how successful he is, he will have to prove himself anew in the face of reflexive skepticism. He's not the first good-looking human being to have to fight to be taken seriously, but Goldsmith's image is often commented upon by his critics. "What I do is always getting placed in the placebo bucket, which implies that my results are because of what's been triggered in your body or because of what you believe, or how I look. Everything to find an excuse. But I know if I don't put in the effort, it doesn't work. If my looks alone can heal 8 out of 10 people, the medical system needs to reconsider the way it casts doctors. We're wasting the talents of fashion models—they should go stand in hospitals and heal. What would they say if I was ugly—that I can heal because people feel sorry for me?"

Following his first stint at NYU Lutheran, Goldsmith spent a day healing allergy patients in the office of a family doctor in Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City. Allergic sensitivity can be objectively assessed by skin tests. Seven patients, ranging in age from 5 to 60, were tested before and after Goldsmith treated them. In six of the seven cases, the positive tests for allergic sensitivity were negative after the healing, according to notes made by the doctor, who declined to discuss any of the cases with me.

Nothing in Charlie Goldsmith's boyhood suggested the strange turn his life took the summer he got out of high school. He grew up in Melbourne, part of a sprawling brood of nine siblings, many of them half brothers and sisters. His parents split up when he was 18 months old; he lived on and off with both. His mother, Mara, was a housewife and a great cook who instilled his zeal for healthy food. From his father would seem to have come his business acumen: Brian "King of the Night" Goldsmith is credited with inventing the nightclub scene in Melbourne. He opened a café in 1957 called Goldy's, had an affair with the first waitress he hired—who became the influential feminist author Germaine Greer—and in 1977 opened the Underground. The club's clientele included Bob Hope, Shirley MacLaine, Lord Snowdon, Elton John, Liv Ullmann, John McEnroe, and David Bowie, whose ego the proprietor deftly deflated one night when the rock star showed up with two bodyguards. ("Which one of you is Bowie?" he said.) Goldsmith married four times; Charlie, one of his eight children, often hung out in his father's clubs well past a schoolboy's bedtime. He was headstrong. Reading didn't come easily, and he was bored by his classes: "My report cards describe me exactly—a strong leader who doesn't do any homework and doesn't do what he's told."

The summer after he finished a desultory high school career, his father sent him on a two-hour flight north of Melbourne to Camp Eden, a sort of cross between Esalen and Canyon Ranch with a touch of Six Flags: healthy food, massage, zip lines, and the chance to trail your hands over large ferns in the mountains of Queensland.

"I sent all the kids up to Camp Eden for a summer," Brian Goldsmith recalled. "For the first week you were a client, and then the second week you started washing dishes. The first week Charlie called and said, 'It's lovely!' The second week he called and said, 'I want to come home!' and then he hung up on me. I rang the manager, and an assistant said, 'Charlie is a healer!' And I thought she meant a Queensland heeler, which is a breed of dog, so I said, 'Has he bitten somebody?' "

Rather, something had sunk its teeth into him. It happened when he was sitting on a bench in the men's changing room. A man came limping by with tears on his face. Goldsmith looked up and said, "What does it feel like?"

"At that exact moment I felt pain shooting up my leg," Goldsmith said. "I fell off the bench in agony. It was like I had stepped on a metal spike. The guy was staring at me. He said, 'Thank you!' After 30 seconds, the pain started to leave my leg, and he was in pain again. It just seemed like something in the category of really weird stuff."

But the next morning at breakfast, when he was going to get a knife and fork, his hands clapped together like magnets. He pulled them apart, but he could feel some force pulling them together. He was frightened and thought something was wrong with him. Six or seven people were sitting at the table; one of the women asked if he was okay. "Can you feel this?" he asked, holding up his hand. He was flooded with relief when she said, "Oh my God!" People began putting their hands against his and could feel what was emanating.

When a woman at the camp, the mother of one of his sister's friends, put her hand up, it felt different. There was a lump in her finger. He thought he should try to get rid of it. They sat in front of a fireplace, and he focused on trying to smooth out the lump. When half of it was gone, the woman began to cry. Goldsmith asked if he was hurting her and she said no, and urged him to keep going. Eventually she began to bend her finger. He freaked out again when she said she had not been able to bend her finger in years.

Someone joked that maybe he should now try to walk across the pool.

It took him a couple of years to fully accept what had happened. In the early days he wondered why he had been given his "gift." What was he meant to do with it? Every night he practiced moving energy around his own body. He learned to activate it, feeling its onset as a kind of pressure in the middle of his forehead. He learned to project it outside his body. "I would lie in my bed and do laps around the world with the energy," he said. "I learned to run multiple streams of it. I can't multitask in this world, but in that world I can do 10 things at once."

Not long after the awakening at Camp Eden, he started his marketing company, Cassette. He taught himself Photoshop and designed a birthday invitation for a friend's party, then a product brochure for a food company. He could see where this could go and where he could take it. But healing led him forward blindly. He was careful to keep the two apart. "I had no idea what I was doing at first. But eventually I learned, and now I know what to do and my efficiency is greater. If I was treating the woman with the lump in her finger now, I wouldn't try to smooth it out; I would just pull the energy out of her finger. Sometimes I am putting energy in and sometimes I am pulling it out. Putting energy in doesn't fix a virus or an allergy; you have to take that out. People can respond differently, but some things I do, like herpes, are the same for everyone."

Where does he think the energy comes from? "I don't know. It feels like it comes from me, but then I think, How could I have known to do that? I've always known I'm not as intelligent as the gift."

In May, Goldsmith returned for a second round at NYU Lutheran and treated 19 patients. The data has not yet been published, but some of the doctors acknowledged to me that the healer's batting average did not drop. There were new wrinkles; Goldsmith noticed that the doctors were careful not to present him as an "energy healer" but as an "energy medicine practitioner," so as not to suggest a positive outcome. The second study was also qualitative; researchers were gathering data about patients' perceptions, experiences, and beliefs.

Word of Goldsmith's success traveled quickly around the hospital, and one day eight nurses lined up with complaints.

Word of Goldsmith's success traveled quickly around the hospital, and one day eight nurses lined up with complaints. One in her fifties had knee pain that had been causing her to limp for months. While the study coordinator explained the criteria, the nurse filled out the consent form. She said she'd gone to the hospital a few weeks ago, unable to walk, and the doctors had given her a cane. Goldsmith, who was standing in the corner of a small room off a main hallway, decided to start the healing before the paperwork was finished. He told me later he had been showing off again, frustrated that he'd poured "heaps" of energy into an alcoholic patient with little effect on the man's chest pain, and also because I'd provoked him with the news that people outside the hospital were still focused on the placebo effects of his movie-star looks, citing his friendship with Miranda Kerr, which had been splashed across tabloids in Australia and England in the late spring of 2014 after paparazzi got photos of "the handsome hunk" "cuddling" with the Australian supermodel on a cruise in Sydney Harbor. (They have been friends and nothing else since they met in 2009, Kerr told me, adding that Goldsmith had stopped her son from vomiting when he had a bug and had treated her for many ailments, including the workaday model complaint of leg aches provoked by standing around in high heels.)

"Okay," the coordinator said when the nurse completed the consent form.

"How how does it feel now?" said Goldsmith, who had already finished his work.

"It still hurts."

"Test it! Is it still hurting?"

The nurse moved her knee.

"No!" She looked shocked. "What? That's it?"

"I did it while you were talking."

"Unbelievable! Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?" she said, in shock.

"Have a walk in the hall," Goldsmith said.

She walked without limping.

"Are you a magician?" she said. "Oh my Lord, thank you." But the fix was not permanent. A couple of weeks later, the pain was back.

"If I can help someone for a day but the pain comes back, I don't think I've done anything of note," Goldsmith said. "I'm not trying to be a painkiller; I'm trying to fix things."

One of the patients Goldsmith treated last May was Linda A. Grant, a Queens resident a few months shy of 65. She had a raft of troubles, from medication allergies and diabetes to chronic back pain and an ankle she had broken twice. Worried about a boil on the side of her body where she'd had breast cancer, she went to the emergency room at NYU Lutheran. She woke up in intensive care. "The doctors were afraid to give me pain medication because I have allergic reactions to just about everything," she said when I called her in her hospital room. She spent a week there, a good part of the time on a ventilator.

"When Charlie came to see me, I relaxed totally," she said. "I don't know what he did, but the constant, chronic back pain was gone."

How had she rated the pain before treatment?

"Twelve," she said.

"The scale only goes to 10."

"Well, it was my pain."

Last spring, on his final day in New York, it occurred to Charlie Goldsmith that he had come to the end of an era. "I feel like I am finishing what I started when I was 18," he said. A doctor in Australia who is analyzing the data of the new NYU Lutheran study had confided to friends of Goldsmith's that he worried what the psychological impact would be if in the course of the Brooklyn tests, he found his ability wasn't what he thought. Indeed, before he started at the hospital, Goldsmith himself had the same concern: "What if the gift doesn't want to be here?" But his confidence had been affirmed—some of the physicians at Lutheran even started calling him "Dr. Pain."

Three weeks of work in New York had left him drained, physically and financially. His business in Australia was suffering in his absence; his trips to New York and his work at the hospital had all been at his own expense. He had even paid the $3,200 fee to put the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine study into the public domain so anyone who wanted to could read it for free. And each day, done with tiring rounds at the hospital, he had returned by subway to a friend's loft in SoHo, where he was staying, only to find messages from people all over the world asking for help. There was a case of shingles in Melbourne, a kidney infection in Queensland, a urinary tract infection in Mexico, chronic knee pain in Los Angeles. The queue itself was evidence that whatever he was doing was in demand and working at some level. People reached him by word of mouth, via forwarded e-mails or text messages, or through a group healing website he'd set up on Facebook. About half of those he has treated have never met him.

Among them was Judy Murphy. She used to work as a public information officer at the National Institutes of Health. Her husband, Donald, trained in biology, had been an NIH research administrator who became interested in healing when the agency opened what is now known as the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in 1998. Judy, 66, had been traveling when she began to suffer debilitating back spasms. Donald had been trying to heal them long distance from their home in Olympia, Washington, without success. So he texted Goldsmith in New York.

"I crawled around on all fours. It was excruciating. The pain was a 10. Charlie called; he said, 'Just a minute' and did his thing, and then I could turn over."

"I was lying on the floor for a couple of hours," Judy told me. "I crawled around on all fours. It was excruciating. The pain was a 10. Charlie called; he said, 'Just a minute' and did his thing, and then I could turn over. And then he did it again, and I could sit up, and after the third time, I was still in pain but I could walk."

Goldsmith often makes analogies between what he does and other professions, noting how much more difficult it is for him to prove himself. A missed shot didn't make Michael Jordan a fraud, but if Goldsmith couldn't heal one person, his whole enterprise was in doubt. "Even now," he said, "when I have proved my value, it's still the blank stare I get most of the time." He said he is ready to undertake a new study with a more rigorous protocol and is discussing with NYU Lutheran doctors the possibility of treating only patients with urinary tract infections, with the outcome measured by changes in bacterial levels. It would be hard to dismiss the results as placebo if he worked long distance from Melbourne on patients in Brooklyn.

He was—as ever—calm and even-keeled, mantled in an air of imperturbability I had wondered about from the moment I met him more than a year ago. It was an attitude you might first attribute to spiritual tranquility but that began to seem more protective, as if cultivated to meet the pain of having had to grow up fast in a tumultuous home, as well as cope with the lonely, difficult path he had been sent out on by a mysterious force—a path on which it was necessary not to get too excited by successes, lest he be undone by failures.

Among Goldsmith's healings I witnessed were a couple on members of my family: one last May on my 10-year-old daughter toward the end of his time in New York, and another in June, long distance from Melbourne, on my 90-year-old father in North Carolina. My daughter, India, had tested positive for an oak tree pollen allergy last year, and with the spring's epic pollen counts she had been miserable, sneezing and clawing at her eyes. Over-the-counter antihistamines weren't giving her much relief. Goldsmith asked if he could have a go. He sat next to her on a couch, asked her to rate her itchiness—7 out of 10—then had her close her eyes. His lids fluttered. Twenty seconds passed.

"Okay," he said. "Is there any difference?"

India nodded.

"What you would say out of 10?"

"Um…5?"

"Okay, one sec," he said. He repeated the process, then again a third time, and by the end, India said her itchiness was gone.

Later, in a classic example of the original to-please-the-doctor meaning of the placebo effect, she confessed that her initial post-treatment rating should have been more like six and a half than five—but, she said, "I felt bad for Charlie. He had come from so far away and he was trying so hard; I didn't want to disappoint him."

My father had some agonizing pain in his shoulder. An X-ray, a MRI, and an ultrasound had been unable to diagnose its source; OxyContin had only dulled it slightly. Goldsmith worked over the phone but could provide no relief. I might be one of those people looking at him askance, but I have to say, there were armies of pollen assaulting my daughter all spring, and other than one antihistamine given to her by a school nurse, she hasn't taken a pill since. Her zero meant zero.

This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of ELLE.

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