Faith Healing

[Switchy]

I saw a program about faith healing yesterday. One person said Jane Doe cured her of Chrome's Disease (ulcers in the intestines) and another said Jane Doe cured her of Cancer!

What do you all make of this? Does faith healing sometimes work and does it work as a placebo or is it devine healing?

Switchy

[CraigD]

There is no legitimate scientific evidence that faith healing is effective as a treatment for any physically real medical disorder. There is substantial evidence that many medical therapies are.

When a faith healer pronounces a person with Crohn's disease, cancer, or any other serious illness cured, there is a risk that that person will not seek or accept conventional medical treatment, allowing their disease to seriously injure or kill them. IMHO, influencing a person to be needlessly injured or killed is very wrong, and should be considered criminal.

[Celeste]

Originally Posted by CraigD
When a faith healer pronounces a person with Crohn's disease, cancer, or any other serious illness cured, there is a risk that that person will not seek or accept conventional medical treatment, allowing their disease to seriously injure or kill them.

Though I agree with Craig that serious negligence on the part of some "faith healers" should be dealt with legally, and perhaps harshly, I don't believe that faith healing is all bogus, anymore then I believe all faith healers are careless and wreckless with their intent or treatments. Faith/hope healing should compliment conventional medical treatment, if for any reason, to uplift and encourage someone.

Faith/hope is a powerful healer, as is the placebo effect. Ask any doctor working in Oncology. There has literally been hundreds of people pronounced terminal that were sent off to live what was left of their lives, only to show up back in the doctors office 1, 6, and 20 years later completely cancer-free.
Doctors like to call this "spontaneous healing".
But what is spontaneous healing?

Spontaneous: coming or resulting from a natural impulse or tendency; without effort or premeditation; natural and unconstrained; unplanned (of natural phenomena) arising from internal forces or causes; developing without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment

FAITH: Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
HOPE: To look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence.
To believe, desire, or trust.

What you have to understand is that there is a biology of the individual as well as a biology of the disease, each affecting the other.
A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief and the belief then becomes biology.
This has been proven throughout Psychoneuroimmunology studies.

In most cases, "Faith healers" work through this same logic, as well as the calling of a higher power if you will....Be it placebo or divine intervention, it can and does work thousands of times a year across the world.

If we had no faith/hope—for a cure, for winning the lottery, for falling in love, for the end of war, for being free of abuse, or for having food, warmth, clothing, and shelter—we would have no reason to go on. What you hope for doesn’t matter, but rather the essence of hope itself.

[public_folder]

Don’t mean to sound all priestly, but the world’s best seller did say that, and I quote

she touched his cloak and was healed

So to me its all mind over matter BS a.k.a. the placebo effect.

Though quite skeptical, I have encountered circumstances where believers, submitted to faith healers, have been cured of whatever the F ailed them.

[Boerseun]

Yep. Placebo effect. Which makes it a complimentary tool when curing people. As in "God will cure you if you swallow these pills." It might help a little for the serial religionists out there. The question is, do we want them around?

I suspect if you take a big enough sample of faith-healer's clients, the percentage having been healed (or affected at all) through the "laying on of the hands" would look identical to the percentage affected by sugar pills during medical trials.

[paigetheoracle]

Originally Posted by CraigD

There is no legitimate scientific evidence that faith healing is effective as a treatment for any physically real medical disorder. There is substantial evidence that many medical therapies are.

When a faith healer pronounces a person with Crohn's disease, cancer, or any other serious illness cured, there is a risk that that person will not seek or accept conventional medical treatment, allowing their disease to seriously injure or kill them. IMHO, influencing a person to be needlessly injured or killed is very wrong, and should be considered criminal.

I would like to concur with Celeste (Giving something a different name doesn't mean it isn't what it is) plus add that what medicl science considers a cure sometimes kills the patient. On top of that chopping out the offending section of intestines and leaving someone with a colostomy bag for the rest of their lives is hardly a cure, even if it does leave them alive and functioning (It's like chopping off somebody's hand to stop them stealing bread - it works but it's drastic and hardly the real answer).