And on the Third Day, Becks Is Healed?

We shift from mind games to spiritual ... games?

This is one of the stranger sports medicine stories of recent times.

David Beckham has a ruptured Achilles tendon. It has been surgically repaired. Now he needs something like six months to rehabilitate. It is a serious injuries.

But a "spiritual healer" from Sri Lanka says he can get Beckham healthy in three days.

Ohh-kay.

Our first reaction to this idea is ... "balderdash!" Second reaction? "Quack!"

Then you read a little deeper, and India's best cricket player, Sachin Tendulkar, says this doctor/healer helped heal his knee.

The guy, named Eliyantha Lindsay White, is the "personal physician" of the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse. And it was President Rajapakse who offered his healer to Becks.

Hmm.

The doctor apparently uses ayurvedic medicine, traditional medicine native to the subcontinent. It calls for herbs, massage and yoga. For us science-based Yanks, it sounds like quackery. But I should note that our insurance here in the UAE covers ayurvedic.

Where Dr. Eliyantha is involved, though, it gets a little more exotic, as this story notes.

I suppose I am willing to listen to someone promulgating treatment from a country with an ancient culture. But when Dr. Eliyantha suggests he has "special powers" ... and that "when someone sits before me with an ailment I can study his reports and feel his system, but what is more important I can see a light, as small as a welder's sparkle and I begin to hear and sense the medication for his ailment."

Anyway, the point is this: Dude says he can fix Beckham.

"I am ready to treat him," the good doctor said. "His condition can be easily treated and within three days he will be able to go back to playing. ... His case is simple. He can be treated. He can play again."

Well ...

What does Beckham have to lose? Plane fare to Colombo, maybe?

Anyway, if this guy fixes Beckham and we see him in England's starting lineup at South Africa 2010 on June 12 ... well, I may be taking a hop over to see about this achy back.