Our health is something that we very often take for granted and so is the treatment that we receive when it fails. Typically when we develop an ailment we take the advice of a doctor who effects a cure, conventionally a physical cure for a physical illness and, more often than not, directly on the affected area. The patient is able to have this physical treatment explained and understand how it works but what happens when this cycle fails? Can the psycichal take over where the physical has failed? How can a psychic healer succeed where a conventional doctor or surgeon has failed?
However much we know, or do not know, about psychic healing and what it is, there is no doubt that it has been with us for a very long time and it dates back certainly as far as Christ who is perhaps still the most famous healer of all. He is said to have effected cures for leprosy, allowed the lame to walk, given sight to the blind and, most amazing of all, given life to the dead, the most famous of those three cases being Lazarus. It is also a fact that in historic times, before advanced medicines, any doctor figure who was able to achieve results, by whatever method, would be held in high esteem and none more so than royalty.
From the Middle Ages to the Victorian era, the monarchs of both England and France were believed to possess what was known as the “Royal Touch” and they would heal people by the “laying on of hands,” the last recorded case being in 1825 and was performed by the French King Charles X.
Those with the Royal Touch were most often required to cure the disfiguring tubercular inflammation Scrofula, popularly referred to as “King’s Evil.” The Royal Touch was however exaggerated as the condition Scrofula was nasty but rarely fatal and would often clear up spontaneously of its own accord but no doubt many a “doctor” claimed to have effected a miraculous cure.
Whenever healing is mentioned, one thinks of course about Lourdes in France, which has for years been associated with miracle cures, but rather than being associated with a particular healer, they do of course have a religious connection.
Ever since 1858 when fourteen year old Bernadette Soubirous experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, it has become a place of pilgrimage for millions of hopefuls in search of a miracle cure for myriad illnesses. The patients are immersed in the grotto waters but, despite frequent reports of success, the church has certified only sixty-four cases as miracles. To satisfy the church that a miracle has occurred, the case must pass four reviews, three medical and one ecclesiastical, and must also satisfy seven criteria established by the church.
The original illness must be serious and under no doubt, it must be extremely difficult or impossible to cure and must have resisted all, if any, medical attempts to cure it. The cure must be sudden or extremely rapid and must also be permanent and perfect. Despite this rigorous screening the church has been criticized for recognizing some of the cures as researchers say that a lot of them involve psychosomatic or hysterical illnesses. The church however, which recognizes many cures as “remarkable” but not miraculous, is not concerned with such criticism and emphasizes that Lourdes is not a place for the production of cures but for spiritual renewal.
One such case occurred in 1962 when Roman Catholic Italian soldier Vittorio Micheli had known about his sarcoma of the left pelvis for thirteen months and his condition had deteriorated to such an extent that he was no longer able to stand or even control his left leg which was encased in plaster from hip to toe as his left femur had detached from his diseased pelvis. Micheli had also lost his appetite and the pain increased as his condition worsened. As a last resort he went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes where he was immersed in the baths and he immediately began to regain his appetite and also to experience less pain. Soon he had the feeling that his hip and femur were reattaching and, believing himself to be cured, he returned home. His doctor was skeptical and insisted that Micheli should continue to wear his cast but, within a month he was able to walk again and X-rays taken two months later showed that the sarcoma had in fact receded and the pelvic bone was regenerated. Over a period of five years medical reviews showed that the sarcoma had completely disappeared.
There is however a darker side to religious healings as well. The “Christian Science Monitor” is an American national newspaper and broadcast service and there are Christian Science reading rooms around the globe, but Christian science forbids its followers from using secular medical care or medication and allows them only to use the power of prayer.
This faith, or maybe blind faith, can go way too far as a Christian science couple in Florida, USA discovered when they were convicted of letting their child die rather than take him to a doctor. There are other faiths that believe in the power of alternative cures, and healers can also use the guise of religion to avoid laws against practicing medicine without a license. Any form of healing though is not meant to replace conventional medicine but perhaps compliment it. It has been around for a long time but still nobody knows where the healing “force” comes from. It has been thought that there may be some kind of life force that the ancient cultures refer to and practiced.
The Ancient Egyptians called it the “Ka” the Hindus call it “Prana” and the Chinese called it “T’Chi.” Could it be that there is some kind of life force that healers can tap into or is it something else? This is one of the main debates within healing; is the healer doing the work or is it actually the patient?
Conventional medicine recognizes that a patient kept confident and in good spirits will heal more quickly than one treated like “an item on a production line” and we also have placebos which will work when a patient is not being given any treatment at all but, importantly, believes that they are, yet still they get better, so is this proof of the patient healing themselves rather than a gifted healer and could a healer therefore learn their trade rather like a hypnotist who practices, rather than being born with the ability? Similar to people talking nicely to plants and seeing them grow more quickly and more fully than those which have not been spoken to, or those that have been shouted at.
Whether the healer describes themselves as a spiritual healer guided by a spirit or as a faith healer guided by a God, a high percentage of those seeking their help are cured, which may suggest that the healer has less to do with the treatment than the patient does, and it would seem that the confidence of the patient in the spirit world or in a God would have a big influence on whether or not a cure is effective. In fact, it could be said that the mindset of a person seeking the aid of a healer must hold some level of belief in the effectiveness of their treatment by the very fact that they seek them out. The power of suggestion is after all, a very strong force and an estimated 80% of asthma cases can be cured by hypnotic suggestion alone.
Tests have been done, including one which used the retired Hungarian Army Colonel Oskar Estebany. These tests were carried out by the biochemist Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1957. Estebany was particularly interesting because he had discovered his gift while he was working with the horses of the Hungarian Cavalry. The experiment used forty eight laboratory mice which all had a sliver of skin removed. Sixteen of them were a control group and were left to heal naturally, sixteen of them were given healing treatment held in Estebany’s hands twice a day for twenty days and the last sixteen were placed in incubators for the same period of time twice a day to simulate the body heat of Estebany’s hands.
By the fourteenth day of the experiment, the wounds of the control group mice had begun to heal as expected, about a third of them had wounds less than half the size of the original wound and the rest were smaller still. Of the incubated group, half of them had wounds around half the size of the original wound and as a group they were healing more slowly than the control group, probably because the heat in the incubator would encourage the growth of bacteria. Of the group that were held by Estebany, the majority of them had wounds equal in size, but more often smaller, than those of the control group, and the three with the biggest wounds had wounds smaller than one seventh the size of the original wound, so as a group, they had healed more quickly than the other two groups.
The experiment was not intended to find out how healing worked, but whether or not it would work on animals who weren’t aware of the auto suggestion involved. Perhaps though, these sixteen mice had felt comforted and secure while they were being held and, as we know from conventional medicine, this feeling of well-being has a positive effect on them.
This latter view is in accordance with Howard Gordon, co-author of “Miracle Man,” who is not alone in the belief that it is the patient not the healer who effects the cure, and he says “I think the healer, at best, is a sort of facilitator who is able to untap certain things that already exist in people.” But one man who certainly disagrees with this view is Dr Daniel Binor who observed a demonstration that would change the way he practiced medicine. He said of the demonstration: “My speciality is psychiatry, and I was convinced before that healing was no more than suggestion or wishful thinking or charlatanism but then I observed a healer bring about a physical change to a patient that I could not explain away. There was a lump under a young man’s nipple, which, within half an hour of laying on of hands healing, shrank by a centimeter – It went from being rather firm to being soft and from being tender to non-tender. There was doctor there and we agreed about the treatment.” Binor now uses elements of spiritual healing in his work.
Einstein maintained that matter and energy are two sides of the same thing, which modern physics would seem to support, and Binor continues: “I use the healing combined with psychotherapy. Many times when a person has a physical illness it’s because of tensions in the body, and through psychotherapy and healing they’re able to find understanding and, in many cases, relief.” He says that he doesn’t like to refer to it as “Faith Healing” because that implies that mice and plants and yeast would have to have faith in order to have change. I refer to it as “Spiritual healing.”” He goes on to say “When the emotions are released, the physical symptoms can clear up. The most spectacular ones are where very rapid changes occur but these are rare. I don’t want to go into these because the media have hyped them up and people have come to expect it to be always like this.”
If it is in fact the healer who effects the cure rather than the patient, then what about the following case where the healer had no idea about the power of her gift, let alone that she had one at all. At age nineteen, Rose Gladden discovered that she was a healer when, in the 1940s, she “had gone into a shop in London called Dyers and Chapman and found Mr Chapman who had collapsed, lying under the counter. I asked him what was wrong and he said ‘I’m in terrible pain. I have an ulcer’ Now, I didn’t know where that ulcer was. All I thought was ‘I wish I could help him’ and I heard a voice say ‘You can. Put your hand there.’ ‘But where?’ I asked myself ‘He hasn’t told me where this ulcer is.’ With that I saw a little star, just as if it had fallen out of the night sky, floating over his left shoulder and, as I watched, the star floated down and stopped on the top half of the stomach. Mr Chapman confirmed that was where the ulcer was. As I put my hand there, I never saw, but felt, another hand come over mine and hold it steady. I felt my hand being filled with a tremendous heat. I couldn’t move it away. It was as if it was glued to that part of the body. After a while, my hand was pulled like a magnet to his side and then away from his body. With that, he said, ‘That’s gone, it’s marvelous. Your fingers felt as if they were holding the pain and as you took your hand across, the pain went with it.’ I was absolutely overjoyed. I still didn’t know you called it healing. I just knew I was beginning to realise why I was born and what I had to do was help people.”
However, Rose’s new found gift turned out not to be as easy to live with as she had first thought. Since her childhood Rose had been able to see things that others couldn’t see and, during her twenties, she had psychic experiences that were so intense she thought she was going mad. She describes herself as a “Psychic” rather than a “Spiritual Healer” as she doesn’t use a spirit guide in her healing but she does believe in the existence of a spirit world. The “stars” that she see on the body of the patient usually take the form of silver lines and spots and she has found that these lines and spots correspond with the same lines and “meridians” that are recognised by acupuncturists. She has also found that the area she is to treat is not always the spot which the patient indicates as being painful but that treating the spot would still effect a cure.
Rose is also able to see a person’s “aura” which has been described by various people as “an envelope of vital energy which apparently radiates from everything in nature,” a “spiritual sphere surrounding everyone,” the body’s “etheric double” and even the “astral body.” No two psychics see the aura in the same way as they perceive the colours differently but they all see disturbances in it, and these disturbances can act as an early warning system as generally they precede the symptoms of an illness.
Rose Gladden however interprets the disturbances differently. She sees the physical maladies as the result of an imbalance in the aura rather than the aural imbalances being caused by pending illness and so she will treat the aura rather than the affected area and again this will effect a cure.
Walter J. Kilner observed that the human aura reflected a person’s state of health and said that “Weak, depleted auras suck off the auric energy of healthy, vigorous auras around them.”
In the 1963 book “An Outline of Spiritual Healing” the author, Gordon Turner, the British healer, makes a study of the aura which he is able to see with his psychic powers. He says that the human aura is a complex one, which he sees as a changing pattern of rippling colour and which is dense near the physical body and fainter at the edges. Turner says that the emotions are registered in the aura as colour changes and illness makes it grow duller or produces patches of new colour. He goes on to say that “When a healer places his hands upon a patient, there is an immediate bleeding together of their auras. Within a few minutes all other colours that were previously observable become subordinated by a prevailing blue, which extends greatly beyond normal and seems to fill the room in which treatment is being carried out… It is still possible to see the colours that had denoted symptoms but these float away from the body of the patient and become surrounded by a yellow coloured light which seems to be spinning. What follows is for all the world like the action of a ‘spiritual Penicillin.’ The yellow light gradually overcomes the duller colour of the disease and it becomes flattened out and much less intense.”
Patients being treated most often report the sensation of heat and also tingling feelings “Something like an electric shock” and even seeing colours before their eyes when the healer touched them, and healers have also reported a feeling of “heavy air” leaving them, usually through their hands. E. Douglas took Kirlian photographs of the hands of a psychic healer and reported that the corona of light surrounding her finger tips flared whenever she thought of healing.
There is an extremely interesting case of a woman who would help her patients, not by healing them herself, but by acting as a clairvoyant and materializing a doctor. In 1916 a young woman named Isa Philips was planning her wedding day when she had a vivid and terrifying vision in which she saw her fiancé, Kit, shot and fall from his horse. Kit was, at that time, away on active service and, a few days later, she received news of his death and when a friend, Jack Northage, brought her Kit’s possessions he explained to her how exactly he had died, and the description matched her vision in every detail.
She had also seen Northage in her vision as he had gone to Kit’s assistance and they soon became friends and later married in 1919. Soon after her first vision, Isa began to hear a man’s voice which would warn her to develop her clairvoyant abilities. She became a widely acclaimed medium who was best known for her materialisations. At one séance in Doncaster, England in 1940, ten sitters saw nineteen forms that materialised and also spoke to other spirits. In 1941 her spirit guide, Dr Reynolds, told Isa to stop her public séances and to concentrate on healings so she established a séance room, healing clinic and operating theatre in the grounds of her bungalow at Pinewoods in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire.
The meetings would start with prayer and would continue until the materialisation of Dr Reynolds. During one séance Dr Reynolds picked up a torch and aimed it at the operating table where there was a patient suffering from an acute duodenal ulcer. Two of the sitters were not wearing masks and the doctor told them to put one on before he began “operating.” He placed cotton wool swabs on the patient’s abdomen and assured him that there would be no pain, despite a lack of anaesthetic. He explained how he would “freeze” the affected area and pass his hand inside the body to remove the ulcer. Dr Reynolds asked if the patient felt any pain, which he did not, and he moved his hands to the side of the body and a gurgling sound was heard. Dr Reynolds said that “The ulcer was in a very bad condition, that it would not come away in a whole piece and that he was afraid of haemorrhage.” The pieces of the ulcer were brought out through what Dr Reynolds described as a temporary opening in the abdomen and he placed them on the swabs on top of the body. When the séance was over, the tissue was placed in a bottle of surgical spirit and later analysed and was found to be “an acute duodenal ulcer, containing brunner’s glands and showing from its condition that it was about to penetrate the intestine and would have proved fatal.”
Throughout the 1950s there were lots of similar accounts and cures and many of them appeared in the press. They stopped, however, after Isa was involved in a car crash and she ceased her materialisations and psychic surgery, though she did continue to heal the sick. For example, in 1967 the Scottish “Sunday Express” reported that a bus driver suffering from a stomach ulcer visited Pinewoods and was treated by Isa who massaged his abdomen. It was said to have “opened like a rose” and the ulcer was removed in two pieces. The patient told the newspaper “Before the operation, almost anything I ate gave me pain. An hour after, I was able to eat a five course meal. I haven’t had a twinge since.”
Joan Windsor of Williamsburg, Virginia is not a doctor, nor does she have any medical training. What she feels she dos have is the power of clairvoyance which enables her to picture a situation without knowing any of the facts. She uses her power to diagnose and treat, and maybe cure, illnesses of all kinds, yet she does this without meeting her patients. They write to her and enclose a photograph of themselves, and it is the photograph that she uses to do this. She feels that every person has a unique vibration and this vibration is what she is able to pick up on from the photographs. Windsor has approximately seventy percent of her diagnoses and treatments confirmed by doctors.
One such case was of a woman, Joyce White, who was having trouble with her digestive system and whose doctor had been unable to diagnose any problem. Joan held Joyce’s photograph after reading the brief letter which accompanied it and she was able to envisage a problem with the Joyce’s spinal cord and which she felt was interfering with her digestion. Joyce’s spinal cord had actually been damaged in an ice skating accident decades earlier and Joan suggested a simple change of diet and treatment for the old spine injury.
Perhaps the most famous distance healer was Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877, Cayce followed the stereotypical path in that he was able to see things that others could not, as well as the human aura from an early age. At 21 he had to give up his job as a salesman because of a chronic sore throat and bouts of laryngitis which resulted in him losing his voice completely and as a last resort he went to see the hypnotist Al Layne.
Layne tried to help but came to the conclusion that Cayce was immune to post hypnotic suggestion so he put him into a trance and asked him what was causing his illness and what might be the best way to treat it. At the end of the session Cayce was able to speak again and Layne suggested that they go into partnership in diagnosis and treatment. Cayce declined the offer and he soon lost his voice again. Taking this as a sign that to help others was his destiny, he decided to change his mind, and in 1901 he began to give readings, diagnoses and cures while in a trance but whenever he used the “gift” against his own principals he would lose his voice again.
Cayce pinpointed his own condition as partial paralysis of the vocal cords and suggested that the cure may be an increase in blood circulation to the area for a short time. Cayce is not alone in not being in control of his gift and it was as though it was merely using him as a conduit. By 1911 Cayce was working with a homeopath, Dr Wesley Ketchum, and a feature on him in the New York Times brought him to national attention and it was Ketchum who now gave the treatments that Cayce prescribed. He began working by being hypnotised in the presence of the patient but later he was able to make a diagnosis with only the name and address of the patient and he would put himself into a trance.
Somebody, usually his wife, would then say to him “You now have the body of [Name and Address]. You will go over this body carefully, noting its condition and any parts that are ailing. You will give the cause of such ailments and suggest treatments to bring about a cure.”
Cayce believed that every cell in the body was individually conscious and that they could communicate their condition to his entranced mind. He was mocked for some of his ideas, such as his belief that he was a reincarnation of one of the angels who had inhabited the Earth before Adam and Eve, and later was a citizen of Atlantis, but as a healer he was highly successful. He found that the work was exhausting and he was warned that giving more than two readings in a day would kill him but he still averaged four a day after 1942 when the war brought him a lot of work, and after June 1943 he increased that figure to six a day. The effort finally took its toll on him and in 1944 he collapsed from exhaustion and within five months he was dead. He had referred to his impending death as a “healing.”
The most famous British clairvoyant healer was Harry Edwards, founder of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, in England, who was late to take up his new “career” as he didn’t perform his first healing until he was in his forties. Edwards had attended services at a spiritualist church to satisfy a friend and he was told there by a number of mediums that he possessed a latent ability as a healer, and next time he knew somebody who was ill, he should concentrate his thoughts on their recovery.
He soon found that a friend of a friend was terminally ill with tuberculosis and he promised that he would do what he could to help. He sat down and began to meditate and images came into his mind of a hospital ward and he found himself focused on the person in the last bed but one in the ward and he “sent out” a get well message as powerfully as he could. He later discovered that the ward, and the position of the bed in it, was just as he had imagined it and the patient had begun to feel better after Edwards’ attempt at healing. Within weeks he was up and mobile, despite the doctors having expected him to die.
Edwards’ second patient “was an adamant atheist and his wife dared not to tell him that she’d sought spiritual help for him” yet the remote healing still worked and cured him of lung cancer.
It was on Edwards’ third healing attempt that he first had physical contact with a patient and he was surprised at how it affected him. The patient was a young girl who was suffering from tuberculosis of the lung and when he put his hands on the girl’s head, his “entire body seemed to come alive.” He felt as though he was filled with energy and this energy flowed along his arms, out of his hands and into the young girl, and he felt himself telling the girl’s mother that she would be up in three days which indeed she was, and when she was next examined, she was found to be completely cured.
These three healings convinced Edwards that he should devote himself to healing full-time and he gave up his printing business. In 1946 he established a sanctuary at Burrows Lea in Shere, Surrey where he could work.
During his prime in the 1950s Edwards was so renowned in healing that he was able to fill to capacity the 8,000 seat Royal Albert Hall where people would flock in the hope of being cured by him and he continued to work until his death in 1976 but his sanctuary was kept open and run by a group of healers.
Edwards believed that he had the direction of Louis Pasteur and Lord Lister in his work and his early healing took place in the Middle East during World War 2 when he was in charge of a crew of Arabs who were building a railroad and who were inexperienced workers so injuries were commonplace, such as hitting their fingers with hammers.
They found that their wounds would heal quite quickly if Edwards treated them and they gave him the nickname “Hakim” – Healer. He returned from the war thinking nothing of it and began to concentrate his efforts on the family printing business until 1935 when he was over forty. He came to believe that absent healing, or healing without the patient’s knowledge, worked as well as, if not better than, direct healing after he began to receive so much mail and pass on healing thoughts so that he wouldn’t have to physically see the senders of them all.
A good example of absent healing occurred in 1953 when Edwards healed a man known as Mr B. who was known to be suffering from a malignant cancerous condition of the throat. The patient had severe pain and swelling, was unable to swallow and could only talk in a hoarse whisper. He had previously had a biopsy, which is where a piece of tissue is removed and examined, and he was due to be operated on in two weeks’ time. When he discovered this, he telephoned Edwards and asked him to try absent healing. In the days that followed, Edwards says that “The pains left him and the swellings subsided; and his voice returned to normal.” Two days before the scheduled operation, Mr B. requested another examination by the two specialists that had performed the original tests, and “after exhaustive tests and a fresh biopsy, they declared that all symptoms of the cancer has disappeared.” Rather than prove to the medical establishment that healing worked, as Edwards had hoped, the two specialists said that the first biopsy must have removed all of the cancerous tissue.
Due to the rise in popularity of healing, there was also a rise in the number of hoaxers, some, but not all, in search of financial or personal gain and the parapsychologist, Dr Thelma Moss, who has tested healers under laboratory conditions and written the book “The Probability Of The Impossible” has drawn up several common characteristics in healers:
Manila in the Philippines boasts many psychic surgeons who people may go and visit as part of a package tour. Psychic surgeons claim to perform operations where they may be seen to remove tumors by reaching into the patient’s body without making an incision or using anaesthetics. As with many paranormal claims, there are those who have been exposed as frauds and perhaps the best way to catch a hoaxer is to film the “operation” where the action can later be slowed down and any sleight of hand can be exposed.
One film clip showed that when a “surgeon” was supposed to be inserting his fingers into a patient’s body, he was actually kneading the patient’s flesh with his knuckles and his fingertips are clearly visible. The blood and tissue supposedly removed during operations have been examined and found to be of animal origin. One such fraud was a wealthy and “successful” healer from the Philippines, Tony Agpaoa, who was investigated by a team of Italians in 1973. They found that the red liquid, alleged to be blood, was of neither human or animal origin, and that two renal stones removed from a patient, were actually lumps of salt and pumice, and what were alleged to be fresh fragments of bone and tissue had already begun to decompose.
Brazilian healer Arigo was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil and only attended school for four years, he developed no trade or profession and worked on and off as a labourer or farm hand. At the age of thirty he reportedly fell into a severe depression which was accompanied by nightmares, sleep walking and sleep talking. A local spiritualist told him that a spirit was trying to work through him, and so began his career as a healer, his first success being that of a local politician who was cured of an inoperable lung tumor.
For most of his twenty years as a healer, Arigo worked at a clinic in Belo Horizonte, which was visited by as many as 300 patients a day. Most of them he felt could be treated by conventional means so he sent them away. One of the many medical and paranormal experts who went to see Arigo at work was Puharich, who watched him perform in 1963 with a camera man in tow. After watching Arigo work for a while, Puharich offered himself up for surgery which Arigo performed with a pocket knife.
Puharich said that Arigo “took hold of my right wrist with his left hand and wielded the borrowed pocket knife with his right hand.” He goes on, “The next thing I knew was that Arigo had placed a tumor and a knife in my hand. In spite of being perfectly conscious, I had not felt any pain, yet there was the incision in my arm, which was bleeding, and there was the tumor. The film showed that the entire operation had lasted five seconds. Arigo made two strokes with the knife. The skin had split wide open and the tumor was clearly visible. Arigo then squeezed the tumor as one might squeeze a boil, and the tumor popped out.”
Within three days, Puharich’s wound was healed, despite his not having cleaned it and only covering it with a plaster. Puharich was now convinced that Arigo’s gift was genuine and he made another trip to watch him where he observed him correctly estimating patients’ blood pressure without equipment, giving accurate diagnoses and naming complex drugs as treatments. He asked Arigo how he arrived at his conclusions and he replied “I simply listen to a voice in my right ear and I repeat whatever it says. It is always right.”
Arigo said that the voice belonged to a long dead German man who had attended, but not finished, medical school named Adolphus Fritz.
In 1971 Arigo was involved in a fatal car crash and, a year later, Puharich reported “Our nice modern equipment proved that genuine healing took place under bizarre conditions and unbelievable circumstances, clearly, we have a lot of research ahead of us.”
However much we know, or do not know, about psychic healing and what it is, there is no doubt that it has been with us for a very long time and it dates back certainly as far as Christ who is perhaps still the most famous healer of all. He is said to have effected cures for leprosy, allowed the lame to walk, given sight to the blind and, most amazing of all, given life to the dead, the most famous of those three cases being Lazarus. It is also a fact that in historic times, before advanced medicines, any doctor figure who was able to achieve results, by whatever method, would be held in high esteem and none more so than royalty.
From the Middle Ages to the Victorian era, the monarchs of both England and France were believed to possess what was known as the “Royal Touch” and they would heal people by the “laying on of hands,” the last recorded case being in 1825 and was performed by the French King Charles X.
Those with the Royal Touch were most often required to cure the disfiguring tubercular inflammation Scrofula, popularly referred to as “King’s Evil.” The Royal Touch was however exaggerated as the condition Scrofula was nasty but rarely fatal and would often clear up spontaneously of its own accord but no doubt many a “doctor” claimed to have effected a miraculous cure.
Whenever healing is mentioned, one thinks of course about Lourdes in France, which has for years been associated with miracle cures, but rather than being associated with a particular healer, they do of course have a religious connection.
Ever since 1858 when fourteen year old Bernadette Soubirous experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, it has become a place of pilgrimage for millions of hopefuls in search of a miracle cure for myriad illnesses. The patients are immersed in the grotto waters but, despite frequent reports of success, the church has certified only sixty-four cases as miracles. To satisfy the church that a miracle has occurred, the case must pass four reviews, three medical and one ecclesiastical, and must also satisfy seven criteria established by the church.
The original illness must be serious and under no doubt, it must be extremely difficult or impossible to cure and must have resisted all, if any, medical attempts to cure it. The cure must be sudden or extremely rapid and must also be permanent and perfect. Despite this rigorous screening the church has been criticized for recognizing some of the cures as researchers say that a lot of them involve psychosomatic or hysterical illnesses. The church however, which recognizes many cures as “remarkable” but not miraculous, is not concerned with such criticism and emphasizes that Lourdes is not a place for the production of cures but for spiritual renewal.
One such case occurred in 1962 when Roman Catholic Italian soldier Vittorio Micheli had known about his sarcoma of the left pelvis for thirteen months and his condition had deteriorated to such an extent that he was no longer able to stand or even control his left leg which was encased in plaster from hip to toe as his left femur had detached from his diseased pelvis. Micheli had also lost his appetite and the pain increased as his condition worsened. As a last resort he went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes where he was immersed in the baths and he immediately began to regain his appetite and also to experience less pain. Soon he had the feeling that his hip and femur were reattaching and, believing himself to be cured, he returned home. His doctor was skeptical and insisted that Micheli should continue to wear his cast but, within a month he was able to walk again and X-rays taken two months later showed that the sarcoma had in fact receded and the pelvic bone was regenerated. Over a period of five years medical reviews showed that the sarcoma had completely disappeared.
There is however a darker side to religious healings as well. The “Christian Science Monitor” is an American national newspaper and broadcast service and there are Christian Science reading rooms around the globe, but Christian science forbids its followers from using secular medical care or medication and allows them only to use the power of prayer.
This faith, or maybe blind faith, can go way too far as a Christian science couple in Florida, USA discovered when they were convicted of letting their child die rather than take him to a doctor. There are other faiths that believe in the power of alternative cures, and healers can also use the guise of religion to avoid laws against practicing medicine without a license. Any form of healing though is not meant to replace conventional medicine but perhaps compliment it. It has been around for a long time but still nobody knows where the healing “force” comes from. It has been thought that there may be some kind of life force that the ancient cultures refer to and practiced.
The Ancient Egyptians called it the “Ka” the Hindus call it “Prana” and the Chinese called it “T’Chi.” Could it be that there is some kind of life force that healers can tap into or is it something else? This is one of the main debates within healing; is the healer doing the work or is it actually the patient?
Conventional medicine recognizes that a patient kept confident and in good spirits will heal more quickly than one treated like “an item on a production line” and we also have placebos which will work when a patient is not being given any treatment at all but, importantly, believes that they are, yet still they get better, so is this proof of the patient healing themselves rather than a gifted healer and could a healer therefore learn their trade rather like a hypnotist who practices, rather than being born with the ability? Similar to people talking nicely to plants and seeing them grow more quickly and more fully than those which have not been spoken to, or those that have been shouted at.
Whether the healer describes themselves as a spiritual healer guided by a spirit or as a faith healer guided by a God, a high percentage of those seeking their help are cured, which may suggest that the healer has less to do with the treatment than the patient does, and it would seem that the confidence of the patient in the spirit world or in a God would have a big influence on whether or not a cure is effective. In fact, it could be said that the mindset of a person seeking the aid of a healer must hold some level of belief in the effectiveness of their treatment by the very fact that they seek them out. The power of suggestion is after all, a very strong force and an estimated 80% of asthma cases can be cured by hypnotic suggestion alone.
Tests have been done, including one which used the retired Hungarian Army Colonel Oskar Estebany. These tests were carried out by the biochemist Bernard Grad of McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1957. Estebany was particularly interesting because he had discovered his gift while he was working with the horses of the Hungarian Cavalry. The experiment used forty eight laboratory mice which all had a sliver of skin removed. Sixteen of them were a control group and were left to heal naturally, sixteen of them were given healing treatment held in Estebany’s hands twice a day for twenty days and the last sixteen were placed in incubators for the same period of time twice a day to simulate the body heat of Estebany’s hands.
By the fourteenth day of the experiment, the wounds of the control group mice had begun to heal as expected, about a third of them had wounds less than half the size of the original wound and the rest were smaller still. Of the incubated group, half of them had wounds around half the size of the original wound and as a group they were healing more slowly than the control group, probably because the heat in the incubator would encourage the growth of bacteria. Of the group that were held by Estebany, the majority of them had wounds equal in size, but more often smaller, than those of the control group, and the three with the biggest wounds had wounds smaller than one seventh the size of the original wound, so as a group, they had healed more quickly than the other two groups.
The experiment was not intended to find out how healing worked, but whether or not it would work on animals who weren’t aware of the auto suggestion involved. Perhaps though, these sixteen mice had felt comforted and secure while they were being held and, as we know from conventional medicine, this feeling of well-being has a positive effect on them.
This latter view is in accordance with Howard Gordon, co-author of “Miracle Man,” who is not alone in the belief that it is the patient not the healer who effects the cure, and he says “I think the healer, at best, is a sort of facilitator who is able to untap certain things that already exist in people.” But one man who certainly disagrees with this view is Dr Daniel Binor who observed a demonstration that would change the way he practiced medicine. He said of the demonstration: “My speciality is psychiatry, and I was convinced before that healing was no more than suggestion or wishful thinking or charlatanism but then I observed a healer bring about a physical change to a patient that I could not explain away. There was a lump under a young man’s nipple, which, within half an hour of laying on of hands healing, shrank by a centimeter – It went from being rather firm to being soft and from being tender to non-tender. There was doctor there and we agreed about the treatment.” Binor now uses elements of spiritual healing in his work.
Einstein maintained that matter and energy are two sides of the same thing, which modern physics would seem to support, and Binor continues: “I use the healing combined with psychotherapy. Many times when a person has a physical illness it’s because of tensions in the body, and through psychotherapy and healing they’re able to find understanding and, in many cases, relief.” He says that he doesn’t like to refer to it as “Faith Healing” because that implies that mice and plants and yeast would have to have faith in order to have change. I refer to it as “Spiritual healing.”” He goes on to say “When the emotions are released, the physical symptoms can clear up. The most spectacular ones are where very rapid changes occur but these are rare. I don’t want to go into these because the media have hyped them up and people have come to expect it to be always like this.”
If it is in fact the healer who effects the cure rather than the patient, then what about the following case where the healer had no idea about the power of her gift, let alone that she had one at all. At age nineteen, Rose Gladden discovered that she was a healer when, in the 1940s, she “had gone into a shop in London called Dyers and Chapman and found Mr Chapman who had collapsed, lying under the counter. I asked him what was wrong and he said ‘I’m in terrible pain. I have an ulcer’ Now, I didn’t know where that ulcer was. All I thought was ‘I wish I could help him’ and I heard a voice say ‘You can. Put your hand there.’ ‘But where?’ I asked myself ‘He hasn’t told me where this ulcer is.’ With that I saw a little star, just as if it had fallen out of the night sky, floating over his left shoulder and, as I watched, the star floated down and stopped on the top half of the stomach. Mr Chapman confirmed that was where the ulcer was. As I put my hand there, I never saw, but felt, another hand come over mine and hold it steady. I felt my hand being filled with a tremendous heat. I couldn’t move it away. It was as if it was glued to that part of the body. After a while, my hand was pulled like a magnet to his side and then away from his body. With that, he said, ‘That’s gone, it’s marvelous. Your fingers felt as if they were holding the pain and as you took your hand across, the pain went with it.’ I was absolutely overjoyed. I still didn’t know you called it healing. I just knew I was beginning to realise why I was born and what I had to do was help people.”
However, Rose’s new found gift turned out not to be as easy to live with as she had first thought. Since her childhood Rose had been able to see things that others couldn’t see and, during her twenties, she had psychic experiences that were so intense she thought she was going mad. She describes herself as a “Psychic” rather than a “Spiritual Healer” as she doesn’t use a spirit guide in her healing but she does believe in the existence of a spirit world. The “stars” that she see on the body of the patient usually take the form of silver lines and spots and she has found that these lines and spots correspond with the same lines and “meridians” that are recognised by acupuncturists. She has also found that the area she is to treat is not always the spot which the patient indicates as being painful but that treating the spot would still effect a cure.
Rose is also able to see a person’s “aura” which has been described by various people as “an envelope of vital energy which apparently radiates from everything in nature,” a “spiritual sphere surrounding everyone,” the body’s “etheric double” and even the “astral body.” No two psychics see the aura in the same way as they perceive the colours differently but they all see disturbances in it, and these disturbances can act as an early warning system as generally they precede the symptoms of an illness.
Rose Gladden however interprets the disturbances differently. She sees the physical maladies as the result of an imbalance in the aura rather than the aural imbalances being caused by pending illness and so she will treat the aura rather than the affected area and again this will effect a cure.
Walter J. Kilner observed that the human aura reflected a person’s state of health and said that “Weak, depleted auras suck off the auric energy of healthy, vigorous auras around them.”
In the 1963 book “An Outline of Spiritual Healing” the author, Gordon Turner, the British healer, makes a study of the aura which he is able to see with his psychic powers. He says that the human aura is a complex one, which he sees as a changing pattern of rippling colour and which is dense near the physical body and fainter at the edges. Turner says that the emotions are registered in the aura as colour changes and illness makes it grow duller or produces patches of new colour. He goes on to say that “When a healer places his hands upon a patient, there is an immediate bleeding together of their auras. Within a few minutes all other colours that were previously observable become subordinated by a prevailing blue, which extends greatly beyond normal and seems to fill the room in which treatment is being carried out… It is still possible to see the colours that had denoted symptoms but these float away from the body of the patient and become surrounded by a yellow coloured light which seems to be spinning. What follows is for all the world like the action of a ‘spiritual Penicillin.’ The yellow light gradually overcomes the duller colour of the disease and it becomes flattened out and much less intense.”
Patients being treated most often report the sensation of heat and also tingling feelings “Something like an electric shock” and even seeing colours before their eyes when the healer touched them, and healers have also reported a feeling of “heavy air” leaving them, usually through their hands. E. Douglas took Kirlian photographs of the hands of a psychic healer and reported that the corona of light surrounding her finger tips flared whenever she thought of healing.
There is an extremely interesting case of a woman who would help her patients, not by healing them herself, but by acting as a clairvoyant and materializing a doctor. In 1916 a young woman named Isa Philips was planning her wedding day when she had a vivid and terrifying vision in which she saw her fiancé, Kit, shot and fall from his horse. Kit was, at that time, away on active service and, a few days later, she received news of his death and when a friend, Jack Northage, brought her Kit’s possessions he explained to her how exactly he had died, and the description matched her vision in every detail.
She had also seen Northage in her vision as he had gone to Kit’s assistance and they soon became friends and later married in 1919. Soon after her first vision, Isa began to hear a man’s voice which would warn her to develop her clairvoyant abilities. She became a widely acclaimed medium who was best known for her materialisations. At one séance in Doncaster, England in 1940, ten sitters saw nineteen forms that materialised and also spoke to other spirits. In 1941 her spirit guide, Dr Reynolds, told Isa to stop her public séances and to concentrate on healings so she established a séance room, healing clinic and operating theatre in the grounds of her bungalow at Pinewoods in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire.
The meetings would start with prayer and would continue until the materialisation of Dr Reynolds. During one séance Dr Reynolds picked up a torch and aimed it at the operating table where there was a patient suffering from an acute duodenal ulcer. Two of the sitters were not wearing masks and the doctor told them to put one on before he began “operating.” He placed cotton wool swabs on the patient’s abdomen and assured him that there would be no pain, despite a lack of anaesthetic. He explained how he would “freeze” the affected area and pass his hand inside the body to remove the ulcer. Dr Reynolds asked if the patient felt any pain, which he did not, and he moved his hands to the side of the body and a gurgling sound was heard. Dr Reynolds said that “The ulcer was in a very bad condition, that it would not come away in a whole piece and that he was afraid of haemorrhage.” The pieces of the ulcer were brought out through what Dr Reynolds described as a temporary opening in the abdomen and he placed them on the swabs on top of the body. When the séance was over, the tissue was placed in a bottle of surgical spirit and later analysed and was found to be “an acute duodenal ulcer, containing brunner’s glands and showing from its condition that it was about to penetrate the intestine and would have proved fatal.”
Throughout the 1950s there were lots of similar accounts and cures and many of them appeared in the press. They stopped, however, after Isa was involved in a car crash and she ceased her materialisations and psychic surgery, though she did continue to heal the sick. For example, in 1967 the Scottish “Sunday Express” reported that a bus driver suffering from a stomach ulcer visited Pinewoods and was treated by Isa who massaged his abdomen. It was said to have “opened like a rose” and the ulcer was removed in two pieces. The patient told the newspaper “Before the operation, almost anything I ate gave me pain. An hour after, I was able to eat a five course meal. I haven’t had a twinge since.”
Joan Windsor of Williamsburg, Virginia is not a doctor, nor does she have any medical training. What she feels she dos have is the power of clairvoyance which enables her to picture a situation without knowing any of the facts. She uses her power to diagnose and treat, and maybe cure, illnesses of all kinds, yet she does this without meeting her patients. They write to her and enclose a photograph of themselves, and it is the photograph that she uses to do this. She feels that every person has a unique vibration and this vibration is what she is able to pick up on from the photographs. Windsor has approximately seventy percent of her diagnoses and treatments confirmed by doctors.
One such case was of a woman, Joyce White, who was having trouble with her digestive system and whose doctor had been unable to diagnose any problem. Joan held Joyce’s photograph after reading the brief letter which accompanied it and she was able to envisage a problem with the Joyce’s spinal cord and which she felt was interfering with her digestion. Joyce’s spinal cord had actually been damaged in an ice skating accident decades earlier and Joan suggested a simple change of diet and treatment for the old spine injury.
Perhaps the most famous distance healer was Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877, Cayce followed the stereotypical path in that he was able to see things that others could not, as well as the human aura from an early age. At 21 he had to give up his job as a salesman because of a chronic sore throat and bouts of laryngitis which resulted in him losing his voice completely and as a last resort he went to see the hypnotist Al Layne.
Layne tried to help but came to the conclusion that Cayce was immune to post hypnotic suggestion so he put him into a trance and asked him what was causing his illness and what might be the best way to treat it. At the end of the session Cayce was able to speak again and Layne suggested that they go into partnership in diagnosis and treatment. Cayce declined the offer and he soon lost his voice again. Taking this as a sign that to help others was his destiny, he decided to change his mind, and in 1901 he began to give readings, diagnoses and cures while in a trance but whenever he used the “gift” against his own principals he would lose his voice again.
Cayce pinpointed his own condition as partial paralysis of the vocal cords and suggested that the cure may be an increase in blood circulation to the area for a short time. Cayce is not alone in not being in control of his gift and it was as though it was merely using him as a conduit. By 1911 Cayce was working with a homeopath, Dr Wesley Ketchum, and a feature on him in the New York Times brought him to national attention and it was Ketchum who now gave the treatments that Cayce prescribed. He began working by being hypnotised in the presence of the patient but later he was able to make a diagnosis with only the name and address of the patient and he would put himself into a trance.
Somebody, usually his wife, would then say to him “You now have the body of [Name and Address]. You will go over this body carefully, noting its condition and any parts that are ailing. You will give the cause of such ailments and suggest treatments to bring about a cure.”
Cayce believed that every cell in the body was individually conscious and that they could communicate their condition to his entranced mind. He was mocked for some of his ideas, such as his belief that he was a reincarnation of one of the angels who had inhabited the Earth before Adam and Eve, and later was a citizen of Atlantis, but as a healer he was highly successful. He found that the work was exhausting and he was warned that giving more than two readings in a day would kill him but he still averaged four a day after 1942 when the war brought him a lot of work, and after June 1943 he increased that figure to six a day. The effort finally took its toll on him and in 1944 he collapsed from exhaustion and within five months he was dead. He had referred to his impending death as a “healing.”
The most famous British clairvoyant healer was Harry Edwards, founder of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, in England, who was late to take up his new “career” as he didn’t perform his first healing until he was in his forties. Edwards had attended services at a spiritualist church to satisfy a friend and he was told there by a number of mediums that he possessed a latent ability as a healer, and next time he knew somebody who was ill, he should concentrate his thoughts on their recovery.
He soon found that a friend of a friend was terminally ill with tuberculosis and he promised that he would do what he could to help. He sat down and began to meditate and images came into his mind of a hospital ward and he found himself focused on the person in the last bed but one in the ward and he “sent out” a get well message as powerfully as he could. He later discovered that the ward, and the position of the bed in it, was just as he had imagined it and the patient had begun to feel better after Edwards’ attempt at healing. Within weeks he was up and mobile, despite the doctors having expected him to die.
Edwards’ second patient “was an adamant atheist and his wife dared not to tell him that she’d sought spiritual help for him” yet the remote healing still worked and cured him of lung cancer.
It was on Edwards’ third healing attempt that he first had physical contact with a patient and he was surprised at how it affected him. The patient was a young girl who was suffering from tuberculosis of the lung and when he put his hands on the girl’s head, his “entire body seemed to come alive.” He felt as though he was filled with energy and this energy flowed along his arms, out of his hands and into the young girl, and he felt himself telling the girl’s mother that she would be up in three days which indeed she was, and when she was next examined, she was found to be completely cured.
These three healings convinced Edwards that he should devote himself to healing full-time and he gave up his printing business. In 1946 he established a sanctuary at Burrows Lea in Shere, Surrey where he could work.
During his prime in the 1950s Edwards was so renowned in healing that he was able to fill to capacity the 8,000 seat Royal Albert Hall where people would flock in the hope of being cured by him and he continued to work until his death in 1976 but his sanctuary was kept open and run by a group of healers.
Edwards believed that he had the direction of Louis Pasteur and Lord Lister in his work and his early healing took place in the Middle East during World War 2 when he was in charge of a crew of Arabs who were building a railroad and who were inexperienced workers so injuries were commonplace, such as hitting their fingers with hammers.
They found that their wounds would heal quite quickly if Edwards treated them and they gave him the nickname “Hakim” – Healer. He returned from the war thinking nothing of it and began to concentrate his efforts on the family printing business until 1935 when he was over forty. He came to believe that absent healing, or healing without the patient’s knowledge, worked as well as, if not better than, direct healing after he began to receive so much mail and pass on healing thoughts so that he wouldn’t have to physically see the senders of them all.
A good example of absent healing occurred in 1953 when Edwards healed a man known as Mr B. who was known to be suffering from a malignant cancerous condition of the throat. The patient had severe pain and swelling, was unable to swallow and could only talk in a hoarse whisper. He had previously had a biopsy, which is where a piece of tissue is removed and examined, and he was due to be operated on in two weeks’ time. When he discovered this, he telephoned Edwards and asked him to try absent healing. In the days that followed, Edwards says that “The pains left him and the swellings subsided; and his voice returned to normal.” Two days before the scheduled operation, Mr B. requested another examination by the two specialists that had performed the original tests, and “after exhaustive tests and a fresh biopsy, they declared that all symptoms of the cancer has disappeared.” Rather than prove to the medical establishment that healing worked, as Edwards had hoped, the two specialists said that the first biopsy must have removed all of the cancerous tissue.
Due to the rise in popularity of healing, there was also a rise in the number of hoaxers, some, but not all, in search of financial or personal gain and the parapsychologist, Dr Thelma Moss, who has tested healers under laboratory conditions and written the book “The Probability Of The Impossible” has drawn up several common characteristics in healers:
- They don’t know how they do it, most just talk of a sensation of heat or tingling.
- They often haven’t been taught to heal and most commonly discover their talent by accident.
- They have no obvious control over their talent and seem to act merely as a conduit for the energy (whereas hoaxers will often come to believe in their own power).
- They don’t claim to be able to heal everyone and often only cure a small minority.
- They often see themselves as working only where conventional medicine has failed, as a last resort.
Manila in the Philippines boasts many psychic surgeons who people may go and visit as part of a package tour. Psychic surgeons claim to perform operations where they may be seen to remove tumors by reaching into the patient’s body without making an incision or using anaesthetics. As with many paranormal claims, there are those who have been exposed as frauds and perhaps the best way to catch a hoaxer is to film the “operation” where the action can later be slowed down and any sleight of hand can be exposed.
One film clip showed that when a “surgeon” was supposed to be inserting his fingers into a patient’s body, he was actually kneading the patient’s flesh with his knuckles and his fingertips are clearly visible. The blood and tissue supposedly removed during operations have been examined and found to be of animal origin. One such fraud was a wealthy and “successful” healer from the Philippines, Tony Agpaoa, who was investigated by a team of Italians in 1973. They found that the red liquid, alleged to be blood, was of neither human or animal origin, and that two renal stones removed from a patient, were actually lumps of salt and pumice, and what were alleged to be fresh fragments of bone and tissue had already begun to decompose.
Brazilian healer Arigo was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil and only attended school for four years, he developed no trade or profession and worked on and off as a labourer or farm hand. At the age of thirty he reportedly fell into a severe depression which was accompanied by nightmares, sleep walking and sleep talking. A local spiritualist told him that a spirit was trying to work through him, and so began his career as a healer, his first success being that of a local politician who was cured of an inoperable lung tumor.
For most of his twenty years as a healer, Arigo worked at a clinic in Belo Horizonte, which was visited by as many as 300 patients a day. Most of them he felt could be treated by conventional means so he sent them away. One of the many medical and paranormal experts who went to see Arigo at work was Puharich, who watched him perform in 1963 with a camera man in tow. After watching Arigo work for a while, Puharich offered himself up for surgery which Arigo performed with a pocket knife.
Puharich said that Arigo “took hold of my right wrist with his left hand and wielded the borrowed pocket knife with his right hand.” He goes on, “The next thing I knew was that Arigo had placed a tumor and a knife in my hand. In spite of being perfectly conscious, I had not felt any pain, yet there was the incision in my arm, which was bleeding, and there was the tumor. The film showed that the entire operation had lasted five seconds. Arigo made two strokes with the knife. The skin had split wide open and the tumor was clearly visible. Arigo then squeezed the tumor as one might squeeze a boil, and the tumor popped out.”
Within three days, Puharich’s wound was healed, despite his not having cleaned it and only covering it with a plaster. Puharich was now convinced that Arigo’s gift was genuine and he made another trip to watch him where he observed him correctly estimating patients’ blood pressure without equipment, giving accurate diagnoses and naming complex drugs as treatments. He asked Arigo how he arrived at his conclusions and he replied “I simply listen to a voice in my right ear and I repeat whatever it says. It is always right.”
Arigo said that the voice belonged to a long dead German man who had attended, but not finished, medical school named Adolphus Fritz.
In 1971 Arigo was involved in a fatal car crash and, a year later, Puharich reported “Our nice modern equipment proved that genuine healing took place under bizarre conditions and unbelievable circumstances, clearly, we have a lot of research ahead of us.”
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