Believe, Be Healed, Beware!

Jul 09, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

My mother, who passed away 45 years ago, voiced a good deal of skepticism over the moon landing

in 1969. She wondered whether humans had the brains or the brazenness to place their earthly selves on a heavenly body God had supernaturally created and hung in the firmament. She found it hard to believe, and she’s got company – science-wary cynics, conspiracy theorists, flat-earth proponents, and Guyanese who imagine our country’s economic woes will end in 2020. Some call them fools!
Following up on my ‘Conned!’ piece a few weeks ago, I’m in the mood to engage in some more head-scratching rumination on belief, faith, and faith-healing. Puzzling because, from a religious perspective, I, like many others, do not quite understand these phenomena. It doesn’t help much to be told ‘just believe’ and ‘have faith’. Those who simplify or attempt to unpack it may also never understand why it is so difficult for others to wrap their minds around. ‘Just do it’ seems to work for multitudes of people; for others the mind is unable to grasp much beyond the frustratingly endless mantra of ‘I don’t know’.
Faith-healing linked to religious belief is practiced to some extent in most theistic societies, Guyana being one. I have no clear idea as to its frequency since the practice seems motley. What I do know is that there are cases (some documented) where individuals’ faith and religious conviction, and belief in God’s power channeled through some human medium, resulted in seemingly miraculous healing or transformation. On the other hand there appear to be numerous instances where either no healing took place or the ‘cure’ was a temporary mind-forced response to a real or imagined illness. Furthermore many a healing turns out to be a brief respite or an illness in remission.
But if you believe your illness can be divinely touched or you can be helped to overcome some hitherto intractable problem through faith-healing, and have evidence of improved health or cure, then so be it. That’s great! Many religious people embrace this process. Indeed among Pentecostal Christians if someone is baptized in the Holy Spirit, he or she may be gifted with a ministry of healing. It is a claim made on behalf of a number of believers, including several Christian televangelists. However some persons view these claims with a great deal of skepticism.
Although current and historic literature have popularized faith healing, they have also exposed fake healers, a number of whom have been shown to possess no more divine connection to healing than most of us. Simple relief from unpleasant symptoms or a more permanent alleviation may be nothing more than the placebo effect of expectancy, well-known in medical circles.
In the religious sphere it may be complemented by an emotionally-charged atmosphere, and/or the power of positive thinking. Some may still argue that there have been ‘documented’ cases of inexplicable if not miraculous healing, including so-called psychic surgery. (My mind goes back to the cancer/chicken-liver fraud carried out by Jim Jones at the Sacred Heart Church in Georgetown 40 years ago)
During the latter half of the last century, mainly in The Philippines and Brazil, there were startling and compelling accounts of ordinary, non-medical persons performing extraordinary ‘psychic’ surgeries to remove tumours, cysts and cancers, often in a few minutes or seconds, with minimal bleeding, almost no scarring, and complete recovery. Many years ago I read a Reader’s Digest article about one such man – a poor Brazilian ex-miner named Jose Arigo, who is believed to have performed over a million ‘surgeries’ free of charge at a small clinic in his home town of Congohas do Campo. In a mediumistic trance, he supposedly channeled a German doctor who had died during World War I.
His clients included a Brazilian senator, the daughter of Brazil’s then President Juscelino Kubitschek, and the head of his security police. His tools were usually a rusty penknife and a pair of scissors which he routinely wiped on his shirt. He would see hundreds of people a day under insanitary conditions, and onlookers were welcome.
Although some believe Arigo’s operations were a complete fraud, an online source notes, “It is difficult to believe that Arigo was able to fool a million or so patients, not to mention the numerous doctors and other qualified observers who witnessed and verified his operations over a 20-year period. It must be borne in mind that in all this time Arigo (known as The surgeon of the rusty knife) was never detected in fraud.”
Accounts like the one above may give credence to the exploits of the local and foreign faith healers, pandits and ‘spiritualists’ operating in Guyana. But we need to be very careful about who we entrust our health or the health of our loved ones to. There are hundreds of cautionary tales about people who turned to faith healing and alternative medicine with dreadful consequences.
Numerous reports have been documented about persons, especially children suffering from serious illnesses, who died from lack of medical treatment after they or their parents chose to rely solely on faith in God. (My youngest sister chose to forgo orthodox medical treatment, turning to naturopathy and her faith in God, for a form of cancer that reportedly has a high success rate with early diagnosis and surgery. Her subsequent rapid deterioration and death were devastating).
American Ecology professor Jerry Coyne notes that many such deaths are needless. He cites a 1998 medical study analyzing cases of child mortality due to faith-based medical neglect which found that “of the 172 deceased, 140 had conditions that would have been curable with a probability of greater than 90%, while another 18 would have been cured with a probability between 50 and 90 percent”.
Surprisingly, at least 34 American states allow religious exemptions from medical care, under which child abuse and neglect may fall.
I am uncertain as to whether or not any such exemption is allowed under the laws of Guyana, but our Protection of Children Act does hold parents and guardians responsible for providing their children with adequate health care, failing which, they can be charged with neglect, abandonment and possibly manslaughter, in cases where children die as a result of the former.
I assume that adults are free to accept or reject medical care; indeed many Guyanese augment medical prescriptions with concoctions, talismans, and other ‘alternative’ treatments, or forgo the former completely. What the doctor fails at, the pandit or obeah woman appears to succeed.
We Guyanese often say ‘Belief kill and belief cure’, a bit of folk wisdom that is echoed in other Caribbean nations and across numerous cultures. Good, maybe for some ailments that are internal, or expressed as subjective pain. But what happens to faith healing when the maladies are visibly physical and very pronounced like congenital deformities; and the tens of millions of people who suffer from maladies like severe cerebral palsy, quadriplegia, cleft palate, leprosy, muscular dystrophy, and amputations.
Wouldn’t it be a great and beautiful miracle to see that gaping cleft in a toddler’s mouth supernaturally close up and become perfect at the touch of a hand? Or an amputee’s leg regrown before your eyes? The Bible says Jesus performed amazing miracles of healing and implies that Christians bestowed with such a gift would be able to do likewise today. But it just doesn’t seem to happen, and to knowingly give someone hope to the contrary is cruel.
As I had alluded to in a previous article (And I’m not being facetious) if you know of a documented and verifiable case of anyone in Guyana in any of the above categories being miraculously faith-healed, please let me know. It could form the basis of a truly life-changing article; and one I would be proud to author.

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