A medical intuitive is an alternative medicine practitioner who claims to be able to use their intuitive abilities to find the cause of a physical or emotional condition through the use of insight rather than modern medicine.
[2] William M. Branham, the father of the Pentecostal Latter Rain Movement, was said by his followers to be able to discern the health condition of people that attended his services, and in many cases heal them of their affliction.
[4] Many medical professionals and psychologists attribute perceived anecdotal successes by medical intuitives to a combination of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, the placebo effect, and regression fallacy associated with self-limiting conditions.
[5][6] A few educational institutions offer graduate degrees that include "research-based training" and certifications for medical intuitives.
[7] In 2009 Steven Novella, writing on Science Based Medicine, calls medical intuitive diagnosis as "purely magical thinking" and refers to a Huffington Post article about it as "a promotion of a dubious pseudoscientific medical claim".