The Art of Healing

Ending Chronic Pain With Energy Healing-Interview with Mike Sententia

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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What if pain relief didn’t care what you believe? We sit down with healer and researcher Mike Sententia, founder of Healing Lab and author of Arthritis: Natural Healing and Prevention, to explore a tissue-specific approach to energy healing that targets cartilage, inflamed bursae, and hypersensitive nerves. 

Mike is generously offering a 10% Discount if you mention Art of Healing Podcast when you book  your session:

Book Your Session at Healing Lab (mention Art of Healing Podcast for your 10% Discount)


Connect with Mike on Instagram: Healing Lab on Instagram

Connect with Mike on Facebook: Healing Lab on Facebook


Instead of a universal “one energy fits all” modality, Mike designs distinct energetic signatures for each tissue involved in chronic pain, aiming for stronger, longer-lasting relief—and he backs it up with a money-back guarantee so results do the talking.


Learn more about Mike on his YouTube Channel: Healing Lab on YouTube

Mike traces his path from early experiments to a breakthrough with chronic hives, where combining knowledge of nerve signaling and immune activity led to lasting relief. He shares how founding Healing Lab forced him to confront durability head-on: results that wore off pushed him to iterate, improve, and build protocols that now help most clients maintain gains with monthly sessions. We examine research that challenges the placebo-only story—cell cultures recovering from stress, plant cuttings surviving far longer with distance sessions, and animal studies suggesting effects on disease progression. The theme is consistent: measurable changes in systems that don’t rely on belief.

We also unpack distance healing, which you can actually test. Mike sends clients a small card carrying a stable, energetic “bridge,” making remote sessions as reliable as in-person work. For busy professionals, he can adjust energy mid-meeting, with clients often noticing a shift before his follow-up note. For arthritis, he pairs targeted energy with practical tools: diet, supplements, and gentle exercise strategies that support joint health without flare-ups. He offers a free e-book and monthly resources, inviting skeptics and fans alike to evaluate changes in pain, function, and resilience over time.

If you’ve tried everything and feel stuck, this conversation offers a different lens: precision energy for the tissues that hurt, transparent guarantees, and methods refined by real-world feedback. Subscribe, share

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SPEAKER_01:

Healing Podcast listeners, thank you so much for joining us for our episode today. I have a special guest, Mike Sentincia. Did I say that right? Mike is the founder of Healing Lab, specializing in chronic pain with a money-back guarantee. He has studied energy healing since 1991, and his second book, Transforming Pain, The Emerging Science of Energy Healing for Pain Management, comes out soon. His mission is to end chronic pain with the modern science of energy healing. Mike is gonna come on and I've got some questions for him, especially chronic pain. That's a big topic for my patients, for myself. So I'm so happy, Mike, that you could be here and join us today.

SPEAKER_00:

Charlise, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about energy healing, the research, how it works with chronic pain. And I love talking with both people who are excited about energy healing and with skeptics. So just excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, thank you so much. This is so very important, especially chronic pain, which we don't talk about enough because so many of us on this planet live with chronic pain. Mike, what inspired you to found the healing lab and dedicate your work to chronic pain?

SPEAKER_00:

It's a little bit of a long story. It starts back when I was a kid. I loved science and math. And then one of my friends talked about feeling energy from trees. And I tried it and I felt some tingling. And I went to the beach and I tuned into the energy and I felt this whole body tingling everywhere. And I had a bunch of experiences like that that got me started exploring it. Now, how much of that was energy and how much of that was imagination? I have no idea. I was like 12. But that's what got me started on this. But my father was kind of an atheist who made fun of psychics and religious people. So I didn't share it with anyone through middle school and high school and a little bit in college, but I was awkward. And then in my 20s, I was partnered with a woman, Lisa, who became one of the great loves of my life. And she as a kid had gotten intuitions about like who was going to call or when a relative would die. And we started exploring energy together. And she was a bit older than me and had chronic knee pain. And her knees would ache whenever we would go dance or she'd garden. She used to run, but she had to give it up years earlier. And I started reading the energy of her knees and adjusting it to look like the energy of my healthy knees. That was my first healing technique ever I developed with her. And each day her pain would come down, and then the next day she'd garden and her pain would be back, and I'd do it again. And after three months, her knees weren't aching anymore. And she was able to start running again for the first time in years. And I finally started coming out of my shell, started getting past some of that shyness and doing healing sessions for friends and family, and they were really encouraging. Later, Lisa retrained to become a nurse, and she developed chronic hives, and she was on all the right medications, and she was still getting worse. One evening she was telling me about it that it was this eight out of ten maddening itch that just made her so miserable. And she was not prone to hyperbole, but she told me if I knew I'd be like this the rest of my life, I would kill myself. We hadn't thought that I could do anything for hives, right? It's complicated, it's an autoimmune condition, difficult to work with. But I said, let's see what we can do. And so, drawing from her knowledge of the medicine and the physiology behind hives, and my knowledge of energy healing, we developed several techniques. The first one targeted her skin, no results. The second one targeted her nerves that were signaling the itch. And her pain came down from an eight to a four. A couple weeks later, it stopped working. And we added some more to the energy for the nerves. And she woke up the next morning without any hives for the first time in almost a year. And after we added one more piece to it, targeting the immune activity, she never had another outbreak. And so this was my life for close to a decade of exploring energy. And then in 2012, we broke up and lost touch, as happens. And in 2014, I learned that she had cancer. And I flew out to Albuquerque, I moved to San Francisco, I flew out to Albuquerque, reconnected with her, became part of the care team. I flew out every month for six months, did a shift, and I developed healing techniques for her, and she started sleeping better and having less pain with the chemotherapy. And in March of 2015, she finished her second round of chemo, and she still had cancer, and she died a few months later. And I mourned. But I also began to dream of all of the people with chronic pain who need help, of what I might be able to do if I could partner with medical researchers to really deeply understand conditions and develop healing techniques for me. And I started Healing Lab a few months later. One of the centerpieces of it then and now was this money back guarantee, right? You only pay, there's no upfront payment. You only pay if you love the way you feel. It's guaranteed for a month. So if the results wear off early, you get a free session to get it working again. I call it a touch-up session, or you get a full leaf fund. And so I started reaching out to clients every week to see how they were feeling and make sure that it was working for them. And I discovered I was a lot less good at energy healing than I thought I was. It was wearing off for people, right? They'd feel great. And then a week later, sometimes less than a week later, it would wear off and they need a touch-up. And it was a big blow to my ego and it was hard to take, but I embraced that that's part of getting better. And so I would do these touch-up sessions and I'd figure out what went wrong, what made the energy stop working, and I'd fix it. And then I'd carry that forward into all of my other healing sessions and do it a little bit better. And it turns out you do that for 10 years and you get a lot better at what you do. And so these days, it's still how I do things. About three quarters of my clients, they need the one session a month. About a quarter of my clients, they need a touch-up session midway through. And I'm still making improvements and figuring out why and making it a little more reliable. And then I have one client who has arthritis in every single finger joint. And she, for whatever reason, is really sensitive to shifts in energy. And she at first was needing a touch-up every few days. I was like two a week. And now we've gotten it to about one a week. I've made a lot of little improvements to what I do and fix what was not working for her. And as long as she wants to stick with it, I'm going to stick with it. And I'm going to keep getting it working better for her and working longer. And it's helping me with all my other clients. And I love what I do because I get to help people and I get to master my craft. And that's two of my favorite things.

SPEAKER_01:

That's that is a beautiful story. And thank you for sharing that. I know you have shared that story a lot, but that's that is so heartening and it's so touching what took you on this journey and that you found inspiration and loss. That's so horrible. Oh my gosh. Thank you for sharing that. So your work or your technique you developed yourself, or was there this was a technique you developed all on your own?

SPEAKER_00:

Or most of the healing techniques that I use day-to-day, I've developed over the last 20 years. I've taken training in Reiki and therapeutic touch and other systems. What I find is that most sisters of energy healing, they use one universal energy for everything. And that's great in that it's straightforward and teach, but it has some limitations, right? If you had to give the same treatment to every single, it'd be really limiting. So I take a different approach. I dial in just the right energy for each tissue involved in the condition. So when I'm working with arthritis, which is something I do a lot, I have one energy for the cartilage, based on the energy of a child's cartilage, to help get the cartilage to regrow. And typically clients after a year don't need me anymore. And we even have some imaging evidence that the cartilage is regrowing. Then I have another energy that I use for the inflamed bursa and another energy that I use for the nerves that have become hypersensitive from signaling pain over and over and learning to signal pain better and better. And by dialing in just the right energy for each tissue, I get stronger, longer lasting, better results. And this is something that in order to get this, I've had to develop it myself.

SPEAKER_01:

So that makes perfect sense. I I get what you're saying, because those other modalities do focus on universal energy. It is just all in one. So I imagine for your clients, learning your technique that probably helps them to integrate and be more open to it as well. I don't I mean, you know what I bet that's they can probably tune into that easier.

SPEAKER_00:

One of the fascinating things that I've discovered as I've done more and more healing sessions and more and more sessions with skeptics, right? I routinely have people tell me, I don't believe in energy healing. The only reason I'm trying this is because of the guarantee. But let's see what you can do, right? And what I find is that they get the same results as everyone else. That it doesn't matter if somebody is emotionally, mentally open to it, that I'm working at the level of the cartilage and bone and muscle and nerve cells. And those cells don't believe anything, right? And that's what we see in the research also. There's been 50 years of research on energy healing. And some of my favorite research is on cells in a petri dish, right? You take E. coli in a petri dish and you heat it up until it's almost dead. That's called heat shock. And then the E. coli that doesn't get energy healing dies. The E. coli that does get energy healing recovers. That was Beverly Rubick. You could do a similar thing with human and animal cells, osteoglass keratinocytes. You put them in a petri dish and you starve them. And then at some point you give them some nutrients again. And if you also give them energy healing, they absorb more nutrients as though they are recovering from that starvation faster. So energy healing seems to work at the level of cells. It doesn't need the client's belief. And I love that because I get to show people that it's for real rather than needing to convince them up front. So it's great. It lets me help more people.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's amazing. I have a set of questions, but I've got to ask you this that you embrace skeptics and you invite skeptics.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So tell I because I have a Reiki practice. And so right now, I don't turn away skeptics. I just invite them, maybe work with me with because I have another modality, you know, where I kind of don't accept them in my Reiki practice. Tell me how this works that you accept skeptics. What, yeah, to lay it on me. How does that work?

SPEAKER_00:

I think skepticism is the correct stance to take when it comes to energy healing. I think that mainstream research, mainstream science, is skeptical for a very good reason. There's no mechanism of action in today's physics or chemistry or biology. This is an anomaly that today's science says shouldn't exist. And today's science is pretty darn good. I think skepticism is the correct stance to take. I'm going to talk about the research in a minute, but I routinely have people come to me because of the money-back guarantee. I routinely have people expect to only feel a little bit better. I routinely have them be shocked at the results. One of my favorite experiences, a friend who's a chiropractor, and I've worked with her. She has of torn meniscus. I've worked with her a bunch. I've worked with her mother who has arthritis. I worked with her son who broke his arm. And she brought her very skeptical partner to me. He's been together for a year, year and a half. He's he looks like a marine. He has a bunch of jaw pain. And he's like, I don't think it's going to do anything, but Melissa says that you're great. Let's see what you can do. She had to bug him 20 times. I lightly touch his jaw. I read the energy. I talk with him for a minute. I tell him what I want to do. He's like, go do your thing. I lightly touch again. I adjust the energy. And I'm like, great, test it out. And he opens his jaw and he kind of moves it around. And his pain is way down. And he looks at her like, what the hell just happened? And I love, I think the correct thing to do is look for the results, trust your experience, and don't believe it until you get the results. And I love doing that with people.

SPEAKER_01:

No, that is amaz. I love that. That is amazing. Because when you said that, I'm like, oh, and then you mentioned in your background that your dad not only was an atheist, but also the type of skeptic that makes fun of people that are more aggressive about it. So that's a huge hurdle to overcome to get to where you are. Huge.

SPEAKER_00:

There was a lot of personal growth and self-work and talking with friends and therapists and doing a bunch of healing to feel good sharing this with people and not knowing if I was going to get enthusiasm or politeness, but dismissiveness or outright skepticism and be okay with whatever I got. And honestly, getting the results and seeing it work day after day is one of the best things for getting comfortable with this. When I teach classes, one of the things that I love to do is we play blindfold energy games. So one person sends, the other receives. The receiver puts on a blindfold, closes their eyes, holds out both their hands. The sender manually picks a hand, sends the energy. Don't tell them which one, don't touch and send the energy. And the receiver tunes in, says where they feel it. And I teach them how to tune in on all of this. And understandably, it's hard at first, even for people who are experienced, but with some training and some practice, in a two-hour class, people are getting 80, 90% accuracy. And it's so cool seeing the kind of confidence that comes from that, seeing people move from vincing themselves, talking themselves into believing in energy, to having this grounded experience of, of course, energy is real. I have data. And I love helping people have that transition.

SPEAKER_01:

Nice. That is amazing. That is so cool. So how would you describe the science behind energy healing?

SPEAKER_00:

When I first started doing my healing practice professionally, I had a lot of doubt. I'd been working with friends, but I was like, there's no mechanism or action in today's more likely that I've discovered something missing from today's physics or that it's all placebo. And so I had all of this doubt. And I connected with this wonderful researcher, really warm, kind woman, and she encouraged me to read the research. And I was only expecting to find some case studies, but I was blown away. There's placebo-controlled trials showing excellent results on pain and anxiety for arthritis, for cancer patients, for a bunch of other conditions. But also, there's cell culture studies that I talked about. There's plant and animal studies. One of my favorites is actually from Melinda. She took plant clippings, put them in water. The plant clippings that were just in water all died within 30 days. The other plant clippings got distance energy healing. The practitioners weren't even in the same room. They all lived for the full 90 days of the study. There's no overlap. So much research. The person who takes the pill gets a little bit better, and you do a bunch of statistics and you show that it worked. No overlap. Everything died in 30 days, everything lived for 90 days. There's animal research. Mice with cancer that get energy healing, the cancer doesn't metastasize as much. That's Gloria Granowitz. All of that research, the plants and animals and cell culture, in all research, there's this what if it's a coincidence? What if all of those plant clippings got the energy healing were already healthy plant clippings? They were going to live. And all the ones that didn't were sickly healthy plant clippings, we're going to die. Right? The probability of coincidence for all that research is less than one in a thousand. That's ten times stronger than most medical research. It's three times stronger than physics evidence. I was blown away. And that's what gave me the confidence to start doing this work. And as I reflected on what is it trying to tell me? What's going on here? Where I wound up is every few generations, humanity encounters a phenomenon that's missing from the science of the day. A hundred years ago, that was quantum physics. Everyone knows about the bizarre behavior of photons. What most people don't realize is quantum physics is what gave us transistors, which are the building blocks of computers and phones and the internet. And those are pretty good. A hundred years before that, when alchemy was a science, people believed that fire was caused by this phlogiston in the wood, that the flames were the phlogiston leaving, and that's why wood weighed less when it w afterward. This researcher Anton Leoisier started weighing different materials as they burned. And he discovered that magnesium weighs more when it burns. Now, if phlogiston theory is correct, if the phlogiston has left, it should weigh less. Now, you and I know magnesium weighs more after burning because magnesium oxide is a solid. So the magnesium has picked up oxygen atoms and now it weighs more. But half of those words didn't exist back then. This is widely regarded as the dawn of chemistry. And it's actually where Loisier coined the word oxygen. Chemistry's pretty good. Oxygen wasn't the matter was always the word didn't exist until the 1700s. Hundred years before that, when people thought that diseases were caused by demons and bad air. Malaria literally means bad air. Breakthroughs in glassmaking led to the first lenses. And Anthony von Leeuwenhoek, he was a weaver, and he bought some lenses to inspect his cloth and do quality control and make better, better fed, better cloth. And then he started looking at blood and saliva and swamp water. And he was the first human to see single-cell organisms. He called them animal cules, like animal molecule. It was a long path that led to the germ theory of disease and modern medicine. And antibiotics and dexons are pretty good too. And so this is what happens. We find these anomalies, these things that the side that the science of the day say should not exist. Single cell organisms, fire making something weighing more, a bizarre behavior of photons. We find them. And then a hundred years later, when we come to understand them, it leads to breakthroughs in the physical sciences and the next century of technology. And there's no mechanism of action for energy healing in today's physics or chemistry or biology. But it's helping real people in the real world. It's showing dramatic results in the lab. And when we understand it, it'll lead to breakthroughs in the physical sciences, the next scientific revolution, and the next century of technology. And that's why I do what I do.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's that is amazing. There is a quote that I'm going to butcher. I'm sure some smart listener can Google it and correct me, but I think it's from Arthur C. Clarke that states that any science that's sufficiently advanced enough will appear to be magic. Something to that.

SPEAKER_00:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

SPEAKER_01:

Magic. That's what I think because from Arthur's that and when you were saying that, that's what it was occurring to me, because of course it does look like science, but I mean like magic, but then later it makes sense and you have science behind it. So and probably the space that we live in now is that we are in the healing sciences, we are so heavily chemically based and that mechanism based that you know that seems like the only way. And even though I share with people all the time, we use energy, it's just megawatt energy. We use radiation, we use protons, we use nuclear medicine, we use energy that you can't see all the time. It's so it would make sense that your healing that you provide, it works, it's targeted as a consciousness behind it. But yeah, that's that is a beautiful explanation. Thank you so much. And I actually did not know that the magnesium story, I'd never heard that. So that's beautiful. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. And with with all the different types of the nuclear energy, the electrical energy, there was a time when humans didn't know what those things were or even that they existed. And the reason we can help all those people with those energy today is because a hundred, two hundred years ago, we figured out what they were, and then we follow the signs where it led. And when we understand what is and follow it where it leads, I don't know where it leads, but it's gonna be amazing.

SPEAKER_01:

It's gonna be amazing. Yes. Yeah, there'll be probably some kind of medical equipment to measure it and categorize it. And soon in Western medicine, they'll have a billing code for it, it'll come. It's gonna be hilarious, but I agree with you, it will definitely come. So, from your viewpoint, what are the biggest misconceptions about energy healing?

SPEAKER_00:

The biggest thing that I hear from folks is expecting it to be psychological, right? Expecting that I'm gonna be talking a lot to the client, expecting that the client has to believe in it in order for it to work, expecting that I'm helping change their mindset and perspective. When really this is something that is it's out there in the world. I like this quote from Philip K. Dick. Reality is that which continues to exist even when we stop believing in it. But out there in the world, doesn't matter if you believe in it, it works at the cellular level, and it works even if somebody doesn't know what's going on. I've had clients where they reach out and they're like, my pain's coming back. I'm gonna be in meetings all day. I can't get on the phone with you and do a uh we can't do a healer, but see if you can do anything. I connect to their energy, uh, I adjust the energy, and I've had clients who were, and then I write them an email, I did my thing, you know how you feel. And I had clients who were like, Mike, the craziest thing happened. I saw this flash of light, and then five minutes later I got your email. Or the craziest thing happened. My pain went away in the meeting, and I looked at the clock to see what time it was. I thought, I wonder if I just did a thing. And then when I got out of my meetings at the end of the day, you sent an email right then. And so it works even if people don't know that it's happening. It's a thing out there in the world that just works.

SPEAKER_01:

That's that is incredible, crazy efficient, by the way. And your clients, they trust you. Crazy. I love that. That that is incredible. So they're actually working or doing meetings, and you go ahead and do a healing session while they're that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00:

It's not my preferred way to do things, but my top priority is taking really good care of the client. And if that's what they need in order to get some help now instead of three days from now, that's what I'm gonna do. For most of the time, when I do a distance session, what I have to do is when the pandemic hit, I tested out a bunch of ways of doing distance sessions. And I tested out not how effective are they that day, but also how long do they last. And what I found is that most of the approaches are not as reliable as I would like to. But one I developed is I put a little bit of my energy into a card and then I mail it to the person. And when we have the healing session, they touch the card to whatever spot I'm working with. And my energy is in the card, so I'm connected to the card, and that lets me bridge a connection to them and send the energy. And it makes it so much stronger and more reliable, and it works, it's as effective as in person. And I routinely have clients now, they start out in person because they can believe in it more, and they try a distance session, it works. And then from then on, they do distance sessions because it works the same for them. It's still strange to me sometimes that the laws of physics allow for this to work, but I trust the data.

SPEAKER_01:

I love it. I love it. That is amazing. So you have a book coming out, and you've also published a book or books previously. Can you tell us about your published works and where to find them?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So the book that I have out is Arthritis Natural Healing and Prevention. For a while, I was specializing specifically in arthritis before expanding to all chronic pain. It is about how to take care of your arthritis with diet, supplements, gentle exercises that will help and not hurt. And it's all stuff that you can do complementary to any other medical care that you're doing. And you can actually get a free copy if you go to my website, sign up for the mailing list, and you'll get a free copy of the book. You'll get my five top tips for dealing with chronic pain. And you'll also get a monthly resource for helping with chronic pain so you can just have better care every month.

SPEAKER_01:

That is beautiful. And I'm gonna make sure I sign up because arthritis deeply impacts my family. I see patients in my day job, and I spend probably 80% of the day on arthritis. The population is over the age of 65, so that's become sort of the small talk, is what arthritis is, you know, that yes. So I will make sure I get a copy and then also listeners in your show notes to connect to Mike, I will have all of his links there. He is active on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube is his website. So I will make sure in your show notes that you can connect and get your free copy of his book. Mike, would there be any message you would like to leave us with or any words of wisdom you'd like to leave us with?

SPEAKER_00:

I'd say so many people with chronic pain can feel like nothing's gonna work. They've tried everything, they're exhausted, they've spent a lot of money on stuff that didn't really help, and they've just kind of given up. And my message is those are the people that I work with all the time. I get results when nothing else has worked, even if you've tried other styles of energy sealing. A lot of my clients, I have clients who themselves are Reiki practitioners, and it turns out for their particular type of pain, what I do works a lot better. So give it a try. Money back guarantee, no upfront payment. You only pay if it works for you, and you decide how much means works. If you feel a little bit better, but you're I'm disappointed. Hey, don't pay me. No hard feelings. You could book your free consultation on the website and uh mention this podcast, and you get 10% off your first session.

SPEAKER_01:

What? 10% off, listeners. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like the topic of chronic pain should be the most important thing we discuss. And maybe because it is pain, it's something that it just feels like it's so much resistance to getting a message yours out there. So I really appreciate you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Listeners, in your show notes, if you will check all of those links, those important resources will be there. Make sure you mention the Art of Healing podcast to get Mike's special 10% off offer. Listeners, we thank you so much for joining us today. If you aren't getting my emails, I'd recommend you also sign up for that in the show notes so that you can get notified when Mike's episode goes live. All of his information will also be in my email, as well as when the next time we connect live and the next episodes going live. Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you.

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Dr. Charlyce

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