The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [114]
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