Adam is your typical 19-year-old. He likes to work out, has tattoos, and goes out on dates. But Adam, as it turns out, is not just a typical university student, but a famous Canadian healer–“The Dream Healer.”

Last night, John Quinones of ABC’s “Primetime Live” took a closer look at this suburban Canadian cutie’s claims to heal people of cancer, immune disorders, and other maladies. Quinones is no stranger to reporting on faith healers, having done a prominent report on the South American psychic surgeon/faith healer John of God in 2005.

But Adam claims not to be a faith healer. In fact, though he diagnoses patients by looking at their auras, he claims there’s nothing spiritual about what he does, that it’s all based in science, and that he is simply manipulating people’s energies, fixing breaks in the flow of their energy. But despite his claims, he certainly had what one might call a spiritual experince while gaining his skills. According to Adam, at the age of 15, he had a vision that told him to go to an island, where he had mystical mind-meld with a large black bird that imparted the scientific mysteries of the universe to him. After that, he cured his mother’s MS.

Quinones and the ABC cameras were allowed to witness Adam’s technique at one of his sold-out seminars. Taking place completely in the dark, Adam goes into a sort of trance and is able to see people’s energies and fixes them, moving his hands in the air as if he’s actually rearranging building blocks.

What Adam does, frankly, is nothing new. Acupuncture and acupressure reportedly release blockages of chi (“energy”), practicioners of Reiki claim to work with energy centers of the body, and creative visualization is a mainstream practice. But, what makes Adam different is that he essentially “cured” someone on live television. When rock-n-roll pioneer Ronnie Hawkins was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a filmmaker decided to document his last days. What the film ended up documenting was Hawkins’ amazing recovery–the tumor had disappeared–and he attributed his miraculous recovery to Adam.

And it doesn’t hurt that Adam’s got the looks of a teen idol–the perfect MTV mystic.

Quinones points out that the cancerous tumors “cured” by Adam had never actually been biopsied, and he interviewed physicists who said that science simply doesn’t work the way that Adam says it does. They do a test to see if Adam can change the reporter’s brainwaves, based on previous tests that showed he could. And, of course, the ABC crew also follows several attendees of the seminar to see how Adam’s work has helped them. In the end, it’s a mixed bag, but one woman, whose soldier husband was severly wounded in Afghanistan, simply won’t give up on her husband and believes that Adam is helping him.

Which leads to Quinones’ final point: That even if Adam is not doing one substantive thing, people’s belief that he is may spur the mind-body connection into healing the body. Again, this is not a ground-breaking idea and even Adam alludes to the mind-body connection several times.

Adam is not a particularly elegant speaker or a studied salesman. In fact, his own father, an engineer, doubted his abilities as first, but is now his manager. His sister picks on him for not healing her zits, and he geniunely seems like a normal guy–nothing like the stereotypical faith healers seen in the movies. And that’s why this report was so anti-climactic as far as television goes. Unlike John of God, who–avert your eyes if you’re squeamish–was scraping peoples’ eyeballs with a scalpel and sticking forceps deep into peoples’ noses, to name just a few of the “surgeries” he does, Adam simply fiddled with their energies and told them to do visualizations. And he seemed to actually agree with Quinones on some points.

But Americans will be able to judge for themselves soon enough: Adam is slated to begin an American worskshop tour at the end of August.