Psychic surgery
Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific medical fraud in which practitioners create the illusion of performing surgery with their bare hands and use sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that diseased lesions have been removed and that the incision has spontaneously healed.
[4][5][6][7] Psychic surgery first appeared in the spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the middle of the 20th century; it has taken different paths in those two countries.
[10] The 16th-century explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca records an account, related to him by Native Americans, of a bearded figure known as "Mala Cosa" (Evil Thing), who would take hold of a person, cut into their abdomen with a flint knife, and remove a portion of their entrails, which he would then burn in a fire.
"[12] In "...1973, a group of medical doctors, scientists, and parapsychologists visited the Philippine Islands to study a phenomenon that was causing increased furor amongst health professionals ... Filipino psychic surgeons, also known as spiritual/magnetic healers.
Omura calls attention to the fact that practitioners in Brazil use techniques resembling qigong, shiatsu massage, and chiropractic manipulation.
[3] The British Columbia Cancer Agency "strongly urges individuals who are ill not to seek treatment by psychic surgeon".
[3][34] The physician William Nolen investigated psychic surgery and his book Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle (1974) uncovered many cases of fraud.
[37][38] Professional magician Milbourne Christopher also investigated psychic surgeons at work, and observed sleight of hand.
When his flattened hand reaches under the roll of skin, it looks and feels as if the practitioner is actually entering into the patient's body.
The healer would have prepared in advance small pellets or bags of animal entrails which would be palmed in his hand or hidden beneath the table within easy reach.
However, some "psychic surgery" procedures do not rely solely on the "sleight of hand" described, as at least one Brazilian "surgeon" also cuts his victims' skin with an unsterilized scalpel to heighten the illusion.
[37][40] John Taylor has written there is no real case for psychic surgery as the explanation of fraud is highly likely in all the operations.
[41] The practitioners use sleight of hand techniques to produce blood or blood-like fluids, animal tissue or substitutes, and/or various foreign objects from folds of skin of the patient as part of a confidence trick for financial benefit.
[8] Science writer Terence Hines has written: The "operation" starts as the hand appears to enter the patient’s belly.
[8]Two "psychic surgeons" provided testimony in a Federal Trade Commission trial that, to their knowledge, the organic matter supposedly removed from the patients usually consists of animal tissue and clotted blood.
