Letter
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To the Editor: In response to the letter on faith healing in the
Christmas 1997 issue of the Journal,1 it is extremely important to
recognise that there is another side to the picture of the
deliberately fraudulent "faith healer".
In July 1976, in the company of another physician and two psychologists, I visited seven healers in the Philippines and collected 22 samples of "blood". All of the samples proved to be human blood. In 1977, one of those healers came to my clinic in the United States, and in the presence of four scientific observers, and with three cameras trained on the proceedings, performed "surgery" on two patients. The healer had no prior knowledge of these patients, who were local volunteers. Blood seemed to appear on the surface of the skin of both patients, although there was no opening of the body that I could see. I collected that blood, and took whole blood samples from both patients and the healer. The report from the laboratory is summarised in the Table. In each case, the blood that seemed to be removed from the patient was indeed that patient's blood type. The laboratory reported that the probability of choosing two random blood samples to match two people selected at random is 0.14. While I do not recommend that people rush off to the Philippines for treatment, what I observed was a very closely monitored scientific observation which I cannot explain.
C Norman Shealy
©MJA 1998
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