Row and Bee
Author notes
Oprah sings the inanities
Kilre onNot surprisingly, Oprah's network of inspirational-woo-ness has come out with yet another sample of blinding preferential treatment:
Millions of people are flocking to Abadiania, a remote town in Brazil, in search of a miracle. They come with every kind of ailment you can imagine—cancer, arthritis, depression—all to see one man: John of God.
So begins the travesty. And it goes on. The first guest brought on to talk about the man is a higher-up in the Oprah magazine, Editor-in-Chief Susan Casey, who begins her spiel with:
Susan Casey…traveled to the Casa to experience John of God for herself. Walking into it as a neutral journalist, she says she was driven first and foremost by curiosity.
Starts out as any "journalist" should hope, but bells ring when she has to outright claim neutrality. Kinda defeats the purpose if you're tooting your own horn. It's of course brought tumbling down soon enough:
While at the Casa, Susan was also searching for her own healing. After her father suddenly passed away two years ago, Susan experienced a "tsunami of grief" that she says she couldn't escape from. She wondered if John of God could help heal her grief.
A clear conflict of interest. She's not there to report, she's there to experience, to enhance her preconceived notions. Journalistic integrity, flung out the window like it was excess baggage. We can completely discount almost anything she says because she's heavily biased and expecting something to happen, and it's a well-known psychological effect: if you're looking for something, you're going to see it. Susan found her woo, though in the end she tries to backtrack a bit:
While Susan acknowledges that the whole experience sounds skeptical, she says she's "not a woo-woo person," and that the Casa helped her find healing.
That word, "skeptical": I'm not sure you know how to use it.
The story goes on to detail a doctor who'd gone supposedly to attempt to document the "healing", but fell for the sham himself; and two patients of John of God, a woman whose "healing" failed and whom now has some very nice cancer to show for it (to be fair, it only got worse after she got back from the visit), and a man who supposedly had a tumor removed from his back.
Chalk it up as another disgusting attempt to highlight a false healing modality that has no known veracity and a bunch of anecdotes–essentially nothing. It's potentially deadly, as in the case of the woman who failed to have her cancer healed; obviously she had the sense to get it checked after returning, but others won't have that little nagging doubt to go to a real doctor and make sure whatever they had was removed by good old Johnny, and they'll get worse or die. It's the same with other such "psychic healers" around the world.
Of course, actual skeptical organizations have managed to get some "healing" tests themselves, one of which comes from CSI, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry. From that article:
Certainly, his procedures are a sham. The twisting of forceps up a pilgrim’s nose is an old circus and carnival sideshow stunt, explained in my book Secrets of the Sideshows (Nickell 2005, 238—241). Looking far more tortuous than it is, the feat depends on the fact that, unknown to many people, there is a sinus cavity that extends horizontally from the nostrils over the roof of the mouth to a surprising distance—enough to accommodate a spike, icepick, or other implement used in the “Human Blockhead†act.
At my instigation, National Geographic filmed a performance of such an act at the Washington, D.C., showbar Palace of Wonders, operated by carny impresario (and friend) James Taylor. Our blockhead was “Swami Yomahmi,†a.k.a. Stephon Walker, whom I introduced with my best carny-sideshow spiel. Walker even cranked a rotating drill bit into his nose. He also used a blunt knife to scrape the white part of his eyeball and acknowledged that such stunts look more risky than they are.
A surgeon who commented on John of God’s incisions stated that they were superficial (little more than skin deep, apparently) and would not be expected either to bleed very much or even to cause much initial pain. The same is true of scraping the white of the eye or inserting something into the nasal cavity (“Controversial†2006). Physicians affiliated with the Skeptical Inquirer voiced similar opinions. The brief nasal procedure occasionally leaves someone’s nose bleeding, but his or her body’s own healing mechanisms will no doubt repair the minor injury. The bottom line regarding the procedures is that they are pseudosurgeries that have no objective medical benefit other than the well-known placebo effect.
Further reading:
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Do-You-Believe-in-Miracles_1/1
http://www.skepdic.com/psurgery.html
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/john_of_god_healings_by_entities/
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