Psychic phenomena have slowly built its way into the world that we now know. We now see things like fortune tellers, mediums, and now surgeons? Psychic surgery is a form of healing where the healer appears to perform a surgery on a conscious patient with no instruments or anesthesia, apparently opening the patient’s body and removing their disease with their own hands. So how did this phenomenon come to be? Some things that need to be brought to attention includes psychic surgery’s origins and history, it’s applications and procedure, its cultural aspects, implications and consequences, and finally, the skeptical point of view.
Psychic surgery first started to appear in the Spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil around the mid-1900s but the practice was first publicly introduced to the U.S. in 1960 by FATE magazine, which deals exclusively with paranormal events or events that cannot be explained through science. In the magazine’s article, they originally called it “bloodless surgery” which carried a certain gore appeal. The article was published when a Filipino healer first appeared to pull blood and tissue from one of his foreign patients. This gore stuck many people’s interest and soon it began to flourish.
By 1966, there was enough interest within the U.S. and Europe that it became the topic of a book written by Harold Sherman that advertised and supported the stories of these miraculous cures. This practice continued to be an uphill trend and in 1972-1973 it was estimated that almost 7,000 to 9,000 foreigners, mainly from the U.S. or Europe, began to travel to the Philippines specifically to visit the psychic healers. Psychic surgery became so popular that many people were traveling to the psychic healers before trying biomedical treatment or even before being diagnosed with a problem. Since so many people began to travel, cons took advantage and set up tour packages through various travel agencies that would cost $1,000 to $3,000 for the week. So what exactly were these psychic healers doing that caught people attention and had them traveling thousands of miles to receive treatment? The Psychic healers were healing despite all of its cultural differences.
The techniques and procedures of psychic surgery are older and were considerably different previous to foreign interest. Originally, these psychic healers were farmers who used psychic healing as almost a hobby. They would help heal their neighbors, family, or friends, and they never expected payment. In fact, they would feel offended if someone were to pay them for healing them. For the healers, it was a way of life, and their duty to help others. Payments were still not expected when foreign interest became a thing; instead, some of them asked for donations for their churches. Even during their height of foreign interest, few healers became rich due to these practices and still supported themselves through farming. Though few became rich, there were definitely quite a lot of greedy healers or con men who tried.
True psychic healers have no training or skills to distinguish whom they can help and who they can’t. These healers were unlikely to turn away patients because they truly believed that they could help cure any illness, and the due fact that if they did turn someone away for being incurable, they would take the chance that people would lose faith in what they can do. The healers also have no idea to predict their effectiveness. They have no guarantee of a cure for every patient and they take the chance of being called a fraud if their techniques don’t work on all of their patients.
When a healer begins a surgery, they would press the tips of his or her fingers against the patient’s skin in the area that needed to be treated. Suddenly, their hands appear to penetrate the body painlessly and blood seems to flow. The healer will then pull out a foreign object that they believed was inserted by ‘witchcraft’. Originally these items would be things like pieces of coconut, tobacco, rope, glass, or other items that each had a symbolic value that abstractly identified them with the illnesses that the patient said they had. To better fit the American and European culture they had to change their tactics and began to ‘remove’ diseased skin or other organic matter to help cure the patient. Foreigners responded better to the gorier objects because it had to do with the cultural difference of what is expected out of a medical treatment.
Native Filipinos believed that strange objects explained illness; the foreigners believed in a biomedical explanation and expected to see malignant or damaged tissues and blood to prove they had been healed. The biomedical expectation grew in the Filipino population not only because of foreign influence but also because of the industrialization of the larger cities and the introduction of biomedicine within these places. So after the ‘surgery’ was completed, the patients skin showed no wounds or scars, and appeared to be healed. The technique chosen by these healers are not in themselves what cause patients to get better though. That has been proven time and time again that it is simply the trick of the mind.
Many times psychic surgery can also refer to what many people know as ‘Faith Healing’. Many Christian churches, especially Pentecostals, believe that there are certain people that God has chosen to help heal those who believe enough in God’s powers. This can also be looked at as saying that if someone believes hard enough that they have been healed, then they will often become better or even healed. Psychic healing is a treatment of the mind and deals with the Placebo Effect. Skeptics look at this and say that it helps prove how big of frauds these healers truly are. Not only are you expected to believe hard enough, but they could be easily influenced by ‘magic tricks’. By 1966, the first accusations of fraud were being made when skeptics noticed that the appearance of the operations could be imitated convincingly by stage magicians using sleight-of-hand.
There are many consequences and implications of this practice when you look at it in the way of it being another form of faith healing. Due to the impressions of these miracles, patients that had been declared bio medically untreatable had begun to fully expect that the healers could cure them within just one or two visits. The thing is though, is that Psychic healers are incapable of curing organic diseases, but they can help heal psychosomatic diseases, which discussed above is like the treatment of the mind and getting you to believe you truly are healed. Psychosomatic diseases are problems that people create within their own mind. Patients are unable to differentiate what’s real and what is imagined. Organic diseases on the other hand, have to be treated bio medically because they are considered impairment in the body’s structure or tissue. Things like cancer, multiple sclerosis, or diverticulitis have to be cured solely by treating the body.
Another implication of this practice was the fact that it was cheaper and faster. Healers began to receive patients who saw them as a relatively cheaper and faster way to treat illnesses compared to the known costs and treatments available bio medically. Usually cheaper and faster does not mean it is the best form of treatment for what you have. Simply being hopeful, cannot always fix what is wrong.
As it can be seen, psychic surgery is in fact a questionable and highly specific way of treating diseases. Though it was first founded within Spiritualism, it eventually grew and made its way to influence the U.S. and Europe. Many people, including Pentecostal Christians, believe that faith healing is the best way to cure any disease. From what is found, it can only cure the mind and anything else can be seen as fraud. Though it has lost many people’s interest, I still think that people who truly have faith that it works should continue to have faith in it. Time after time psychic surgery has proven to help people, even if it isn’t real. It lets people have hope that they can be saved from illnesses that are no longer curable. Sometimes, a little bit of faith, goes a long way. Psychic surgery is not for everyone and people shouldn’t use it just because it is cheap and fast but only to hang on to hope. Psychic surgery, faith healing, or the Placebo Effect are all the same thing and even science agrees that sometimes it really can heal people.