In 1858, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was reported in Lourdes, France; the Mother of God confirmed the dogma of her immaculate conception which had been proclaimed by Pope Pius IX just four years earlier. Something like a hundred million people have come to Lourdes since then in the hope of being cured, many with illnesses that the medicine of the time was helpless to defeat. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the authenticity of large numbers of claimed miraculous cures, accepting only sixty-five in nearly a century and a half (of tumours, tuberculosis, opthalmitis, impetigo, bronchitis, paralysis and other diseases, but not, say, the regeneration of a limb or a severed spinal cord). Of the sixty-five, women outnumber men ten to one. The odds of a miraculous cure at Lourdes, then, are about one in a million; you are roughly as likely to recover after visiting Lourdes as you are to win the lottery, or to die in the crash of a randomly selected regularly scheduled airplane flight -including the one taking you to Lourdes.
The spontaneous remission rate of all cancers, lumped together, is estimated to be something between one in ten thousand and one in a hundred thousand. If no more than five per cent of those who come to Lourdes were there to treat their cancers, there should have been something between fifty and 500 ‘miraculous’ cures of cancer alone. Since only three of the attested sixty-five cures are of cancer, the rate of spontaneous remission at Lourdes seems to be lower than if the victims had just stayed at home. Of course, if you’re one of the sixty-five, it’s going to be very hard to convince you that your trip to Lourdes wasn’t the cause of the remission of your disease . . . Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Something similar seems true of individual faith-healers.
After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith-healing, a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before the ‘cure’? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just have the healer’s or the patient’s say-so? He uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in America of ‘psychic surgery’. But he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child’s spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to a faith-healer and she’s dead in a day. Dr Nolen’s conclusion:
When [faith]-healers treat serious organic disease, they are responsible for untold anguish and unhappiness . . . The healers become killers.
Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating disease (Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that some diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If prayer works, why can’t God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb? Why so much avoidable suffering that God could so readily prevent? Why does God have to be prayed to at all? Doesn’t He already know what cures need to be performed? Dossey also begins with a quote from Stanley Krippner, MD (described as ‘one of the most authoritative investigators of the variety of unorthodox healing methods used around the world’):
[T]he research data on distant, prayer-based healing are promising, but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be drawn.
This after many trillions of prayers over the millennia.
As Cabeza de Vaca’s experience suggests, the mind can cause certain diseases, even fatal diseases. When blindfolded patients are deceived into believing they’re being touched by a leaf such as poison ivy or poison oak, they produce an ugly red contact dermatitis. What faith-healing characteristically may help are mind-mediated or placebo diseases: some back and knee pains, headaches, stuttering, ulcers, stress, hay fever, asthma, hysterical paralysis and blindness, and false pregnancy (with cessation of menstrual periods and abdominal swelling). These are all diseases in which the state of mind may play a key role. In the late medieval cures associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary, most were of sudden, short-lived, whole-body or partial paralyses that are plausibly psychogenic. It was widely held, moreover, that only devout believers could be so cured. It’s no surprise that appeals to a state of mind called faith can relieve symptoms caused, at least in part, by another, perhaps not very different state of mind.
But there’s something more: the Harvest Moon Festival is an important holiday in traditional Chinese communities in America. In the week preceding the festival, the death rate in the community is found to fall by 35 per cent. In the following week the death rate jumps by 35 per cent. Control groups of non-Chinese show no such effect. You might think that suicides are responsible, but only deaths from natural causes are counted. You might think that stress or overeating might account for it, but this could hardly explain the fall in death rate before the harvest moon. The largest effect is for people with cardiovascular disease, which is known to be influenced by stress. Cancer showed a smaller effect. On more detailed study, it turned out that the fluctuations in death rate occurred exclusively among women 75 years old or older. The Harvest Moon Festival is presided over by the oldest women in the households. They were able to stave off death for a week or two to perform their ceremonial responsibilities. A similar effect is found among Jewish men in the weeks centred on Passover – a ceremony in which older men play a leading role – and likewise, worldwide for birthdays, graduation ceremonies and the like.
In a more controversial study, Stanford University psychiatrists divided eighty-six women with metastatic breast cancer into two groups – one in which they were encouraged to examine their fears of dying and to take charge of their lives, and the other given no special psychiatric support. To the surprise of the researchers, not only did the support group experience less pain, but they also lived, on average, eighteen months longer.
The leader of the Stanford study, David Spiegel, speculates that the cause may be cortisol and other ‘stress hormones’ which impair the body’s protective immune system. Severely depressed people, students during exam periods, and the bereaved all have reduced white blood cell counts. Good emotional support may not have much effect on advanced forms of cancer, but it may work to reduce the chances of secondary infections in a person already much weakened by the disease or its treatment.
In his nearly forgotten 1903 book, Christian Science, Mark Twain wrote
The power which a man’s imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had it, the last one will possess it.
Occasionally, some of the pain and anxiety or other symptoms of more serious diseases can be relieved by faith-healers – however, without arresting the progress of the disease. But this is no small benefit. Faith and prayer may be able to relieve some symptoms of disease and their treatment, ease the suffering of the afflicted and even prolong lives a little. In assessing the religion called Christian Science, Mark Twain – its severest critic of the time -nevertheless allowed that the bodies and lives it had ‘made whole’ by the power of suggestion more than compensated for those it had killed by withholding medical treatment in favour of prayer.
After his death, assorted Americans reported contact with the ghost of President John F. Kennedy. Before home shrines bearing his picture, miraculous cures began to be reported. ‘He gave his life for his people,’ one adherent of this stillborn religion explained. According to the Encyclopedia of American Religions, ‘To believers, Kennedy is thought of as a god.’ Something similar can be seen in the Elvis Presley phenomenon, and the heartfelt cry: “The King lives.’ If such belief systems could arise spontaneously, think how much more could be done by a well-organized, and especially an unscrupulous, campaign.
In response to their inquiry, Randi suggested to Australia’s Sixty Minutes that they generate a hoax from scratch, using someone with no training in magic or public speaking, and no experience in the pulpit. As he was thinking the scam through, his eye fell upon Jose Luis Alvarez, a young performance sculptor who was Randi’s tenant. ‘Why not?’ answered Alvarez, who when I met him seemed bright, good-humoured and thoughtful. He went through intensive training, including mock TV appearances and press conferences. He didn’t have to think up the answers, though, because he had a nearly invisible radio receiver in his ear, through which Randi prompted. Emissaries from Sixty Minutes checked Alvarez’s performance. The Carlos personality was Alvarez’ invention.