It’s the late ’60s. We’re in Melrose Park, west of Chicago, a suburb of Italians, Poles and Irish. Caroline Myss, a sheltered 15-year-old, has just bought a book on palmistry. A friend asks her to read her mother’s palm.

“I walk into this house,” recalls Myss, “and here are these two classic housewives from the ’60s, very zaftig-they looked like they sat around all day eating cheese and bread. They’re wearing housecoats-remember housecoats?-and these squishy pink rollers in their hair and they’re smoking cigarettes. One of the women holds out her hand and says, `Here, kid, read this.’ “

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Myss doesn’t really know much about palmistry, but she gives it a shot. “Here’s your heart line,” she says, “and here’s your life line.” The woman rolls her eyes. She snorts. Myss plows on. “I look at the marriage line and I say, `You’ve had two marriages.’ ” The woman exhales a pungent cloud of smoke from the side of her mouth and says, “You’re wrong, kid. I’ve had three.”

Myss sits back in her chair and out of her mouth, in this very adult, very authoritative voice, comes, “Yes, but the second one was never consummated.”

The neighbor friend looks at the young girl, who appears to be channeling Dr. Joyce Brothers, and says, “Jeez, kid, you’re good.”

She didn’t know how good Myss (pronounced “mace”) really was. Myss didn’t know the word consummate. She didn’t know what it meant. She just knew she was right. She went home and told her mother what had happened. After “You said what?” her mother said, “God gave you a gift for some reason and someday you’ll know what that reason is.”

It turns out that Myss is what is known as a “medical intuitive.” She has no medical degree, but she has the ability to diagnose illness, even before it has fully developed. She can sense a tumor before the cancer appears on any test.

After that first reading, says Myss, “my abilities kind of went to sleep for a while.”

Well, not completely. She told her mother an acquaintance was “going to drop real soon.” Six months later, he was dead. One September, she told her father to see a doctor. He didn’t, and by Thanksgiving, he was in the hospital, recuperating from heart failure.

“When she was just 7 or 8 years old, she said, `Mother, my life is going to be different,’ ” says her mother, Dolores. “We were visiting a cousin who had two little babies and she said to me, `I’ll never have this.’ “

The abilities really began to wake up in the early ’80s. Myss, who had started a company that published books dealing with “the human consciousness movement,” was living in Walpole, N.H. She had a professional rather than personal interest in holistic health and practiced not what she preached. She smoked, drank pots full of coffee, never exercised and ate whatever she felt like. She refused to meditate. As she writes in the best-selling “Anatomy of the Spirit” (Harmony Books), “I developed an absolute aversion to wind chimes, New Age music and conversations on the benefits of organic gardening.”

She also suffered from chronic back pain, chronic fatigue syndrome and headaches so severe they made her vomit. When colleagues told her that perhaps her inner child needed healing, she told them they were “nuts.”

She couldn’t fix herself, but she was becoming very good at fixing others. If a friend mentioned someone wasn’t feeling well, Myss would know what was wrong. The talent reappeared spontaneously, as if, she says, “it had a mind of its own.” She developed a reputation in the small town and was soon doing readings for people suffering from everything from depression to diabetes, miserable marriages to migraines.

Not only can Myss tell people what is wrong with them physically, but by “reading” their energy, she can also tell them why they’re sick-where they’re blocked emotionally, psychologically or spiritually-and how they can unblock. Hence her latest book, “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can” (Harmony Books).

If all this sounds way too New Age, too Shirley MacLaine, too Psychic Friends Network for you, please stop reading right now and go directly to some other part of the paper. Like the horoscopes.

The truth is, as the new millennium quickly approaches, more and more Americans -about 61 million, according to a 1996 study by the Harvard Medical School-are going outside traditional medicine to cure what ails them. Some 70 medical schools teach courses in spirituality and healing. The National Institutes of Health has set up an Office of Alternative Medicine to keep up with this very real revolution in health care, which believes that the mind, body and spirit are all connected and that physical illness is often the result of an emotional, psychological or spiritual crisis.

Once we accept that Type A personalities are prone to heart attacks and that stress can cause headaches, is it such a leap to believing an unrewarding job can lead to sciatica or loneliness can bring on a stroke? It was Dr. Albert Schweitzer who said, “It is more important for the doctor to know the patient who has the disease than to know the disease that has the patient.”

Acupuncture, aromatherapy, biofeedback, chiropractic, reflexology, hypnosis, homeopathy, osteopathy, meditation, magnets, massage, visualization, healing hands and herbs aren’t just for hippies anymore. Even the most no-nonsense types, disillusioned with their doctors, are playing relaxation tapes, popping St. John’s wort and wearing angel pins. They’re checking out the bulletin board at their health food store, looking for healers and past-life therapists. They’re pushing James Van Praagh’s “Talking to Heaven: A Medium’s Message of Life” (Dutton) up the New York Times best-seller list.

And they’re signing up for Myss’ workshops and seminars, buying her books and tapes, and browsing her World Wide Web site, all of which make her one of the hottest gurus in the self-help market and the new sweetheart of public television fundraising.

Some recent postings to www.myss.com: From British Columbia: “Wonderful, wonderful life-changing work.” From Atlanta: “Your words have turned my life around.” From Norristown, Pa.: “Your material has been a blessing.”

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Myss, 45, doesn’t look like a guru. On this particular rainy day, she’s in her Oak Park home, which she shares with her partner, Donald Meshirer, who is pursuing a career as a Jungian analyst. She’s wearing black tights and a sweat shirt. On her videotapes, she wears spiffy suits and looks as though she should be discussing estate planning, not energy medicine. She doesn’t sound like a guru as she complains about her aches and pains, the results of 18 months of nearly non-stop traveling around the world. She has taught all over Europe, in Russia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and has trips planned to Egypt and India. She’s funny, sarcastic, direct, skeptical and-and this is weird-down-to-earth.

Incredibly down-to-earth about her ability. Being a medical intuitive, she says, “is such a nothing to me. It’s just a talent, like being a good car mechanic. It’s no different. We’re all intuitive. We’ve all had the experience of thinking of someone and then having them call us. Why do we dismiss it as being a cute little coincidence and brush it off? It’s not. It’s two people in energetic dialogue made incarnate, in a phone call.”

Like a psychic hot line?

Myss makes a face.

“All I’m saying is that this is a skill that can be harnessed and trained, and that’s what I’ve done.”

Myss says her Catholic upbringing introduced her to “an atmosphere of spirituality with saints, apostles, angels and mystics. Because of that, none of this seemed in the least bit odd to me.” She also got a lot of support from her family.

Says Dolores Myss: “I never tried to squelch her in any way. It never frightened me; I thought it was wonderful. She was intuitive, but other than that, she was very normal.”

“I’m a serious pragmatist,” says Caroline Myss. “I wouldn’t want an occupation that was spacey. It wouldn’t suit my sarcasm.” When she gives a reading, she says, she doesn’t “shake, rattle or roll.”

Myss says it helped that when she began doing readings in Walpole, they were just a sideline.

“I had a profession, as a publisher, that meant a great deal to me and a skill for medical intuition that didn’t mean a great deal to me. If that skill had been the only thing I had, I think I would have overloaded it with ambition or competition. But publishing took all that energy. I would be in my office, with a manuscript on my lap, and I’d get a call from Norm who’d say, `I have Mary Smith, age 30, in my office.’ I’d say, `Pancreatic cancer coming in, three months from now. Here are the issues. . . .’ It was just like that. It’s always been just like that.”

Norm is Dr. Norman Shealy, a neurosurgeon, trained at Duke, Harvard and Massachusetts General. He is also the co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, and he and Myss started working together in 1984.

“I would call her and say, `I’ve got a patient here, tell me what’s going on.’ The less she knows about the person, the better she is. All she needs is their name and age. If she knows too much, she gets emotionally hooked.”

In 1986, Shealy kept track of Myss’ diagnoses over several months and found her more than 90 percent accurate. In one case, she said the patient suffered from severe spinal pain and weighed 249 pounds. He actually weighed 250 pounds.

“Some people are a genius at music, some at art. Caroline is at medical intuition,” Shealy says. “That doesn’t mean I would give her money to invest in the stock market.”

“I don’t have that kind of skill,” says Myss. “Would that I did.”

Of the many cases they’ve worked on together, one stands out for Shealy. His patient was in a deep depression. Myss said that if he didn’t deal with it, he would have colon cancer within a year. That was in July. In November, the man was operated on for colon cancer. In February, Shealy called Myss again, asking about the same patient. She said that if he didn’t deal with his depression, he would be dead by August.

“I shook him and told him he had to come to grips with his depression, but he didn’t. The following August, he had a pulmonary embolism, and he died Aug. 31.”

Another doctor Myss has worked with is Dr. Christiane Northrup, an obstetrician-gynecologist and author of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” (Bantam).

“A patient of mine had had a very positive experience with Caroline, so I called her and had her do a reading on me to check her out,” says Northrup. “I found her to be extremely accurate. The first words out of her mouth were, `You are a rescuer.’ At the time, that was absolutely true. She told me if I continued, it would cause energy to leak out of my right leg. I’d had occasional problems with my right hip off and on for years. The things she told me were incredibly specific. No one could have known them.”

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Northrup had Myss teach her energy system to Northrup’s colleagues at a women’s health clinic and would call her when she had a patient with confusing symptoms.

“I had one woman who had abnormalities in her uterine lining. We were faced with surgery if it didn’t stop. I had Caroline do a reading. She said the patient had some old feelings about the loss of a child earlier in her life, and if she would allow herself to remember it and get it out of her system, it could help. The patient said she had had an abortion. She didn’t want it, but her husband had insisted. Once she was able to talk about it and weep over it, she never had a problem with her uterus again.

“Emotions aren’t the entire key to illness, but they hold a great deal of weight. If you can create a condition, then you can change it and get better. That is the most empowering message. We’re not just sitting ducks for illness. They happen for a reason. You don’t have to feel like a victim, like a cork bobbing along on the ocean. When you know how the mind and body connect, you have a rudder and a sail.”

When Myss did readings at her seminars, she could be extremely blunt. She would ask for permission to speak freely and if the subject agreed, she didn’t hold back.

“She might turn to a physician-we get lots of health professionals at the seminars-and say, `You have completely ignored your family,’ ” says Suzanne Fageol, an Episcopal priest who runs workshops with Myss. ” `Your wife and children are begging for your time. You’ve got this one kid who’s a drug addict and the other is a dropout and neither of them speaks to you. You’re a candidate for prostate cancer. If you don’t want it, this is what you have to do. You’ve got to go home and repair the damage you’ve caused in your family. You have to find out what feeds you at the deepest level and do it.’ People come back the next year and say their lives have changed.”

“I’ve seen many lives changed dramatically,” says Virginia Slayton, who sponsors some of Myss’ workshops. “People have changed jobs, forgiven their parents; marriages have happened and fallen apart.”

As Myss worked as a medical intuitive, she began to notice patterns. People with the same issues, whether they were related to relationships, responsibility, fulfillment or forgiveness, developed the same illnesses. She developed a philosophy to explain how different emotional, psychological and spiritual problems translate into physical illness or, as she says, “biography becomes biology.”

There is, however, no simple quid pro quo. “I’ve come to realize that the assumption that all illness is the consequence of negativity is simply not true. I’ll never teach that again.”

With a theology degree from Mundelein College, Myss uses the major religions for inspiration. In her work, she blends the Christian sacraments, Hindu chakras and Judaism’s tree of life into a coherent system that divides the body into seven levels of energy.

Another part of Myss’ philosophy is what she calls “woundology,” the controversial idea that hanging on to old wounds gives people identity, power, a shorthand language and a handy excuse for not getting on with their lives.

Like so much of Myss’ knowledge, this came to her in a flash. At the time, she was wondering why people who believed in the mind-body-spirit connection, who read the books and attended the conferences, talked the talk and walked the walk, weren’t healing. Why not? Years went by and everyone seemed as sick as ever.

Then one day she was with a friend who happened to be an incest survivor. An acquaintance came up and asked the woman if she was free on a certain day. The woman said something like, “Oh, no. I’ve got my survivors of incest meeting that day. I never miss it, because we survivors of incest have promised to always be there for one another. And, as a survivor of incest, I would never let my fellow survivors of incest down.” The man said, “Uh, OK,” and left. Myss asked her friend why she felt she had to lay all this on someone who just wanted a yes or no answer. The woman, as you can imagine, was extremely defensive and hostile.

The next day, at a workshop, another woman introduced herself by saying, “My name is Shelley. I’m 52 and I’m an incest survivor and I have a wonderful support group.”

“Two days in a row,” says Myss, “incest survivors with wonderful support groups. It sounds like I make it up, but truly, the gods educate me in a very phenomenal way. When I was working with Norm, when the time came for me to learn about a new illness, there would always be three people in a row with the same disease. They were saying to me, `Pay attention; new information coming in.’ “

The twin experiences made Myss wonder if people really wanted to heal.

“The standard response is, `Oh, come on,’ ” she says. “But what I recognized is that healing represents change, and people would rather be abducted by aliens than change their lives. If you said to someone, `Your stomach needs Tums because your marriage ain’t the best thing in the world, and you really need to take a serious look at the manner in which you’ve set up your personal life because it ain’t working,’ they’d rather take the Tums. I’m not saying no one wants to heal; that’s nonsense. I’m talking about people who have found the street value of their wounds. If we do something wrong, the wounds go on trial, not us. Look at the Menendez brothers. A perfect example. Wounds give you power.”

Since Myss knows so much about how the mind, body and spirit work, people expect her to be perfect. Perfectly healthy, perfectly balanced, perfectly in tune with the cosmos.

“Oh, please,” she says. “I’m an advocate of morality and ethics and I work to keep myself balanced. . . . It needs to be said I’m working as hard as everyone else at maintaining my own integrity and not pointing fingers at others. I have to keep an eye on myself all the time. I start every one of my workshops by saying, `Don’t even consider putting me on a pedestal. I will not tolerate it. I won’t have you project that. . . . I’m working just as hard as you are. I have a whole list of people that I need to forgive and one category that I wouldn’t even consider forgiving. I am trying as hard as you and I will not have you think I can do all this. So if one day you find that I’ve broken a leg, you won’t say, “How can that happen?” We have to have this agreement right here and now.’ “

Myss no longer does private readings. With all her conferences and workshops, she no longer has the time or the energy. Still, she can’t help doing on-the-spot readings for strangers when she picks up some unhealthy vibrations.

“I’ll say, `How are you feeling? You look like you’re feeling a little under the weather.’ If there’s an open door, I’ll take it. I never tell them who I am or what I do. I’ve done that a million times. I’ve done it on airplanes, I’ve done it in bathrooms. . . . I love the invisible power. I can totally change someone’s life. It fills me up. It keeps me sharp. It tells me I’ve still got it.”

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