"Clairvoyant Cottrell Gaining Recognition Chiropractor uses his power to diagnose ill patients" by Terry Field

This article originally appeared in the Barrie (Canada) Banner, October 20, 1978

Doug Cottrell often goes where all of us, he claims, have been but cannot remember.

He is a clairvoyant and a student of the late parapsychologist Edgar Cayce. He believes he has lived, that all of us have lived, many times before in different bodies. He believes death is not an end to life but an intermediary zone one passes through and a necessary stage toward sustained spiritual growth.

As a clairvoyant, Cottrell has the ability, he claims, to put himself into a trance and reach into his subconscious where he can tap the accumulated knowledge of lives past and use it to answer questions concerning the present and the future.

On Sunday, Cottrell, his wife Karen, psychic Ken Dixon and wife Wendie were in Barrie to give a seminar about psychic awareness. A small group sat and watched as Cottrell lay on the floor and placed himself into a trance. While under he was asked to do a body scan of one of the group. He began to talk. A vertebrae in the upper back is causing pressure on a nerve that serves the left ear and another that serves the eye. The results: affected hearing and blurred vision. A problem in the lower back is placing pressure on the outside of the legs and stress in the knees.

Later he answers a question concerning erosion patterns of the soil on the south shore of Lake Simcoe over the next five years. He predicts, in answer to this reporter’s question, that a nuclear war will take place during the 1980s and that two thirds of the world’s population will be killed.

Clairvoyant
The man is at the same time frightening and fascinating, and according to two chiropractors, who are concerned with this analysis of health problems and wrestling with the overall philosophy, very accurate.

“I have no hesitation in suggesting a patient meet Doug,” chiropractor Mike Bodnar told The Banner in a phone interview from a clinic in Mississauga.

“We have used him in our practice with patients who are receptive…I don’t force anyone to go and see Doug,” Bodnar said.

Bodnar has sent patients who were interested for a health reading. Cottrell puts himself in the trance and tells the person what is wrong with their body and virtually anything else they would like to know concerning them, including their emotional makeup.

“He might suggest spinal manipulation and the patient comes back to me,” Bodnar said. The chiropractor examines the patient and compares the findings.

“His accuracy rate is very high,” Bodnar says. In only one case, the chiropractor says, Cottrell was off by one bone, a matter of centimetres.

One quarter of Bodnar’s patients have been to see Cottrell and, he estimates, 60 percent are receptive to parapsychology.

Bodnar has used Cottrell himself and is a believer in the philosophy of Edgar Cayce. There is no question in Bodnar’s mind concerning the validity of Cottrell’s ability and the chiropractor’s belief in the clairvoyant has resulted in his acceptance of reincarnation.

“Maybe it just substantiates my own prejudice or fear but it gives me piece [sic] of mind,” Bodnar said. “I’d like to believe we come this way more than once.”

“I have found a success with Doug with respect to his health readings … if Doug was wrong I wouldn’t support him, this is my livelihood,” Bodnar said.

Bodnar and Bill Dronyk, a chiropractor in Port Elgin, agree that the possibility that this power exists in Cottrell should be explored but the opinion of the latter man is not as settled.

Dronyk uses Cottrell’s service and someday he may employ the clairvoyant to help heal patients but in the interim he is “exploring.”

“I don’t know how much of this I can accept,” Dronyk told The Banner. “I’m not ready to commit myself.”

“Cottrell’s ability would question the entire medical profession,” Dronyk said. “If he has access to a universal intelligence…”

“Where it fits in stuns me … it’s almost overpowering,” he said.

Dronyk said that much of what Cottrell told him concerning the results of certain dislocations in the spain can not be substantiated or disproved. “I just don’t know, there’s no scientific basis for it,” Dronyk said. “Doug is way ahead of us (science) in the field of neurology (how the nerves relate to the body and what nerves affect which organs).”

Dronyk accepts that Cottrell has an ability to “read” the body but does not believe the source is, as Cottrell believes, a storehouse of knowledge accumulated over the ages and available to all who want to use it.

Neither does the chiropractor believe in reincarnation.

“I’m still looking,” He says.

Cottrell, nicknamed `Big Daddy’ by Ross Peterson after one if [sic] his previous incarnates, is a professional clairvoyant. He does trance readings, laying on of hands, (a form of healing in which energy is transmitted from the healter [sic] to the sufferer) and conducts seminars. He is paid for his efforts but, he says, it is not a lucrative trade.

He began several years ago after becoming interested in the beliefs espoused by Cayce and meeting psychic Peterson (Peterson is the subject of a book by Allen Spraggett).

“Anyone can do it,” Cottrell says of his ability. “It’s a fine tuning of the mind.”

Yet, Cottrell cautions, if a person does not want to become involved or does not believe it possible, then they should not take part. Because people have that choice Cottrell will not spend his time trying to convert the masses and chooses instead to work on interested individuals.

Briefly stated Cayce believed that everyone is part of the whole and that God is inside us all. We, he claimed, move from life to life as part of a learning process. Each new incarnation offers us a chance to deal with a new problem and gain experience. The goal is perfection and good.

Cayce’s view was not original to him. Many philosophers, Plato among them, wrote of the attempt to reach a state of grace with God and only in death finding the answers to the riddle of life.

You may not remember your previous lives but, Cottrell says, they are there for you to explore and in that exploration you may find guidance for the present. His job, as he sees it, is to help those who want it or need it. He is not unlike a man of the cloth in attitude and purpose.

What is religion but the exercising of your faith?