Garry Lineham says just the kind of stuff that sounds dishy. A whole lot of quotable lines come from this self-taught healer’s mouth, things that grab eyeballs and make for cool soundbytes—some saucy, some debatable, often dissonant from what we know and understand as health and science. Like sunscreen causes cancer and is ineffective. Or that nicotine is a cure for many ailments, including autism. Or an anal sphincter release works for uterine or anal prolapses. It doesn’t need any explanation beyond that these videos alone get millions of views.
These are a mere few from the repertoire of Lineham (aged 56 but with the biological age of 30 and the blood of a 10-year-old, he says). And no matter what the scholarly opinion is, he has a captive audience.
Lineham is the somewhat controversial face behind healing portal Human Garage, which has a cool 1.5 million-plus followers on Instagram and TikTok and thousands of views, along with prolific YouTube videos that are avidly watched, re-watched and shared.
Human Garage was born as a clinic for athletes and artists in Venice, California, USA, co-founded by Lineham along with Cynthia Leavoy, Jason Van Blerk and Aisha Rodrique. One decade and 2,00,000 appointments later, the intrepid team of practitioners decided that “true healing comes from empowering individuals to take charge of their health”. So, in 2020, they released ‘fascial manoeuvres’, a combination of intention, movement and breath (think yoga, pranayam, energy balance and tai chi) to the public—available for free even to date.
The premise of these “movements”? To release traumatic memories stored in the body’s tissue and promote emotional release by reducing stress, which, in turn, helps the body cope better with any disease, whether it is a cold or cancer. (The original clinic has since shut down and moved online.)
It’s a warm summer afternoon during Lineham’s short visit to Dubai when we catch up over coffee and a chat on what exactly his mission is, his contentious past—including a prison term for alleged drug charges—and a missing medical degree that apparently doesn’t matter. He’s relaxed, dressed in his standard shorts and tee, curtains half drawn, ready to share.
What is it about Lineham that appeals to his million followers? Is it a novel frontier of bodywork and self-regulation or something else, more along the new-age smokescreen variety? Stressors in 2025 are immense, coupled with poor, unaffordable or inaccessible healthcare in large pockets of the world. And pegging illnesses to human emotions can be a slippery slope for people to blame themselves and soon enough stumble into misinformation. There are many who feel Human Garage’s content may be exploitative for thousands of people looking for solutions online. “But what I sell is free,” says Lineham. “I have no bank account, no driver’s license, no financial gains. I just care for my basic needs. Who am I exploiting?”
With the whole narrative around trauma release and somatic healing gaining popularity right now, some may be sceptical of this seemingly perfect modern 15-minute ‘quick-fix’ to problems. “What we see on social media today are in fact quick fixes ‘on purpose’ because we have short attention spans,” he remarks. If you keep coming back with recurring issues on your neck, back, shoulder or arm, eventually you are going to say ‘I want to fix myself and stop going to a doctor every time I have problem’. “That’s when people enter our programmes for a reset,” he adds.
Even with no known medical credentials and with scientific journals discrediting his theories, Lineham and his Human Garage are immensely popular and boast a cult-like following. Numerous testimonials and videos on the website showcase people fainting or sobbing uncontrollably after engaging in these manoeuvres, not unlike how believers collapse and cry when they receive the Holy Spirit. “The practice of medicine is application, and I have touched 1,00,000 bodies. You learn on the job,” smiles Lineham. “I documented my journey of personal pain and dysfunction at a very high level and then became a practitioner with top celebrities and athletes as my patients.”
For him, regular people care about results, not credentials, which is why he has achieved this ‘cult’ status in two years where most organisations take 30. “And I’m not even driving an end goal here. We’re helping people transform their health for free,” he says. People have always donated by choice. Those who can’t afford it receive the guides free on DM requests. It was only in 2024 that Human Garage went on a Transforming Trauma World Tour, where people could voluntarily pay USD 450 to receive and practice hands-on manoeuvres.
Human Garage’s free e-guides are apparently a hot favourite download amongst Indians. Calls come from remote villages in Africa. People come flocking, whether in Los Angeles or Dubai. From early June 2025, Lineham also commences work with the Philippine government to roll out a national programme that trains a million-plus Filipinos in the fascial manoeuvre technique to add value to their export expertise as caregivers. “When people teach people, it’s as open-source as it can get,” he says.
It sounds like a noble and serious thought. But we are yet to talk about his checkered past, of which he begins to speak most casually. He was convicted and incarcerated in 2010 for allegedly distributing encrypted BlackBerry phones to a drug trafficking ring operating in the US and Canada. “I had nothing to do with drugs. I ran an encryption business where I encrypted data for different government ops. I turned against the system in 2005 as I was about to sell my company for 250 million dollars. When I said they’re spying on us illegally, they came out against me. We had a negotiated settlement. I was a whistleblower before Snowden.”
This miserable prison term was what changed his life forever. As a serious body builder in the 1980s, Lineham suffered from a grave body building injury followed by accidents and concussions, and spent the next 20 years living with pain, seeing chiropractors and physiotherapists, spending a few million dollars on trying to make himself feel better. In prison, he was in the most amount of pain ever. “I’m not someone who prays, but I told God I would help people get rid of their own pains if he helped me with mine.” And one day, like divine intervention, the door to his dark solitary confinement room opened and a sliver of light fell through. An old man got pushed inside. He was a neurologist who became a chiropractor and, for the next 14 months, 24 hours a day, Lineham learnt everything from him.
It’s fairly safe to say he attempted to keep his side of the bargain with God when he got out of prison. Human Garage soon launched with four co-founders and 52 practitioners. A few years on, Lineham found himself in Canada practising these very fascial manoeuvres which finally freed him of 30 years of pain in three months. A few Facebook videos yielded 5,000 sign-ups in two days. On TikTok it was a cool 1.5 million followers in two months. The ball never stopped rolling. The already popular network drew more disciplines from across the world—including the US Olympic team, Ben Affleck, Hrithik Roshan and author Anita Moorjani, among others—simply because they combined so many modalities of healing, and it seemed to work.
And the numbers are serious. Let’s put aside the seemingly comical or scintillating aspects of an anal sphincter release that drives media interest, for instance. At millions of views, Lineham makes a point; bad posture pushes our hips forward, which, in turn, can cause uterine or anal prolapse and pain, for which current curative mechanisms don’t work. The fascial release takes pressure off the organs from the inside.
“We take snippets from real lives, which is why we have so much content,” says Lineham, who shares an endless stream of videos of kids with cerebral palsy getting off wheelchairs, mothers helping their C-section newborns with a reset, calming ADHD, relieving chronic pain, and a curious tongue-pull-and-modified-butthole-release video that eased a client’s emotional stress. His point? To hand back the power and drive people to take care of themselves, even if it’s just 15 minutes a day where you take the stress out of your body and environment and help it heal on its own. “If a fishbowl has dirty water, no amount of biohacking will save the fish. You have to clean the bowl,” he says.
Lineham has a weird relationship with science. Much like sunscreen, he doesn’t believe in vaccines either. “Science too often aligns with the narrative from pharmacology, which drives a message to drive revenue. That I don’t trust,” he insists, even though his momentum isn’t backed by science. Not backed by science yet, he insists.
It’s only been five years since he initiated his fascial manoeuvres framework. Two very well-known US-based doctors who have had personal and life-changing experiences with Lineham’s manoeuvres are now heading teams in clinical trials. “The science will come later, as it always has,” he says.
