Author: Craig Shearer

Last week we ran a campaign to get self-proclaimed “spiritual medium” and “healer” Jeanette Wilson shut down. This woman is touring NZ, doing a show called Psychic Surgery, which purports to be able to heal people (not cure, mind!) of whatever ails them. The “mechanism” is that she communicates with a team of “spirit surgeons” who when work the magic (being the operative word!) on her rubes patients. But it’s all God doing the work – she’s just the medium.

We got some good publicity in the media (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/400150/sceptics-aim-to-shut-down-nz-tour-by-spiritual-healer), after emailing all of the venues in a bid to get the hires rescinded, and the tour effectively shut down. Alas, it seems that the profit motive is stronger than the ethics motive. Of the venues that did bother to reply, the common response was that they could not be responsible for what goes on at their venues.

Of note is that Radio New Zealand actually interviewed Ms. Wilson. This is really worth a listen. Seldom do we get to hear woo merchants “put it all out there” and make the claims in public as to what they think they can do. https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018715951

Our activity does seem to have riled Wilson up. She’s made the claim that skeptics don’t attend her shows – if they did they’d see first-hand what an amazing healer she is, and, ridiculously, why aren’t the medical community studying her? Well, we have attended her shows. What we have seen is that the “healing” as such is likely to be placebo effects, and long-term relief is unlikely. What is surprising is that her spirit surgeons didn’t let her know that there were skeptics in the audience. So much for being able to communicate with “the other side”.

It’s also caused her to come visit our website – she probably has a Google Alert set up on her name (Hi, Jeanette!). This led to a tirade on her Facebook page where she ridiculously claimed that NZ Skeptics were driven (maybe even funded?) by “Big Pharma”. She was shocked that a NZ Charity would be promoting vaccines (which, you won’t need to be reminded, are safe and effective). Apparently, she will be complaining to NZ Charities – bring it on, we say!

We make light of her ridiculous shows, but there is a serious side, which is why we took action. People that attend these shows tend to be vulnerable. Our skeptics who attended the shows witnessed some people who appeared to be quite unstable, being subject to the attention of this woman.

As we’ve seen with other woo merchants, their woo doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Once you go down one anti-science rabbit hole, there are plenty of other warrens to keep you there. Wilson’s Facebook page is a scary (but amusing) place. She’s anti-vax (despite claiming she’s not), she’s a climate-change denier, and she’s also anti-5G. She also claims that you can cure your eyesight by throwing away your glasses and using pinhole glasses. She also sells a dietary supplement, Purple Rice Powder, which, we’re told, is earning her $20,000 a month. It just goes to show that there’s big money to be made in pseudoscience.

To conclude, we never really expected to be able to shut down her shows, though it would have been great to be able to do so. The hope for the future is education – a population that is science-literate is unlikely to fall for the ploys of charlatans pushing false hope.

NZ-based, self-described “spiritual medium” Jeanette Wilson has started touring the country with her Psychic Surgery show. We’re running a campaign to try to disrupt this by contacting the venues and making them aware of the sort of thing they’re hosting.

“Traditional” psychic surgery has involved literal blood and guts from animals being passed off as tumours and other tissues being removed from patients’ bodies. Jeanette Wilson bypasses all this messy stuff and simply walks around the patient flailing her arms and making weird “Eeeeeeeee!” sounds. All this under the guidance of her supposed team of “spiritual surgeons” on the other side.

This really is unbelievable. If you want to witness her performance, she has videos on her website.

Earlier this year we sent one of our committee members along to her show in Christchurch to observe the event and report back. What he saw was quite shocking. These shows seem to attract vulnerable people and one person there looked to be on the verge of a breakdown. So, this really is serious stuff.

Forty dollars is what it costs you to attend, but that’s just the start. She’s also running a sideline business promoting Purple Rice Powder as a dietary supplement, costing upwards of $100 for a month’s supply.

So, this person is a danger to the community. Any healing is likely just taking advantage of placebo effects, but the concern is that people with more serious conditions might well delay or avoid proper medical treatment by attending one of her shows.

Her shows aren’t limited to NZ either. She travels to the UK doing the same stuff over there. So, earlier this year, we contacted the Good Thinking Society in the UK to make them aware. They ran a campaign of contacting her venues and had good success in getting them to cancel the bookings after being made aware of what she was doing. We are hopeful that we can achieve the same here.

Locally, if you’re close to one of her venues, perhaps a well-placed word to them might sway them towards reconsidering their hiring decisions.

Tickets to the NZ Skeptics Conference 2019 are now available for sale, with early-bird prices until the end of September (but of course, we’d love you to buy sooner so we get a good idea of numbers).

The conference has a bunch of exciting speakers, including all the hosts of the popular Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, Guerrilla Skeptic and psychic buster Susan Gerbic, and world-renowned mentalist and psychic entertainer Mark Edward.

This year’s conference will be held in the heart of Christchurch. Visit the conference website for more information and to get your tickets.

The Force Field Film Challenge, aimed at helping kids to learn about the importance of vaccines, is an innovative competition being spearheaded by the New Zealand Skeptics.

The Challenge will test the research and creative skills of New Zealand Primary and Intermediate students in a deep dive to promote vaccination and the advantages of herd immunity. Students will be asked to put together a short film, up to three minutes long, to educate New Zealanders on how vaccination and its strong but seemingly invisible protective force field works.

Full-on creativity will be a requirement! Costumes, puppets, animation and any other presentation techniques that can grab the viewer’s attention are encouraged. A comedy sketch that shows how evil diseases can get thwarted? A gritty drama demonstrating how powerful vaccinations are at keeping New Zealanders healthier? Anything goes! The Number 8 wire, out of the box thinking that New Zealand prides itself on will be put to the test.

In preparation for this challenge, the NZ Skeptics have launched a funding campaign with Givealittle to help raise the prize money:

https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/force-field-film-challenge

The funding goal of $10,000 will be exclusively used as prize money, and will be awarded to the winning schools. The first place entry will win $5,000, with five runner-up entries getting $1,000 each.

NZ Skeptics Chair, Craig Shearer, said “It’s a sad fact that, even today, preventable diseases can have a horrific impact on New Zealand communities. The overwhelming scientific consensus shows that widespread vaccinations, resulting in herd immunity, are a safe and effective tool to fight these diseases. Measles, Influenza, Whooping Cough and even Polio have all been shown to be effectively combated by modern vaccinations.”

The Givealittle funding campaign will run until the 30th of April, with The Force Field Film Challenge being launched later in 2019. The challenge will be managed by the New Zealand Skeptics, a New Zealand registered charity.

Facebook has been host to some lively discussion among Kiwis who identify as having a skeptical outlook. These pages are not endorsed by NZ Skeptics Society, and we have no control over their content. Unfortunately, some of the content falls well outside the collective views of the NZ Skeptics committee.

We have now set up an official page on Facebook which will reflect the general views of NZ Skeptics. We’ll be sharing curated content here and making general announcements that are relevant to members of the society and a broader NZ audience.

You can visit the page here.

We’ve recently seen another example of psychics acting as the “grief vampires” they are and preying on a grieving family.

Northland woman Theres’a Urlich has been missing since February 2018. The family, who have not seen their loved on for over seven months, was recently approached by a psychic with some gory details of what had happened to Theres’a.

The family decided to contact the police. The response from NZ Police is:

Police do not currently work with psychics and it is entirely the decision of the family if they wish to pursue that avenue.

This is a good thing!

NZ Skeptics were approach the the NZ Herald for our response. NZ Skeptics chair Craig Shearer was quoted at length. Read the NZ Herald article for more details.

 

We were recently asked to comment on the alarming increase in ACC claims for injury from Chiropractic treatment.

The article appeared in the Sunday Star Times.