Crystal treatment taken to heart.

Crystal treatment taken to heart

Followers claim they help love life and vitalize body

In the 1960s, much of the country's youth embraced non-traditional ideas, experimenting with drugs, Eastern religions and astrology. In the 1980s, New Age baby boomers turned to self-improvement books -- and crystals.

Crystals, or nearly every type of semi-precious stone, first arrived in Los Angeles as a mind-body treatment, appearing in metaphysical bookstores. And whether they work or not, crystals are becoming popular enough with mainstream consumers that corner drug stores sell them.

"Crystals work on a subtle, vibrational level, open up old energy patterns that keep people stuck," says Ellen Durham, who for the past several years has sold crystals at Nature's Own in Santa Monica. "According to the molecular structure of the crystal, they work on different energy centers of the body."

Rose quartz, she says, can be placed over the heart to help one's love life. Amethyst, a purple gemstone, purifies all levels of consciousness and malachite, a green stone, is an "excellent balancer, vitalizing for the body and mind, strengthens the heart."

Crystal followers say they aren't exactly sure where the art of crystal healing came from or how it became popular in Los Angeles, but reports of "healing" stones in Egypt and India date back hundreds of years.

Selling them has become a cottage industry.

"It's big business now -- there's no doubt," says Katrina Raphaell, who has written three books based on her experience with crystal healing. "The price of crystals continues to escalate."

A crystal nowadays runs between $1.50 to $25, whereas 10 years ago one could buy a bag of them for $15.

Louise Taylor, a Van Nuys crystals practitioner who holds a masters degree in home economics from Cal State Northridge, treats clients by laying them down and placing crystals on top of them. She prefers quartz or clear crystals, which have a "special quality of creating energy." She heats them and squeezes them to encourage that energy.

Taylor charges $30 for a half-hour session and $50 an hour, but "you don't really leave them on for that long of a time. They get too powerful, the energy gets vibrating too strong," she says.

Taylor says she is able to revitalize people's energy levels, thus healing them and making them better fit to resist illness.

How well someone responds to the treatment, adds Taylor, depends on one's belief system. "If someone thinks crystals are far out or unbelievable, you're not going to affect them."

David Balfour, a Norwalk chiropractor, says "crystals are more for things that have to do with disorders that are of a psychosomatic matter where the mind and the emotions have become disturbed and out of balance and began to affect the physical body," he says.

The chakra points, or the crystal therapist's name for energy points, are located in the same areas as the traditional Western medicine's plexus points, where nerve networks coincide, says Balfour. Crystal healers believe that the energy in a human body can be unbalanced or blocked and crystals can put the body back in order by rechanneling that energy.

"Quartz is a transmitter of very subtle energy," says Balfour. "Our body is an electromagnetic entity produced by the brain and the nervous system and crystals seem to challenge them."

Crystals are indeed used to transmit energy in radios and computer chips and other electronic devices.

"When you stress a phonographic needle, which is crystal, you get voltage and it amplifies into music," says David Hayes, a Canoga Park chiropractor who likens crystal therapy to "acupuncture without poking holes" in people. Hayes uses crystals "about 2 percent of the time" combined with other chiropractic treatment. Crystals are a tool to help open up "blockages of energy flow" which can result in muscle spasms or pains.

"If the muscle's hard as a rock, it becomes softer and there's less pain [after crystal therapy]," says Hayes. "If not, I would not use [crystals]."

One of Hayes' patients, Gary Haven, a general contractor from Agoura Hills, gives crystals credit for healing the neck and back troubles he has had for five years.

"I've been to three different traditional chiropractors for my problems," says Haven, "but Hayes is the only one who's been able to release the pain; it's not coming back. I'm getting better."

"All atomic matter vibrates at certain frequencies and has some amount of energy," counters a lab engineer at the Gemological Institute in Los Angeles. "As far as crystals emitting enough energy to have an effect on humans, it is beyond our reasoning."

"There is no medical evidence of an imbalance of energy in the body," says Ronald M. Baum, an Agoura Hills neurologist.

The business of crystals began to surface in L.A. metaphysical bookstores in the mid-1980s as yet another alternative to western medicine.

One store, Bodhi Tree on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles is said to be nationally reknowned among crystal followers. Another, Phoenix Bookstore on Santa Monica Boulevard, has been selling crystals since it opened seven years ago.

New Age and holistic health magazines, such as Van Nuys-based Meditation Age, began to include stories on crystals.

Crystals also began to find their way to more mainstream consumers. They didn't care whether crystals had special powers, they just thought they were pretty.

"Crystals are being used to decorate homes now," says Judalon Smyth, whose West Los Angeles tape duplication shop, Sound and Light, took on the business of crystals five years ago. "Decorator pieces -- a 10- to 15-pound amethyst -- can be $2,000. They use them like sculptures, coffee table pieces."

Although some say the crystals business has already peaked, Smyth believes that the entry of new stores that sell them has glutted the market.

"There was a period about a year-and-a-half ago that everybody was buying crystals but there weren't a lot of people selling them," says Smyth. "The Christmas before we had sold about $12,000, but last Christmas we only sold in the hundreds [of dollars]."

Smyth, like other dealers, has a license to import polished stones from Brazil, France and Africa. Other crystals are mined in Arkansas.

Smyth's other popular items, often purchased by those who believe in crystals, include wands, or different crystals assembled together, jewelry pieces and, of course, crystal balls.

Across from the Beverly Center in West Los Angeles, the Rexall Drug Store began offering crystal jewelry, balls and sculptures for sale two years ago.

"We had a manufacturer come in and wanted it to be on display here and it ended up being a good seller," says Rexall manager Thomas Davis. "The items run from $40 to $80."

Robert Leysen, owner of three Psychic Eye bookstores in the San Fernando Valley, believes that although the "L.A. market for crystals is good," it has become saturated by "the vacuum cleaner shops and Bullocks jumping on the bandwagon."

Leysen says the types of crystal items sold has evolved.

"We've upgraded the crystal business," notes Leysen, who formerly promoted psychic Tamara Rand. "We now sell crystal jewelry at $300 when originally there wasn't such a thing. Before, when a small artisan brought a jewelry piece, we'd sell them for $15 or $20. Now they're fancier, made out of 14-karat gold."

Many customers will continue to buy crystal items from his psychic bookstores, he says, because it is a "credible" location to buy such items.

"People buy from us rather than the drugstore -- knowing it costs more -- because they feel it has better vibrations, etc.," says Leysen.

PHOTO : Talismanic touchstones: New age business of healing