Hands that relieve pain – Birthe Krabbes from Hamburg heals migraines, shingles and middle ear infections laying on of hands. an encounter.
No incense sticks, no angel figures, not even candles or devotional music. Birthe Krabbes doesn’t need any of that. She sits with her legs apart at the head of a lounger and chats. In front of her is a woman in her late 50s who has been suffering from migraines for decades. The casualness with which Birthe Krabbes now puts her hands on the neck of the woman with the headache says a lot about the 55-year-old: “People shouldn’t relax with me, at least not as a program. Most of the time I talk so that they behave normally.”
Birthe Krabbes is a “healer” according to her homepage. She is one of many who, since a court decision in 2004, have been able to legally practice their profession without having to take a naturopathic examination. These include people who heal with natural forces, even with the help of angels or simply by laying their hands on others. “We healers usually have in common that we don’t see ourselves as competing with conventional medicine and want to promote the self-healing powers of our patients,” explains Birthe Krabbes. It’s a world to be sneered at or taken for complete nonsense. But what if there is something to it? Basically, aren’t we all receptive to a bit of superstition, magic or just hope – at the latest when we’re feeling bad and nothing else helps?
the headache patient, who just lay there with a contorted face is now breathing deeply, her eyes are closed. Later she will tell that Birthe Krabbes discovered one of the causes of her migraines a few months ago. Just by laying her hands on her, she knew something was wrong with her teeth. The healer advised her to have it checked with an x-ray. Result: two inflamed tooth roots. Now the headaches come back from time to time. “But when I was with Birthe, I feel better afterwards,” she says.
“I can feel where it is stuck inside”
How do you imagine what Birthe Krabbes does with her hands? She herself describes it like this: “My hand is like a gate through which I enter the other person. First I feel a tingling sensation, then I move through the body.” She can’t explain how this works. She can only tell how she feels about it. “I can feel where it’s getting stuck inside, where it’s getting crunchy or feels like a block of cement.” You can imagine it like a marble that runs through a marble run and encounters obstacles. Or when you run your thumb and forefinger along the outside of a ballpoint pen. “You also notice where there is an upsurge, a resistance.” She feels the same way about her expeditions into other bodies. She can then often “pull something out” where it is stuck or hard. Or she refers her patients to specialists. “I can feel that something is wrong in my stomach, but I often can’t tell exactly where.”
The somewhat flippant and always very direct way in which she expresses herself, in sometimes funny, always very specific images, is certainly one reason why people quickly trust her. She doesn’t stage herself, she doesn’t play omniscient. And she speaks openly about her doubts about her supposed gift. “I’m not convinced that you have to believe in it for it to work. Many patients come and say: I’m skeptical. Then I say: It doesn’t matter, I am too.”
As she talks, she sits in the living room of her narrow terraced house in East Hamburg, solid middle class between working-class housing estates. Birthe Krabbes, jeans, T-shirt, short gray hair, grew up here, “very down-to-earth, in a craftsman’s household”. Her father was a master painter with his own business. She trained as a teacher, married early, had two daughters and only a few years ago married her current husband, a pastor. She loves heavy metal music and never misses a FC St. Pauli soccer game. “I’ve never been spiritual,” she says. “I grew up with my father on the construction site. The language there is direct, often harsh. And there are clear rules. That shaped me.”
Unforeseen Talents
For a long time she had no idea that she had a special ability. And so it was that she didn’t take it too seriously the first time it happened. Her two-year-old daughter had a wart under her foot. And because she didn’t want her potential snipping at the doctor’s, she looked for someone who would discuss the wart. To show her daughter how this could work, she tried it herself – in her own way, with hands and words. A few days later the wart was gone. She remembers this moment as a brief irritation. When she told her family doctor in a rather casual and embarrassed manner, the latter would occasionally send her the first patients who she believed would be in good hands with Birthe Krabbes: obviously not cancer patients, but children with warts or middle ear infections and adults suffering from a suffered from shingles, rheumatism or migraines.
But make a job out of it? Wasn’t an option for Birthe Krabbes. Until the moment when her husband was in the hospital. Paralyzed on one side after a serious illness. She intuitively laid her hands on him. You guess it: “He was able to walk the next day,” she says – even today there is a hint of bewilderment in her voice. “After this experience I thought: I can’t understand it, but I can try it more often and accept it as a gift that I have.”
Today, Birthe Krabbes goes without saying that shingles are easy, pull them out. She cannot take the pain away from those affected, but the viruses stop it. Your hand feels something like chewing gum stuck to a hot stovetop. “And then I pull out this chewy, hot mass. My palm is red afterwards.” A wart, on the other hand, is more complicated, but she always tries.
What does science say?
Most scientists would tear their hair at such descriptions, although some do acknowledge that positive inner images promote self-healing. They explain what Birthe Krabbes does with the placebo effect: that the attention and expectations of the patient alone trigger processes in the body that lead to an improvement. The role of endorphins and hormones, which the brain releases when touched, for example, has already been well researched in pain research. On the other hand, how the immune system can be influenced in the case of shingles or warts, no one knows exactly.
For Birthe Krabbes, these explanations don’t matter. The encouragement of her patients and the successes are enough for her. In the meantime she has given up her job as an educator and only works as a healer. She sees ten patients a week. She takes around 80 euros for an hour, more than 100 is considered dubious in the healing industry. She says she has patients from all walks of life and ages, some from Switzerland who come directly from the airport, others from next door who show up with the whole family. Sometimes she also makes house calls, for example to the old lady with balance problems. And resorts to unconventional means: “I lie down on the sofa with her and hold an electric toothbrush behind her ear. That helps her.” Maybe it’s not the quivering brush, maybe it’s just the confidence Birthe Krabbes exudes and the fact that she gives her single patient so much attention. She says herself: “Basically, I only give the impetus for healing. Everyone does the rest themselves.”