Chapter 10
FAITH HEALING
You are at a “Miracle Service” given by famed faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman. There are thousands of people in the audience. You have seen several seemingly amazing cures, but the most dramatic is about to occur. Kuhiman shouts out, “Someone here is being cured of cancer!” Then you see a fifty-year-old woman, a Mrs. Helen Sullivan (not her real name), arise from a wheelchair and hobble painfully up onto the stage. She has stomach cancer that has metastasized to her liver and the bones of her spinal column, making walking extremely painful. She can walk, but only with the aid of a back brace. William A. Nolen, M.D., in his book
Mrs. Sullivan had, at Kathryn Kuhlman’s suggestion, taken off her back brace and run back and forth across the stage several times. Finally, she walked back down the aisle to her wheelchair, waving her brace as she went, while the audience applauded and Kathryn Kuhlman gave thanks to the Lord. (p. 87)
The effect of this miracle cure on the audience must have been immense. How could anyone, no matter how skeptical, doubt what they had seen with their own eyes: a woman devoured by cancer (and she really did have cancer—she was not a shill or a plant) had been cured by God. Now she could not only walk but run without assistance of any sort.
The above example is just one of tens of thousands of miracle cures claimed by faith healers worldwide. Faith healers, whether called that, or witch doctors or shamans, have been around since earliest times. In the twentieth century, at least among Western cultures, belief in faith healing rapidly declined until the last few decades. With the rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1980s, faith healing has again become extremely popular. It is practiced not only by traveling healers, who move from town to town, but also by many “prime-time preachers” such as W. V. Grant, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Ernest Angley, and Pat Robertson, to name but a few.
Several factors are extremely powerful in convincing people that faith healers are actually able to cure the sick. One is actually witnessing a “cure” such as the one described above, or seeing it on television, or hearing about it from someone who saw it.
How can one explain a cure such as that described above? In fact, no cure took place. Nolen followed up the case and interviewed Mrs. Sullivan two months after her miracle cure. She had gone to the “Miracle Service” expecting a cure, she said.
At the service, as soon as she [Kathryn Kuhiman] said, “Someone with cancer is being cured,” I knew she meant me. I could just feel this burning sensation all over my body and I was convinced the Holy Spirit was at work. I went right up on the stage and when she asked me about the brace I just took it right off, though I hadn’t had it off for over four months, I had so much back pain. I was sure I was cured. That night I said a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord and Kathryn Kuhlman and went to bed, happier than I’d been in a long time. At four o’clock the next morning I woke up with a horrible pain in my back. It was so bad I broke out in a cold sweat. I didn’t dare move. (Nolen 1974, pp. 98–99)
X rays revealed that one of the bones in her spinal column, a vertebra already weakened by the cancer, had collapsed. It had collapsed due to the strain that had been put on it when she had run back and forth across the stage. She died two months later, of the cancer that Kathryn Kuhlman had “cured” her of before an audience of thousands.
Skeptics still must explain Mrs. Sullivan’s surprising freedom from pain during and immediately after the service. It has been recognized in the past decade that the body has its own physiological and biochemical systems for dealing with pain (Watkins and Mayer 1986). Several of these systems control pain by causing the release of endogenous substances that are naturally occurring analogues of drugs like morphine and its stronger biochemical relative, heroin. These endogenous substances, called
But, of course, Kathryn Kuhlman didn’t see Mrs. Sullivan as she lay in her bed, crippled and dying. Nor did the thousands of people who “saw with their own eyes” that Mrs. Sullivan had been blessed with what appeared to be a miraculous cure. Since faith healers almost never follow up on the cases they claim to have cured, it is easy to understand why both members of the audience and the healers themselves can become convinced that their cures are real. Psychologically, the situation is little different from that of cold readers convinced they can foretell the future (see chap. 2). Their failures don’t return, so they see only their successes.
Nolen (1974) followed up many cases of “cures” by faith healers and found no miracles. This has been the universal result when faith healers’ “cures” are carefully investigated. Many people, if asked during or immediately after a healing session, will report that their pain has gone away or at least lessened. But, when asked about it again later, they will admit their pain has returned. This temporary reduction of pain that is so commonly reported is due to excitement-induced release of endorphins.
Testimonials are a second, related factor that falsely convinces people of the reality of faith healing—or of the effectiveness of any number of quack remedies and cures. People who genuinely believe that they have been cured by a faith healer or a quack are most effective at convincing others. The situation is similar to that of eyewitness testimony for UFOs. As was noted in chapters 7 and 8, the one piece of “evidence” that proponents of the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs find most convincing is the testimony of eyewitnesses. As was also seen in those chapters, such eyewitness testimony is highly unreliable. The same applies to testimonials about cures. One can find testimonials attesting to the effectiveness of almost anything. In the early part of this century, before government regulation of advertising claims for medicines, it was common for manufacturers to claim that their particular brand of “snake oil” would cure “consumption,” as tuberculosis was known then. They would provide genuine and sincere testimonials from people who had actually used their medicine and felt themselves to be cured. These people would later die of tuberculosis because the remedies were, in fact, worthless (Young 1967). This is illustrated by the poster shown in figure 20.
My own favorite testimonial touts a cure for cancer and cataracts so bizarre that it’s difficult to believe it’s not a joke. Time magazine, in its October 24, 1977, issue reported that Morarji Desai, then prime minister of India, attributed his vigor at age eighty-one to drinking a cup of his own urine each morning. He said “it was a cure for cancer and cataracts; he claimed to have cured his own brother of tuberculosis” with urine (p. 58). This item promptly brought another testimonial to the effectiveness of “urine therapy,” which was published in
THE NATURE OF DISEASE
The question still remains, however, as to why people give testimonials for worthless cures and treatments. One might expect them to be better able to tell whether they have been cured than to identify the real nature of a UFO they have sighted. But the issue is not so much the ability to determine whether one’s condition has improved, but to what cause one attributes the improvement. People often mistake the cause of their improvement because
