Sometimes feeling better isn’t a good sign at all… Carl Wyant recalls an occasion when faith healing showed itself better at handling symptoms than causes.

The following story is true; the names have been changed to protect the lame-brained. It’s not a terribly dramatic story of its type — that is, no one died — but it illustrates an important point. Over the years I have found, as a general rule of thumb, that most “natural healers” know hardly anything about the human body.

Once upon a time there was an attractive, young married couple, Jack and Jill, and Jack’s mother, a charming, vivacious 50-ish woman, with a growing reputation as a “spiritual healer.” I was deep into my Zen phase at the time, and too caught-up in the mysteries of the void and the unfathomable wisdom of one hand clapping to remember every last detail of the case, but here’s the basic gist.

Stomach Ache

Jack and Jill were around at our place, when late in the day Jill began to complain of a bad lower stomach pain. Being an occasional pancreatitis sufferer, I tend to take bad stomach pains seriously, so I suggested she see a doctor. But of course, being budding New Agers, they said, “we’ll see what mom says”; which is what I figured they’d say. I forgot about it.

When I saw Jack a couple of days later I asked him how Jill was. “She’s fine,” he said. “She had a few sessions with mom and it just went away. Tension, apparently, from a block in her sexual energies.”

Jack’s mom specialised in blockages of the “life airs” or vapours, ethers, chi, or whatever term is popular at the time. She was able to determine where these alleged blockages were by studying the client’s aura and then healed them by focusing her energy on the trouble spots.

Admittedly, I’m not a doctor, but somehow the kind of pain Jill had been describing, to my uncultured, insensitive, skeptical ear at least, didn’t sound like an everyday, run-of-the-mill type of pain, and for a minute I was almost disappointed that my more fearful diagnosis was so far off the mark.

More Than a Stomach Ache

Some days later I was informed that Jill was in the hospital recuperating from an operation to remove a burst appendix. Jack’s mom had miraculously stopped the pain sure enough, but not the progression of the appendicitis.

One would think that if a person was genuinely interested in healing people they would endeavour to learn as much about the body and its problems as possible. But most occult and natural healers don’t do this. For them, the main premise of New Age healing is that modern western science is all hogwash because it lacks the “spiritual” dimension. It’s not worth knowing.

This “no need to know” theme is a common one among paranormalists. Indeed, most religions would burn every book on Earth right now if they had the chance. Throughout history, religions have always hit the libraries.

It would behoove us to remember that despite the alleged “spiritual” dimension, the body is still a machine of sorts, and just as we take our cars to people who know a lot about cars, rather than, say, windmill systems, we should take our bodies to people who know a lot about bodies rather than, say, ritualistic superstition and fairytales.

Luckily there are people available who do try and find out as much as they can about the body; they’re called doctors.

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