In 1858, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was reported in Lourdes,
France; the Mother of God confirmed the dogma of her immaculate
conception which had been proclaimed by Pope Pius IX just four
years earlier. Something like a hundred million people have come
Lourdes since then in the hope of being cured, many with illnesses
that the medicine of the time was helpless to defeat. The Roman Catholic Church rejected the authenticity of large numbers of
claimed miraculous cures, accepting only 65 in nearly a century and a
half (of tumors, tuberculosis, opthalmitis, impetigo, bronchitis, paralysis
and other diseases, but not, say, the regeneration of a limb or a severed
spinal cord). Of the 65, women outnumber men ten to one. The
odds of a miraculous cure at Lourdes, then, are about one in a million;
you are roughly as likely to recover after visiting Lourdes as you are to
win the lottery, or to die in the crash of a regularly scheduled airplane
flight—including the one taking you to Lourdes.
The spontaneous remission rate of all cancers, lumped together, is
estimated to be something between one in ten thousand and one in a
hundred thousand. If no more than 5 percent of those who come to
Lourdes were there to treat their cancers, there should have been
something between 50 and 500 "miraculous" cures of cancer alone.
Since only three of the attested 65 cures are of cancer, the rate of spontaneous
remission at Lourdes seems to be lower than if the victims had
just stayed at home.Of course, if you're one of the 65, it's going to be
very hard to convince you that your trip to Lourdes wasn't the cause of
the remission of your disease. . . Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Something
similar seems true of individual faith healers.
After hearing much from his patients about alleged faith healing,
a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year and a half
trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there clear medical
evidence that the disease was really present before the "cure"? If so,
had the disease actually disappeared after the cure, or did we just
have the healer's or the patient's say-so? He uncovered many cases of
fraud, including the first exposure in America of "psychic surgery." But
he found not one instance of cure of any serious organic (nonpsychogenic)
disease. There were no cases where gallstones or
rheumatoid arthritis, say, were cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular
disease. When a child's spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform
a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better.
But take that child to a faith healer and she's dead in a day. Dr. Nolen's
conclusion:
"When [faith] healers treat serious organic disease, they are responsible
for untold anguish and unhappiness. . . The healers become
killers."
Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating disease
(Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that some
diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If prayer
works, why can't God cure cancer or grow back a severed limb? Why
so much avoidable suffering that God could so readily prevent? Why
does God have to be prayed to at all? Doesn't He already know what
cures need to be performed? Dossey also begins with a quote from
Stanley Krippner, M.D. (described as "one of the most authoritative
investigators of the variety of unorthodox healing methods used
around the world"):
The research data on distant, prayer-based healing are promising,
but too sparse to allow any firm conclusion to be drawn.
This after many trillions of prayers over the millennia.
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