December 29, 2025 • 59 mins
In the ancient days, when medicine and spirituality were inseparable, people often used rituals and invocations to elicit help from divine sources. This practice continues today, through a number of techniques collectively known as faith healing. But what is it, exactly? How does it work? Could mere physical touch from the right person heal otherwise incurable medical conditions? Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they dive into fact and fiction of faith healing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, you guys know how, uh, you guys know how
religion is still pretty popular.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I heard tale.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Yeah, I like that Tennessee reference, that.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Georgia reference.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Oh, I'll amend it. I like a Southern Americana reference.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
There you go. Oh for sure, it's kind of a
big deal religion.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yes, then as now. In the ancient days, medicine and
spirituality were intertwined, right and inextricable and inseparable, and so
people would use rituals and vacations attempting to ask for
help right on the physical plane from divine sources. And
(00:47):
back in twenty twenty we got super into exploring the
concept of laying on of hands. The yeah put your
put your fingers against the screen, but your with your
hands against your your ears.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Uh oh no, rogue is on the other side.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Don't touch it again. Growth with the gloves. You got
the gloves with her in the gentle touch.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yes, comics, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we we know. There's this
idea that persists day that a mere physical touch from
just the right other person could heal otherwise incurable medical conditions.
For any fans of our corporate overlords, Illumination Global Unlimited,
(01:34):
don't worry they got in on this grift super early.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Many hands what was it called, It's many hands.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's roll the tape to it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
A production of EE Art Radio.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you
are you. You are here and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Crucial disclaimer for this episode.
Nothing we talk about and today's show is medical advice
and it should not be mistaken for such.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Could it be mistaken as spiritual advice?
Speaker 5 (02:41):
Or we maybe we should disclaim that too, So that's
all in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, right, true.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, the stance of this show has always been that
your spirituality is your own, so we would never dispend
spiritual advice either. But to the point about medical advice,
the reason we're saying this at the top of the
show is that at some point in every single person's life.
No matter who you are, your health becomes your number
(03:07):
one priority princes, princesses, and poppers alike, and when people
are beset by chronic, debilitating, or terminal conditions, we often
turn to any possible avenue in search of a cure.
In the US, the healthcare system also forces many many
residents to seek out alternative medicine, simply due to the
(03:29):
fact that traditional medical care can be enormously expensive, and
for other people, the alternative care route is already seen
as somehow more reliable or at the very least less
dangerous than established medical practice. One of the oldest, most
common forms of early medicine comes from the ancient days
(03:51):
of religion and what we today call science and ritual
and procedure. Back when all these things were lumped into
a single entity, in medicine such as it was, was
less a matter of science and more a matter of faith.
So today's question, what is faith healing? What is the
laying on of hands? Here are the facts.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the laying on of hands
beyond the notion of you know, I think the image
that a lot of us conjure when we hear the
term faith healing of somebody in a position of leadership
and a church taking their hands and laying them on
someone and healing the sick, or the idea of you know,
Jesus laying his hands on Lazarus and curing him of
(04:34):
his leprosy, or what have you, you know, restoring sight
to the blind and the like. But laying on of
hands is a lot more than that. I mean, it's
in the Christian tradition. It is a form of transmitting
blessings and sort of being a conduit for God's message
or God's kind of power.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I guess, depending on who you talk to.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
But it is something that is in the Bible and
is a very very basic tenet of the Christian faith.
It's one that people often overlook. So what is the
laying on of hands in the genre of faith healing?
That term being an umbrella term for kind of rituals
and practices meant to create some sort of divine or
(05:17):
supernatural result in like I said, healing someone's physical, psychological,
or spiritual malady. Some other examples can include things like
visiting a shrine in other faiths or religious sites, some
sort of pilgrimage, doing a group prayer. Channeling this kind
of spiritual energy in a group, incantations, contact with an artifact,
(05:43):
a sacred relic, and so on, and again this is
beyond the Christian faith. I mean, that's the term they use,
but it's been around for thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, it's been used in organized religion,
and I guess more traditional religions that go, as you said,
far beyond the concept of laying on hands or some
kind of spiritual interaction that is manifested through a physical touch.
(06:13):
It doesn't necessarily mean healing, or it isn't always restricted
to healing. There are some other things that that action
has been used for. For instance, in Judaism, the semicha
is an action of ordination that some it's not necessarily
like physical healing, but some type of blessing that can
(06:34):
be bestowed upon somebody. It can confer like that blessing
from one to another, or even the authority of that
one person holds to give it to another. It's pretty
interesting stuff. You can find references to this in numbers
twenty seven, fifteen through twenty three. And in this story
from the Bible, Moses gives his power essentially to Joshua
(07:00):
through this action. It's pretty interesting. Oh, it's all another
verse in numbers eleven, sixteen through twenty five. Moses then
has a group of seventy elders around him and through
this action. Again I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly, but Semeka
he ordains them with his powers.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
But he does not heal them. To your point, right,
this is a conference of authority. And although you know,
one of the most important myths to bust here is
that conflation of faith healing with Christianity. It occurs in Christianity,
but that doesn't make it Christianity in any way special.
(07:42):
Because of our association with Christianity in the West, our
most apparent examples of faith healing come from that spiritual system.
So various Christian denominations have practiced laying on hands both
as an act of faith healing and also, to your point, Matt,
as an act of conferring some sort of authority ordaining someone.
(08:08):
In multiple New Testament passages, laying on of hands is
depicted as just that, an act of ordainment, and in
Pentecostal churches, especially in recent years or in recent eras,
this act, accompanied by prayer, is considered a crucial component
of faith healing. You'll also see that it's not uncommon
(08:29):
in charismatic churches, often associated with a single individual, mortal
personality who has some sort of distinct, unique connection to
the divine again, whatever that divinity may be.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Yeah, and it certainly takes on kind of a theatrical quality,
you know, when you are this very charismatic individual that's
you know, bringing someone up onto the stage to perhaps
cure them of some reality and you know, witnessed by
your congregation, and it creates this kind of fervor and
kind of works people up into a frenzy oftentimes. So
(09:06):
it is sort of used in that way, especially in
modern day, but you know, we see it all the
time in history, and like these kind of big tent
revival kind of church services that would do just this.
It would be a matter of like, you know, an individual,
a single kind of leader, having this very specific ability
that was believed in by a congregation. And perhaps there
(09:29):
were skeptics on the fringes or on the outside of
that group, but the folks that actually follow this individual
around would have believed that what they were seeing was
the work of God being done or kind of funneled
through this one person.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, and we see this in cultures across the world,
across the timeline of human history. For instance, it's present
in some form in the Navajo spiritual system. But and
this might surprise people, it's one of my favorite things
about this. It was also a secular power for a
(10:02):
very long time, back when the notion of the right
to rule was also tied up with the notion of religion.
For centuries, French and English monarchs would practice something called
the royal touch. The royal touch is what it sounds like.
They would deign to touch their subjects, and this would
(10:22):
be perceived as a means of treating a disease. They
started out with any old condition that caught their eye,
just like a celebrity on Twitter. If you're a peasant
and you have a condition, and you catch the king
or the queen on a good day, then they may
lay hands on you. They may royally touch you, and
you know your chances of being cured, it would assume,
(10:44):
would rise. However, from about the sixteenth century on, these
monarchs began to focus on a specific ailment, scruffula, which
was also at the time known as the King's evil.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Ooh love that name. Well, I mean, it's another example
of the power of belief.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I mean, because a lot of these monarchs, you know,
they operate under this principle that their power came from God,
you know, and so therefore they were like the hand
and the voice and the you know, mandate of God
on earth.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
And a lot of their subjects believed that too.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
So scruffula, scruffula, what be the you might say, the
scruff or the King's Evil. Well, it's pretty pretty cool
to look into it, because it's actually a really early
version of perhaps marketing. Hey, Edward Burnees wasn't involved at
(11:41):
this time.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You know. I'm so glad that you said that, Matt,
and a little piece of me hopes that Brenees was
at least aware of this brilliant con and I'll call
it a con. This may be a controversial episode. Hey yeah,
shoot me, grim shot. Yeah, So you're right. They focused
on this specific thing, this specific condition, its dressed up
(12:04):
name when it goes to fancy parties is tuberculosis cervical lymphodonitis.
The King's Evil. As we said, the thing about this
condition tuberculosis cervical lymphodonitis. If you want to search it
to your heart's content is that you'll find it rarely
leads to death, and it often, even back then, would
(12:24):
go into remissions seemingly on its own. So and this
is very important. Later the Royal Touch appeared to cure
the condition. Unlike paralysis or blindness, conditions that could be
easily discerned just for looking as someone, this was something
that you know, the person who is suffering from the
(12:45):
affliction would be the most aware of. And that's why
the Royal Touch looked like it worked, or just as importantly,
it looked like it didn't fail.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
But like, is this are these symptoms that were so
pronounced that it could be super clear They're like, aha,
and your symptoms have now left you entirely, or was
this so sought all that well? Lake it worked eventually,
you know what I mean? Like did there need to
be a big aha moment or was it like Okay,
now go home and get some rest and call me
(13:14):
in the morning kind of situation. It seems a little
more like that. And then they would report back, I'm cured.
And then the King's touch was smashing success or thought
of as infallible.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Is that kind of the shape of it.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Ben The big physical indication the most apparent physical symptom
is swelling of one or more lymph nodes. So you
was swelling would go up and then it will gradually
go down. And some people who had pre existing or
concurrent unrelated conditions would also have things like fever, weight loss, fatigue,
(13:47):
night sweats. In other words, a bevy of symptoms that
could come from any number of ailments. So worse comes
to worse if the royal touch, if the King's touch
has not cured so one of the King's evil, they
can always say that they cured that one specific thing,
the King's evil, And what's really getting you is leprosy
or not praying hard enough.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah, well, let's not forget too. This was a time of.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
Very poor medical care, so a lot of people were
sick a lot of the time.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I would imagine, you.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Know, yeah, hey guys, I just thought of something outside
of the healing. Just to take a quick detour here,
we're talking about the king's touch or the queen's touch,
or the physical act of someone in royalty touching another person,
connecting that to ordainment. I was thinking about being knighted
or you know, taking up something like that where you're
(14:39):
using a physical thing a sword in a lot of cases,
some kind of weapon to touch another to then send
the powers that you already have into that other person.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, and symbolically show that you are the difference between
their life and their death. Not for nothing is it
a sword, right?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:57):
So the weird thing is this sounds like an historical footnote, right,
one of those other kind of obscure things that are
fun to hear about. The last known example of the
royal touch occurred as recently as eighteen twenty five at
the coronation of the French King Charles the tenth. And
then after that, these superpowers of monarchy sort of fade away.
(15:20):
And it's good to know that they faded away if
you're a fan of medicine, but if you're a fan
of folklore, it's a little bittersweet to see them go.
You know, they went the way of the Dodo, along
with other royal superpowers, like the ability to craft magical
curative objects, or of course the ability to exercise demons,
because you see, science becomes the new kid in town.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Well yeah, but even like things like we've talked about previously,
like unicorn horns being ground up or what they thought
were unicorn horns, which were actually like narwhal tusks that
were traded by the Vikings. That was something that even
the royals believed in, you know, pretty heavily, and they
would have like acceptors made out of these things and
these like magical objects. Which is interesting to me because
(16:04):
if there was this emphasis on the royal touch being
so powerful, how come they couldn't use it on themselves.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
It's a good question. That was probably the the moment
in court where a philosopher got kicked out.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Oh, we don't want to hear that, we don't want
to hear any of that, and exactly. But then thankfully
science did sort of supplant a lot of this, a
lot of this stuff. So what does science have to
say about this whole concept of, you know, imparting power
or healing to others just through physical touch.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Well, i mean, the scientific community in the modern day, largely,
fast majorityly dismisses faith healing as being a thing. They
say that it's pseudoscience. I mean, I mean, that's just
kind of the stance, right, that's the way it's going
to be, and in the way the way it has
(17:01):
been for quite a long time. But there are many
others in the world, from true believers to people who
are even more skeptical. They do, they do object to
this concept of it being complete pseudoscience.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
There there are.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
People, I would say, kind of like me, I don't
want to put myself too deep into this camp early
on in this episode, who think there might be something
to it, to that physical physical connection of cells atoms
together that could do something right. And people who are
who believe this a little more. They argue that faith
(17:37):
healing should be view viewed as a spiritual practice in itself,
and that is it. It is a spiritual practice, right,
and the concept of using faith faith healing or believing
in faith healing or accepting faith healing has nothing to
do with science and scientific claims. It should be treated
(17:58):
as a matter of faith, and that's that's period. But
it's no surprise that this practice is still really popular
and there are things that have grown out of it,
different kinds of faith, different kinds of touching or almost touching,
And thinking about reiki where there's almost touching, it's the
(18:19):
same kind of physical act without the physical touch.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Or think about this, I'm a televangelist. Put your hand
against the screen, pray with time, Corona.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
You will be healed.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That's where that's for folks watching the video there.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
Oh man, I felt it hard, ben Or. But the
flip side of this is like, if if you can
heal somebody like this, can you also harm somebody like this?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Could you? Could I manifest like cancer into you? Am
I an enemy?
Speaker 5 (18:50):
Or at the very least I mean, is in this
sort of like a reverse curse almost. I don't want
to derail us too much, but it does. It feels
like there ought to be a flip side. If you
believe in the one, shouldn't you even the other? You know,
I don't know the.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Left hand path. Yeah, yeah, it's another episode of one
we should do. I think that's a fantastic idea. Actually,
I'm going to write that down.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
Yeah, if one exists, then the other would have to right.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, that's what That's what our various philosophical schools tell us,
and that makes that future episode even more chilling for
reasons that will soon become a parent.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
In many parts of the world, we have to remember,
even in twenty twenty, millions and millions of people have
no realistic access to modern medical care and overwhelming evidence
proves that, all things being equal, a patient will tend
to be much better off with a doctor than with
a priest. The vast majority of spiritual authorities these days,
(19:51):
with some notable exceptions, welcome the practice of modern medicine.
They do not see it as conflicting with their personal beliefs. Please,
religious authorities, go to a doctor. Pray and you know,
go to the doctor. So the question then, is why
does faith healing persist? More importantly, why are so many
(20:12):
people convinced that it works? We'll tell you after a
word from our sponsor. Has this ever happened to you?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Please, sir, heal my grievest wounds?
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Well, my son, I want to, but I have so
many other people to heal, and I've only got these
two hands.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, it's a problem familiar to any work in faith healing.
You've got money rolling in, You've got a line of
desperate people out the front door of the revival of
local megachurch. But how are you to get to everyone's
bank account in time?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
But sir, can't you just pray for more hands? Pray
to God for more hands.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
If only I could, my son, if only I could?
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Why pray to God? When you can thank Many Hands.
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Speaker 4 (20:59):
Are the gloves with a bunch of other plastic hands
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Speaker 1 (21:04):
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Speaker 5 (21:13):
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Speaker 1 (21:16):
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Speaker 2 (21:26):
I'm touching you, and you and you and me, mister
and me. Do you feel it, my son? Do you
feel the power of the divide? Hang on to me,
Just adjust my glove.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
He I feel it all right. I feel something that's
good enough for.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Me and that's good enough for God.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
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itchy palms, microplastic inhalation, the nihilistic dread of swindling, the
(22:08):
ill and the dying, intogrin, malfunction, rhythmic diarrhea, earworms, tapeworms, hopeworms,
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legal rulings in any hand is a subsidiary of Illumination
Global Unlimited. Wow, they're back one of our first sponsors.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Yeah, yeah, they are, yep, And boy are they helpful
given those products to us that we just need so
so badly.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
That was such a great ad break. Let's take another one.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Here's a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Here's where it gets crazy. The answer, but whether or
not faith healing works and laying on hands is not
as clear cut as we might like to think. Science
has proven that physical human contact and yes, in some ways,
even the process of laying hands on people may have
(23:08):
genuine medical benefits. That is a very very bold claim,
but it's maybe not as crazy as it sounds.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I actually have first hand experience with this because it
appears that the laying on of hands. The physical touch
is crucial, absolutely crucial to early childhood development. If you're
a parent, you may have experienced this. I certainly did.
You've probably had multiple conversations early on after having your child,
(23:38):
before having your child, perhaps talking about the importance of
something called skin to skin contact. And you know, there
is a lot of misinformation out there that you can
find on the internet and in so many books about babies.
There's so many of this, but it does seem to
be very important, and it appears to be important, at
least in our case with my son, my wife, where
(24:01):
that immediate skin to skin contact was very much encouraged
by everyone around us and.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Was told we were told to do this prior to
having the baby.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
But also it was good for I would say, for
me to have like my child touch my skin and
like the sense and there. It's one of those weird
things that feels.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Like it goes beyond.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
Science, but in reality it does seem to be things
that are very scientific like this, like the very animalistic
almost like the scent, the touch, the tactile feel, the warmth,
the sounds.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's fascinating stuff.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Matt, did you notice a line item on your hospital
bill for skin to skin contact. Yes, that's a real
thing they'd charge you for. Like the act of it's
like it's a service they're providing, but it's basically just
dicking the baby and giving it to you.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Really quickly.
Speaker 5 (25:01):
Though, Matt, it's also important for bonding, you know, Like
I mean, we've seen scientific studies of like animals where
that's you know, what was the study with the wire
monkey versus like the actual real mom, you know, touch it,
like a newborn baby monkey given contact with this like
wire monkey, and then the ones that actually were able
(25:23):
to be you know, skin to skin nurtured by the
real mother, and there was you know, the bond was crucial,
and that's something that I think is important with humans
as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, it reminds me of the infamous Romanian orphanage studies
that show there are lasting developmental effects based on the
amount of interaction a very very young human has with
an adult. There's a professor of developmental psychology at Saint
Francis Xavier University in Nova, Scotia. Her name is Anne Bigelow,
(25:53):
and she says she agrees with you, Matt, that the
science is there and it's compelling and to with your
point all about emotional bonding. It's proven that babies who
have this skin to skin contact do appear to cry less,
they have more RESTful sleep. And additionally, the practice can
benefit the parents. It reduces levels of stress in the
(26:16):
parent the caregiver, It reduces levels of depression, and it
does this by releasing oxytocin. There is neurochemical science here,
and of course that helps with bonding on an emotional level.
You can kind of envision the positive feedback loop. I
feel calmer when I hold my child. My child also
feels calmer because they're picking up my vibes. For a
(26:39):
super scientific term, and this works again, this works with
fathers as well.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
Really clearly, the thing I was talking about, the experiment
that I was referencing was the Harlow monkey experiments, and
it wasn't with the real mother ever. It was one
monkey surrogate was made of wire and provided nourishment, and
the other one was made of soft terry cloth, felt
much more like a real mother kind of experience and
(27:04):
didn't provide nourishment, And that was the more important bond
than the one that.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Felt less motherly.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
And and you know Cuddley, it proved that that was
a more important connection than even the providing of food.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I just want to say that study is messed up.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Oh, all of this guy's studies were.
Speaker 5 (27:23):
This guy's an awful person whoa Parlow. Yeah, big, big,
very very bad reputation.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
In the scientific community.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
I'm imagining it being done to humans and just what
that would actually look like. And I'm horrified, and now
I kind of want to write something about it.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I'm sure it happened, but maybe without the veneer of
scientific experimentation. Humans are so messed up, and there's so
many of us, and we've been around for a pretty
long time. So yeah, one of us did something like
that easily.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Yeah, well, speaking of psychologically being messed up or okay,
let's talk about the psychological effects of the stuff.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
We're talking about skin to skin connection.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, we know that, we know that there is something
that babies can innately's sense about a human caregiver. And
this is part of why I imagine the Harlow experiment
occurs with another primate, right, because that's something you can
get closer and closer to human comparison with This is
(28:34):
proven and as you said, Matt, There are a plethora
of books about this. I am using the word directly.
I feel like there are too many. But we know
that relationship is real. That is a situation where laying
on hands or skin to skin contact does matter. And
if you are a mother, shortly after you give birth
(28:55):
you get a couple of superpowers related directly to this.
You'll find that the temperature of the skin in your
chest area is a degree or two higher than the
temperature of the skin across the rest of your body.
This makes a natural kind of like warming cradling area
for the yourkido and additionally, your body as a recent mother,
(29:19):
can also thermo regulate the child if the baby's this crazy.
If the baby's temperature rises, yours goes down in response.
That's fascinating. Yeah, but it's also not quite the same
thing as laying hands on someone to heal an injury
or condition. To talk about that, we have to talk
(29:39):
about being healed versus feeling healed. We have to introduce
the placebo effect.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
We sure do.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
And again, like I always kind of lump these two
and together, the placebo effect is a very measurable metric
of the power of belief. The idea of actually being
healed versus feeling like you're healed, And a lot of
that has to do with your belief in the individual
that is imparting this, either medicine or touch or something bigger,
(30:12):
whether it's some kind of ritual or you know, whatever,
it might be, some.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Sort of holistic approach.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
You know, there's a lot of power of belief and
placebo effect tied up with some of that kind of
stuff too, and that's lumped into the realm of pseudoscience,
like the idea of colloidal silver or certain you know,
kind of medicinal herbs or what have you that maybe
people swear by and they swear that it changes their
entire life when they take witch hazel. But then science
(30:40):
maybe says we the jury still out on that. But
faith healing operates as the name implies, on faith. Thus,
from a scientific perspective, you can't measure faith. Faith is
a very individualistic thing. It is a very personal thing.
So that makes it a non starter scientifically because it's
not measurable. Faith is by nature, it's an unexplained, dare
(31:02):
we say, kind of magical and ephemeral thing that's incomprehensible
in the realms of science, which relies on scientific measurements
and being able to objectively compare two different things and
the effects, so it can't be weighed, can't be measured,
You can't you know, meet it out in doses like
you can drugs or pharmaceuticals, et cetera. You know, it's
(31:26):
just a completely different universe than science or medicine.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
And there's certainly no shortage of individuals who believe they
themselves have been healed or they know someone who has
been healed through faith alone, through the laying of hands,
through the touch of God, or someone you know manifesting
God's power through them. And I mean, it's amazing and
(31:52):
it's actually really cool to read a lot of these stories.
It's a hopeful thing to go down that pathway. But
those personal anecdotes don't add up to real evidence, at
least scientific evidence, unfortunately, and it's not going to satisfy
those listening right now who are more skeptical.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, and that doesn't mean that anyone is automatically wrong.
That means that we have to do our due diligence
and investigate it right. So faith healing when it appears
to work, they're very compelling cases where it appears that
something happened. When this appears to work, it may be
one of the earliest examples in humanity of what we
(32:36):
call the placebo effect. Record scratch. Some of us listening
today may think that calling something the placebo effect is
the same thing as dismissing it. But this could not
be further from the truth. And Paul editme. Here here
is the crazy part. Placebos are proven to work in
(32:57):
about thirty percent of patience. You can find more research
on this sided in how Stuff Works article How the
placebo effect works. This means that the simple act of
taking something on a doctor's recommendation is more similar to
taking the advice of a religious figure than we may
want to think. In the modern day, you get a
(33:21):
sense of well being, you get what's called subjective verification,
and some research indicates that the placebo effect may indeed
go beyond the psychological realm, inducing or inciting a physiological response.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
It's crazy, It's super crazy.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
And just to double back to what I brought up earlier,
the idea of like what's the opposite of faith healing?
And this is for another episode. I just wanted to
point out placebo effect does have an opposite and it's
called the no cibo effect, and that is a detrimental
result of an inert substance based on belief.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
So you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (33:59):
I mean, I really think that those things do go
hand in hand with this, and I'd love to explore
that in conjunction with the idea of a curse or
imparting some kind of malady or a negative effect to
somebody you know through touch or psych you know, or suggestion.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Right, So there are there are multiple studies that confirm
the efficacy of the placebo effect, and I do want
to mention just for the Latin nerds, placebo is Latin
for I will please. So a major doctor is just
like convinced that you will feel better even if they
(34:37):
don't believe you have a real condition, if they give
you sugar pills. That's the one of the common examples.
But a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute in two thousand and two gave two different groups
of patients experimental antidepressants. They gave a third group a placebo,
and after several weeks of taking these pills, the real
(35:00):
ones on the placebo version each group's brain activity was
measured using EEGs. The patients who had been on the
placebo and also reported a positive effect, I feel less depressed.
In other words, they showed a greater increase of brain
activity than the people who had responded well to the
actual drug. The activity also recurred in the prefrontal cortex.
(35:24):
That's important because it suggests to us that the brain
isn't necessarily being fooled by a placebo after all. Instead,
it's responding to this placebo in a different way than
it would respond to an actual drug.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Hmm.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Or maybe that drug was just garbage. Antidepressant was just
a depressant.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, I don't know, maybe it was.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, But then you could you can see that, you know.
There's some other excellent research at two thousand and four
study at the University of Michigan that shows placebo effect
has some relationship with endorphins, your brain's natural pain relievers.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
And so.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
When you do brain scans when they did in the study,
and you see someone given a placebo, then what you'll
see is that their brain activity will change, particularly in
their opioid receptors which receive endorphins, and there will also
be activity in areas relating to processing and responding to pain.
(36:29):
It is then scientifically proven that the mere expectation of
pain relief caused the brain's pain relief system to activate,
and that means it works. And that also means that
the important part of why it works hinges on our perception.
The nature of the placebo doesn't matter, you know what
(36:52):
I mean. There is no curative spoon to bastardize the matrix.
So long as the patient has some sort of faith
in the individual administering the treatment, or more importantly, in
the process of receiving the treatment, then a pill is
the same as a pall. So we have a scientific
case for how this process could in some instances work,
(37:16):
a could function. But when we talk about faith healing,
we also have to address a darker, more controversial, more
disturbing aspect of the practice, which we'll do after word
from our sponsors. We've returned, and as we continue delving down,
(37:41):
we're reaching the rotten route of the controversy surrounding faith healing.
Make no mistake, this involves real life conspiracy, not theories,
no guesses or speculation, proven conspiracies that are both dangerous
and ongoing. Perhaps in an area near you. Sadly, one
(38:03):
of the most common insidious conspiracy surrounding faith healing involves
con artists, by which we mean people who know they
cannot cure cancer through the power of their physical touch
or connection with the divine, but will gladly pretend to
cure anything you want so long as the price is right.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, it's very true.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
You may remember from a previous episode we did on Televangelists.
There's there's quite a bit of crossover in this episode
and that episode. And you know one person that I
don't think we mentioned in that episode. Guys, correct me
if I'm wrong, is someone known as Marjoe.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
We did not.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I went back and checked.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah, okay, cool, so mar Joe.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
The name, by the way, is Mary and Joseph Portmanteaud
shoved together there. It's not really Portmantad, but it's shoved together.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
At least.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Marjo is the name of a boy, or at the time,
a very young boy. I believe he was four years
old when he got his start as a preacher. At
least that's when he got his start, when his parents
began putting him in front in front of executives in
media and other industry saying, hey, let me introduce let
(39:20):
me introduce you to our son Marjo, and he would
go in and recite passages from the Bible. He began
preaching I think at the age six, maybe he was
even younger than that when he was out giving sermons
to enraptured audiences hanging on to his every word. By
the way, it's Marjoe Gordoner. That's the person's name. And
(39:45):
there is a documentary that you can check out. The
one that I was able to actually find was titled
The Story of Marjo. I was able to find that
on Vimeo if you're interested in checking it out. It's
about an hour and a half hour twenty something and
it goes over the entire life story of this child
who grew up doing this pretty much forced by his family.
(40:09):
I mean, anytime you were a child as young as
he was at the time, your guardian or your family
is going to have a lot of say in what
you do and do not do. And in this case,
it was his family that pressured him to continue doing
things like this. I think he married. I know he
started marrying people around the age of five before or five,
Like he was officiating sermons but it continued and continued,
(40:36):
and I would say an evolution of a snowball that
was rolling down a hill that was pushed by his parents.
By the end or towards the middle, he was laying
hands on people like huge, huge, essentially tense you know,
ten style revivals where they're just hundreds and hundreds of people,
(40:57):
and he would go around and touch people where people
would look like they're having a seizure, in at least
the televised or the recorded versions of it, where people
would claim to be healed by him, where he and
his parents were making those kinds of claims. And here's
the problem. He came forward a little bit later in
his life and essentially rejected everything that he had done
(41:20):
because he felt very bad. Least according to what I've read,
that all of this stuff was a sham and it
was a show that they were putting on and people
were getting you know, essentially, he said that people were
getting hurt and he felt terrible about it. Anyway, there's
more we could talk about. It might even be a
whole episode, but fascinating stuff. It's one example of how
(41:45):
this can go wrong, how the concept of faith healing
can be used by someone or a group of people
to just get money from others.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
And then we have other examples such as stage acts
like Peter Popoff spelt like it sounds, who claimed to
get messages from the divine. This is unfortunately a common grift.
He was actually getting information from his wife and co
conspirator who was sending it to him via a pretty
(42:16):
modest headpiece, and they would collect this information when people
wrote about their lives on these index cards as they
entered the grift. So there are also some things that
appear to be cures because the condition itself was incorrectly diagnosed,
So the actual medical condition went away on its own
(42:38):
over time, but now the healer is able to take
credit for the miracle, which happens a lot with the unscrupulous.
Some deadly serious conditions Furthermore, like multiple sclerosis or cancer,
can go into remission for months or years at a
time for reasons that we don't fully understand. However, the
(43:00):
the healer will still be there front and center to
claim responsibility for yet again something that they didn't do.
And should the condition return, the healer is long gone.
You know, maybe they'll performatively pray for their victim. If
it comes up in conversation right on the way to
(43:20):
another grift. And I know maybe the language I'm using
is strong here, but if you are doing this to
people and you know that it does not work, then
you are a terrible person. These swindlers rely on what's
called subjective validation, the idea that because I feel this
(43:40):
is true, it is true, right, and my certitude is
of a higher priority and value than any objective evidence presented.
Speaker 5 (43:52):
And you know, it reminds me of what we're talking
about at the beginning of the show, the whole King's
Evil thing. But if that came back, I mean, it's
the king, you would never call that into question, right,
But it's the same situation where that particular malady I
can't remember the long form, but the King's Evil was
the kind of shorthand had a tendency to disappear on
(44:13):
its own, or at the very least some of the
symptoms would go into remission. So this is a much
more specific grift than that, even but kind of relying
on the same principle, right.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, yeah, And the process has been ironed out so
that it can work even if you are at royalty.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Think about it.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
The people are self selecting right for a hopeful positive outcome.
That means they're pre selected to validate what they're told
is happening. Additionally, unlike a medical appointment, there's not going to.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Be a follow up.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
They're not going to check back in on you after
they blow through town. That makes it easier to sweep
victims under the rug. And, of course, as horrific and
inhuman as this is, if there is an obvious failure
that you can't you know, sideline, or you can't sort
of negate or diminish, then you, as a faith healer,
(45:14):
have one super mooved. You can just imply that the
victim didn't have enough faith or they didn't follow the
procedure you set forth for them.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
Which is extra punishingly awful because these people all they
have is their belief. They're they're they're they're entering into
this agreement based on their belief. Uh, and then you're
taking advantage of that, and then when it doesn't work,
you're calling their whole like basis for existing into question.
(45:43):
Can you imagine if if you believe your cancer was
healed by a faith healer because of the power of
God and your faith in God and this individual and
then it didn't work and you were told, well, I
guess you don't believe in God enough.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Well, there's there is that, and that's often.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
That's mind boggling.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
But there's also an internal logic to some spirituality, and
a lot of it is based on a belief in
destiny or you know, predetermination or a version of you know, God.
Whatever entity has a plan or a map, and we
(46:25):
are just following along on this map and this timeline
and this story and our time when it is our
time is our time, right. So if this faith healing
didn't work and the person still passed away, it was
just God's plan or it was when that person was
supposed to go. And it doesn't matter if they were
(46:45):
going to be healed or if the healing would have worked,
it's what God intended. So I mean there all of
that kind of works with each other to set the
person up that I think we're pretty clearly labeling a
swindler here to win.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, it's a win win situation. I would also add
to that thread of conversation that the interesting part of
that argument is that it means free will at the
best takes a very far back seat in the bust
of existence, and therefore it would be useless for us
(47:23):
to record this episode. But we have to do it
because we're not choosing to do so. And the illusion
of choice is you know, it's a big thing in
stage magic and all kinds of scams. But you're right,
it's the game is rigged for again these unethical faith healers,
who I would say are not faith healers because they
don't believe in what they're doing. These people are setting
(47:46):
up this win win. Anything bad that happens is not
the healer's fault. If for some reason anything good happens,
for like due to any variable, then the con artists
can take every bit of the credit. And then, of course,
if they're super good at their job, they'll make sure
(48:06):
to pay a little lip service to a divine being
that they probably don't believe in, just because that keeps
the show going. You know, it's kind of a Kfei
sort of thing. But this isn't to say that there
is not science a play. Patients will feel better, the
endorphins are churning. This leads to the physiological stuff we
outlined earlier. It can be a genuine, albeit temporary respite
(48:31):
and I think we have to just spend a little
bit of time on this. We're being hard on the
bad actors here, right, We're being hard on the grifters
and the criminals, But we are by no means saying
that all faith healers are bad or cynical parasites or
credit thieves. In fact, many faith healers are practicing in
(48:54):
well good faith.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
It's true.
Speaker 4 (48:57):
There are undoubtedly people out there right now, maybe you listening,
who truly believe that what they're doing is helping someone.
If they are a faith healer, if they're someone who
does lay on hands, no matter what the spirituality and
belief of that person and the people that they're administering
(49:18):
it to, and they believe that, or they at least
truly want to believe that, because they want to help somebody,
and they have the faith and belief in that, you know,
in their abilities and the abilities of whatever deity to
apply that. So, you know, given what we know about
(49:38):
the placebo effect, what we've discussed on this episode in
previous ones, depending on the perception of the person that
the faith healing is being administered to the patient, it
seems like this practice laying on hands could actually genuinely,
provably trigger those positive psychological changes in that person. And
(50:03):
again that's why I bring up something like reiki, where
even if it's over a camera, someone like pulling your
energy out right, having that time and the belief that
it's working, it could do something to your brain. It does, well,
it could thirty percent of the time, right or more.
Speaker 5 (50:23):
In general, though, I mean, like with this whole quarantine situation,
I think people are almost downplaying the mental health aspects
of what this is doing to people not having human touch,
the ones that are so paranoid about getting sick because
maybe they have autoimmune issues or.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
What have you, or they're older.
Speaker 5 (50:43):
It's really difficult to overstate how important human contact and
human touch is for just human beings in general. We're
not designed to be isolated in this way. And who
knows if just the power of having some physically touch
you in a way that has a meaning imparted behind it, right,
(51:04):
that is powerful in and of itself, and it's enough
to turn some screws in your brain that could then
turn some screws in your body. And maybe it's not
actually curing the thing, but it sure as hell can
make you feel better. You know, there's even this idea
of self soothing where if you're going through anxiety, or
if you're experiencing physiological responses to anxiety, you can just
(51:27):
touch hold yourself, you know, like literally give yourself a
hug or stroke your arm if there's no one else around,
And that's got proven positive qualities as well, no substitute
for having somebody else do it though, right So, I
don't know. I think a lot of this is really
wrapped up in that how the power of touch, the
power of human interaction, I think is at the core
(51:49):
of all of this.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
And we know that regardless of whether or not you
consider yourself a skeptic, there is at least evidence, we've
at least built a case of how this stuff called
faith healing could impart psychological and physiological changes. It can
alleviate pain. Faith healing has a clear scientific path.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
To do that.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
But we have to remember alleviating a pain is not
the same thing as curing an ailment. And many, many
people who are with the with full sincerity practicing as
faith healers have you know, they're not trying to rip
people off, they're not trying to harm people. They may
(52:35):
in many cases be saying, hey, let's go through this
process together, and also let's do that in addition to
traditional medical care. You know what I mean, These things
aren't always at loggerheads, even though that would make for
you know, a more sensationalistic story. A lot of these
faith healers, again, not the con artists, the people who
(52:56):
really believe in what they're doing. They will say that
they are working with powers human beings do not readily understand,
and to a degree that is absolutely true from everything
we know about this process right now, however, it seems
that the power at hand, the prime mover here, is
(53:18):
science rather than something divine.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Agreed, but we can't prove that it's not something divine. No,
we can just.
Speaker 4 (53:27):
Prove that over the course of history, a lot of
people have abused the concept of having divinity or experiencing
divinity or channeling it.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Yeah, I mean, I like that point because we see
here the character of humanity writ large. We see some malevolence, right,
we see lack of ethics, but then we also see inspiration. Right.
We see people trying to help each other, which is
one of the most beautiful things this species can do.
And we know that we know as we always say
(54:02):
when we're addressing matters of faith, we're showing that faith
does have a scientific impact on individual human life. Like
another thing would another you know, pin to put in
this conspiracy board is the fact that strong faith in
something can help bolster the human immune system. Your body
(54:24):
seems to know when you believe in something. That's maybe
a very simplistic way to put it, but it holds true.
And we want to hear what you think. Have you
or someone you know experienced firsthand, I'll stop faith that
that appeared to work? Right? And do you believe this
(54:44):
can be explained through something like the placebo effect or
to your earlier point, know the power we feel the
way our bodies and our hormones and our intecrine systems
respond to human contact. What do you think about some
of the research here? Do you think that science maybe
should not attempt to explain faith healing? Should it exist separately?
Speaker 3 (55:08):
Well? Like should? Right? Is this something that I don't know? Man?
Speaker 5 (55:12):
Like it's one of those things where it's like, aren't
some things better left to the realm of the metaphysical
as opposed to trying to like explain them with science?
I don't know like, I think some things about religion
are wrapped up in the placebo effect. To me, in general,
they can make you feel better even if quote what
you're quote unquote believing in isn't provable. That's what faith is, right,
(55:37):
So I mean, like, do you do we want science
to explain whether there is or isn't a God? Doesn't
that kind of fly in the face of the whole
concept of faith.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
That's the whole point of science proving if there is
or is some invisible hand guiding everything.
Speaker 5 (55:54):
Then science is kind of a buzzkill sometimes, Like, I
don't know, I'm not a religious person. I'm not, but
I would consider myself a spiritual person and I don't
know that I need science to put that in a
box for me. You know, I don't know, like you
should to hear what listeners, what you folks think.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
And it also reminds me of Arthur C. Clark's famous quote,
any sufficiently advanced technology, well just insert science here, maybe
indistinguishable from magic. It also reminds me of anybody who
is interested in the intersection between technology and the divine.
If you have not read it yet and you have
a spare ten minutes sometime after you listen to this,
(56:33):
please check out the Nine Billion Names of God. It's
a short story. I won't spoil the ending, but it
is just Chef's kiss, top notch reading. And while you're
on the internet, let us know something about your take
on some of these questions we post. You can find
us all over the place except on a couple of
(56:57):
live journal it's just they got too popular. Want to
answer our emails?
Speaker 4 (57:01):
You guys, we got a message about Pinterest. We got educated.
Speaker 3 (57:05):
Are we being shamed? Are we being Pinterest? No?
Speaker 4 (57:07):
No, it's very kind actually about Hey, here's exactly what
pinterest is and what you use it for and how
I use it.
Speaker 1 (57:13):
And thanks for writing in on that one, because I
too remember the days when access to Pinterest was a
pretty exclusive thing that was sort of a digital velvet
rope around it.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
That's Catherine, by the way, Thanks Catherine.
Speaker 1 (57:26):
Thank you, Catherine. So you can find us at the
dive bars and gin joints of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
You can find us on Facebook and Twitter as conspiracy Stuff.
We're on Instagram as conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
If you wish.
Speaker 5 (57:42):
You can also finds as an individuals on social media.
I am on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown.
Speaker 4 (57:49):
I am at Matt Frederick Underscore, iHeart and special shout
out to all the ASM artists out there, thanks for
helping us all get to sleep easier and comforting us
in these lonely times with your virtual faith healing and
reiki sessions that I looked at for this episode.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
And of course special thanks to our fellow listeners who
write in every so often to say love your show.
It helps us fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (58:16):
That's all my favorites.
Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, you can find me Twitter at Ben Bolan HSW
what's the HSW for longtime listeners? You know you can
also find me on Instagram at Ben Bollan. But I
hate social media, you say, shaking your fist at the sky.
I have no faith that there's a salve for that.
I'm a phone call person. Well you are in luck.
Speaker 4 (58:39):
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. Leave us
a message exactly what you want to say, anything you
want to say, everything you can. You can have a
musical soundtrack, although we probably can't play that in the
background because we wouldn't be able to afford the rights.
Unless you're playing the music and it's your own original
score or and you send us a license agreement, it'll
(59:02):
get complicated public domain.
Speaker 5 (59:04):
That's cool shit, And you can just comment and now
or or whatever, play it on the.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Kazooe, or just use your voice.
Speaker 4 (59:09):
Whatever you want to do, give us a call. If
you don't want to do that, you can always give
us an old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (59:39):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, you guys know how, uh, you guys know how
religion is still pretty popular.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I heard tale.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Yeah, I like that Tennessee reference, that.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Georgia reference.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Oh, I'll amend it. I like a Southern Americana reference.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
There you go. Oh for sure, it's kind of a
big deal religion.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yes, then as now. In the ancient days, medicine and
spirituality were intertwined, right and inextricable and inseparable, and so
people would use rituals and vacations attempting to ask for
help right on the physical plane from divine sources. And
(00:47):
back in twenty twenty we got super into exploring the
concept of laying on of hands. The yeah put your
put your fingers against the screen, but your with your
hands against your your ears.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Uh oh no, rogue is on the other side.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Don't touch it again. Growth with the gloves. You got
the gloves with her in the gentle touch.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yes, comics, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we we know. There's this
idea that persists day that a mere physical touch from
just the right other person could heal otherwise incurable medical conditions.
For any fans of our corporate overlords, Illumination Global Unlimited,
(01:34):
don't worry they got in on this grift super early.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Many hands what was it called, It's many hands.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's roll the tape to it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
A production of EE Art Radio.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you
are you. You are here and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Crucial disclaimer for this episode.
Nothing we talk about and today's show is medical advice
and it should not be mistaken for such.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Could it be mistaken as spiritual advice?
Speaker 5 (02:41):
Or we maybe we should disclaim that too, So that's
all in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, right, true.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, the stance of this show has always been that
your spirituality is your own, so we would never dispend
spiritual advice either. But to the point about medical advice,
the reason we're saying this at the top of the
show is that at some point in every single person's life.
No matter who you are, your health becomes your number
(03:07):
one priority princes, princesses, and poppers alike, and when people
are beset by chronic, debilitating, or terminal conditions, we often
turn to any possible avenue in search of a cure.
In the US, the healthcare system also forces many many
residents to seek out alternative medicine, simply due to the
(03:29):
fact that traditional medical care can be enormously expensive, and
for other people, the alternative care route is already seen
as somehow more reliable or at the very least less
dangerous than established medical practice. One of the oldest, most
common forms of early medicine comes from the ancient days
(03:51):
of religion and what we today call science and ritual
and procedure. Back when all these things were lumped into
a single entity, in medicine such as it was, was
less a matter of science and more a matter of faith.
So today's question, what is faith healing? What is the
laying on of hands? Here are the facts.
Speaker 5 (04:14):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the laying on of hands
beyond the notion of you know, I think the image
that a lot of us conjure when we hear the
term faith healing of somebody in a position of leadership
and a church taking their hands and laying them on
someone and healing the sick, or the idea of you know,
Jesus laying his hands on Lazarus and curing him of
(04:34):
his leprosy, or what have you, you know, restoring sight
to the blind and the like. But laying on of
hands is a lot more than that. I mean, it's
in the Christian tradition. It is a form of transmitting
blessings and sort of being a conduit for God's message
or God's kind of power.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I guess, depending on who you talk to.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
But it is something that is in the Bible and
is a very very basic tenet of the Christian faith.
It's one that people often overlook. So what is the
laying on of hands in the genre of faith healing?
That term being an umbrella term for kind of rituals
and practices meant to create some sort of divine or
(05:17):
supernatural result in like I said, healing someone's physical, psychological,
or spiritual malady. Some other examples can include things like
visiting a shrine in other faiths or religious sites, some
sort of pilgrimage, doing a group prayer. Channeling this kind
of spiritual energy in a group, incantations, contact with an artifact,
(05:43):
a sacred relic, and so on, and again this is
beyond the Christian faith. I mean, that's the term they use,
but it's been around for thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Right, Oh, yeah, absolutely, it's been used in organized religion,
and I guess more traditional religions that go, as you said,
far beyond the concept of laying on hands or some
kind of spiritual interaction that is manifested through a physical touch.
(06:13):
It doesn't necessarily mean healing, or it isn't always restricted
to healing. There are some other things that that action
has been used for. For instance, in Judaism, the semicha
is an action of ordination that some it's not necessarily
like physical healing, but some type of blessing that can
(06:34):
be bestowed upon somebody. It can confer like that blessing
from one to another, or even the authority of that
one person holds to give it to another. It's pretty
interesting stuff. You can find references to this in numbers
twenty seven, fifteen through twenty three. And in this story
from the Bible, Moses gives his power essentially to Joshua
(07:00):
through this action. It's pretty interesting. Oh, it's all another
verse in numbers eleven, sixteen through twenty five. Moses then
has a group of seventy elders around him and through
this action. Again I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly, but Semeka
he ordains them with his powers.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
But he does not heal them. To your point, right,
this is a conference of authority. And although you know,
one of the most important myths to bust here is
that conflation of faith healing with Christianity. It occurs in Christianity,
but that doesn't make it Christianity in any way special.
(07:42):
Because of our association with Christianity in the West, our
most apparent examples of faith healing come from that spiritual system.
So various Christian denominations have practiced laying on hands both
as an act of faith healing and also, to your point, Matt,
as an act of conferring some sort of authority ordaining someone.
(08:08):
In multiple New Testament passages, laying on of hands is
depicted as just that, an act of ordainment, and in
Pentecostal churches, especially in recent years or in recent eras,
this act, accompanied by prayer, is considered a crucial component
of faith healing. You'll also see that it's not uncommon
(08:29):
in charismatic churches, often associated with a single individual, mortal
personality who has some sort of distinct, unique connection to
the divine again, whatever that divinity may be.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Yeah, and it certainly takes on kind of a theatrical quality,
you know, when you are this very charismatic individual that's
you know, bringing someone up onto the stage to perhaps
cure them of some reality and you know, witnessed by
your congregation, and it creates this kind of fervor and
kind of works people up into a frenzy oftentimes. So
(09:06):
it is sort of used in that way, especially in
modern day, but you know, we see it all the
time in history, and like these kind of big tent
revival kind of church services that would do just this.
It would be a matter of like, you know, an individual,
a single kind of leader, having this very specific ability
that was believed in by a congregation. And perhaps there
(09:29):
were skeptics on the fringes or on the outside of
that group, but the folks that actually follow this individual
around would have believed that what they were seeing was
the work of God being done or kind of funneled
through this one person.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, and we see this in cultures across the world,
across the timeline of human history. For instance, it's present
in some form in the Navajo spiritual system. But and
this might surprise people, it's one of my favorite things
about this. It was also a secular power for a
(10:02):
very long time, back when the notion of the right
to rule was also tied up with the notion of religion.
For centuries, French and English monarchs would practice something called
the royal touch. The royal touch is what it sounds like.
They would deign to touch their subjects, and this would
(10:22):
be perceived as a means of treating a disease. They
started out with any old condition that caught their eye,
just like a celebrity on Twitter. If you're a peasant
and you have a condition, and you catch the king
or the queen on a good day, then they may
lay hands on you. They may royally touch you, and
you know your chances of being cured, it would assume,
(10:44):
would rise. However, from about the sixteenth century on, these
monarchs began to focus on a specific ailment, scruffula, which
was also at the time known as the King's evil.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Ooh love that name. Well, I mean, it's another example
of the power of belief.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
I mean, because a lot of these monarchs, you know,
they operate under this principle that their power came from God,
you know, and so therefore they were like the hand
and the voice and the you know, mandate of God
on earth.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
And a lot of their subjects believed that too.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
So scruffula, scruffula, what be the you might say, the
scruff or the King's Evil. Well, it's pretty pretty cool
to look into it, because it's actually a really early
version of perhaps marketing. Hey, Edward Burnees wasn't involved at
(11:41):
this time.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You know. I'm so glad that you said that, Matt,
and a little piece of me hopes that Brenees was
at least aware of this brilliant con and I'll call
it a con. This may be a controversial episode. Hey yeah,
shoot me, grim shot. Yeah, So you're right. They focused
on this specific thing, this specific condition, its dressed up
(12:04):
name when it goes to fancy parties is tuberculosis cervical lymphodonitis.
The King's Evil. As we said, the thing about this
condition tuberculosis cervical lymphodonitis. If you want to search it
to your heart's content is that you'll find it rarely
leads to death, and it often, even back then, would
(12:24):
go into remissions seemingly on its own. So and this
is very important. Later the Royal Touch appeared to cure
the condition. Unlike paralysis or blindness, conditions that could be
easily discerned just for looking as someone, this was something
that you know, the person who is suffering from the
(12:45):
affliction would be the most aware of. And that's why
the Royal Touch looked like it worked, or just as importantly,
it looked like it didn't fail.
Speaker 5 (12:54):
But like, is this are these symptoms that were so
pronounced that it could be super clear They're like, aha,
and your symptoms have now left you entirely, or was
this so sought all that well? Lake it worked eventually,
you know what I mean? Like did there need to
be a big aha moment or was it like Okay,
now go home and get some rest and call me
(13:14):
in the morning kind of situation. It seems a little
more like that. And then they would report back, I'm cured.
And then the King's touch was smashing success or thought
of as infallible.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Is that kind of the shape of it.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Ben The big physical indication the most apparent physical symptom
is swelling of one or more lymph nodes. So you
was swelling would go up and then it will gradually
go down. And some people who had pre existing or
concurrent unrelated conditions would also have things like fever, weight loss, fatigue,
(13:47):
night sweats. In other words, a bevy of symptoms that
could come from any number of ailments. So worse comes
to worse if the royal touch, if the King's touch
has not cured so one of the King's evil, they
can always say that they cured that one specific thing,
the King's evil, And what's really getting you is leprosy
or not praying hard enough.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah, well, let's not forget too. This was a time of.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
Very poor medical care, so a lot of people were
sick a lot of the time.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
I would imagine, you.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Know, yeah, hey guys, I just thought of something outside
of the healing. Just to take a quick detour here,
we're talking about the king's touch or the queen's touch,
or the physical act of someone in royalty touching another person,
connecting that to ordainment. I was thinking about being knighted
or you know, taking up something like that where you're
(14:39):
using a physical thing a sword in a lot of cases,
some kind of weapon to touch another to then send
the powers that you already have into that other person.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, and symbolically show that you are the difference between
their life and their death. Not for nothing is it
a sword, right?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:57):
So the weird thing is this sounds like an historical footnote, right,
one of those other kind of obscure things that are
fun to hear about. The last known example of the
royal touch occurred as recently as eighteen twenty five at
the coronation of the French King Charles the tenth. And
then after that, these superpowers of monarchy sort of fade away.
(15:20):
And it's good to know that they faded away if
you're a fan of medicine, but if you're a fan
of folklore, it's a little bittersweet to see them go.
You know, they went the way of the Dodo, along
with other royal superpowers, like the ability to craft magical
curative objects, or of course the ability to exercise demons,
because you see, science becomes the new kid in town.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
Well yeah, but even like things like we've talked about previously,
like unicorn horns being ground up or what they thought
were unicorn horns, which were actually like narwhal tusks that
were traded by the Vikings. That was something that even
the royals believed in, you know, pretty heavily, and they
would have like acceptors made out of these things and
these like magical objects. Which is interesting to me because
(16:04):
if there was this emphasis on the royal touch being
so powerful, how come they couldn't use it on themselves.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
It's a good question. That was probably the the moment
in court where a philosopher got kicked out.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
Oh, we don't want to hear that, we don't want
to hear any of that, and exactly. But then thankfully
science did sort of supplant a lot of this, a
lot of this stuff. So what does science have to
say about this whole concept of, you know, imparting power
or healing to others just through physical touch.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Well, i mean, the scientific community in the modern day, largely,
fast majorityly dismisses faith healing as being a thing. They
say that it's pseudoscience. I mean, I mean, that's just
kind of the stance, right, that's the way it's going
to be, and in the way the way it has
(17:01):
been for quite a long time. But there are many
others in the world, from true believers to people who
are even more skeptical. They do, they do object to
this concept of it being complete pseudoscience.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
There there are.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
People, I would say, kind of like me, I don't
want to put myself too deep into this camp early
on in this episode, who think there might be something
to it, to that physical physical connection of cells atoms
together that could do something right. And people who are
who believe this a little more. They argue that faith
(17:37):
healing should be view viewed as a spiritual practice in itself,
and that is it. It is a spiritual practice, right,
and the concept of using faith faith healing or believing
in faith healing or accepting faith healing has nothing to
do with science and scientific claims. It should be treated
(17:58):
as a matter of faith, and that's that's period. But
it's no surprise that this practice is still really popular
and there are things that have grown out of it,
different kinds of faith, different kinds of touching or almost touching,
And thinking about reiki where there's almost touching, it's the
(18:19):
same kind of physical act without the physical touch.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Or think about this, I'm a televangelist. Put your hand
against the screen, pray with time, Corona.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
You will be healed.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That's where that's for folks watching the video there.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
Oh man, I felt it hard, ben Or. But the
flip side of this is like, if if you can
heal somebody like this, can you also harm somebody like this?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Could you? Could I manifest like cancer into you? Am
I an enemy?
Speaker 5 (18:50):
Or at the very least I mean, is in this
sort of like a reverse curse almost. I don't want
to derail us too much, but it does. It feels
like there ought to be a flip side. If you
believe in the one, shouldn't you even the other? You know,
I don't know the.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Left hand path. Yeah, yeah, it's another episode of one
we should do. I think that's a fantastic idea. Actually,
I'm going to write that down.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
Yeah, if one exists, then the other would have to right.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, that's what That's what our various philosophical schools tell us,
and that makes that future episode even more chilling for
reasons that will soon become a parent.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
In many parts of the world, we have to remember,
even in twenty twenty, millions and millions of people have
no realistic access to modern medical care and overwhelming evidence
proves that, all things being equal, a patient will tend
to be much better off with a doctor than with
a priest. The vast majority of spiritual authorities these days,
(19:51):
with some notable exceptions, welcome the practice of modern medicine.
They do not see it as conflicting with their personal beliefs. Please,
religious authorities, go to a doctor. Pray and you know,
go to the doctor. So the question then, is why
does faith healing persist? More importantly, why are so many
(20:12):
people convinced that it works? We'll tell you after a
word from our sponsor. Has this ever happened to you?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Please, sir, heal my grievest wounds?
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Well, my son, I want to, but I have so
many other people to heal, and I've only got these
two hands.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, it's a problem familiar to any work in faith healing.
You've got money rolling in, You've got a line of
desperate people out the front door of the revival of
local megachurch. But how are you to get to everyone's
bank account in time?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
But sir, can't you just pray for more hands? Pray
to God for more hands.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
If only I could, my son, if only I could?
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Why pray to God? When you can thank Many Hands.
The newest product from Illumination Global Unlimited, guaranteed to revolutionize
the faith healing industry.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Are the gloves with a bunch of other plastic hands
attached to them.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
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vented gloves and let many hands warm skin. Helping hands
instantly quadruple your output and your income.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
Wow, it feels like you're touching me with a real hand.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
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on upd eight victims patients at once, as long as
they are properly a positioned Amazing.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
I'm touching you, and you and you and me, mister
and me. Do you feel it, my son? Do you
feel the power of the divide? Hang on to me,
Just adjust my glove.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
He I feel it all right. I feel something that's
good enough for.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Me and that's good enough for God.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yes, put away those tiresome obstacles to spiritual fame and
financial success. With Many Hands available now at a disreputable
house of worship or department store near you. Rated eight
of eight simultaneous high fives by faith healings across the globe.
Hands bears no responsibility for lack of actual medicine, dizziness, euphoria, dropsy, cropsy,
itchy palms, microplastic inhalation, the nihilistic dread of swindling, the
(22:08):
ill and the dying, intogrin, malfunction, rhythmic diarrhea, earworms, tapeworms, hopeworms,
laundry expenses, and any fees associated with corek costs or
legal rulings in any hand is a subsidiary of Illumination
Global Unlimited. Wow, they're back one of our first sponsors.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Yeah, yeah, they are, yep, And boy are they helpful
given those products to us that we just need so
so badly.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
That was such a great ad break. Let's take another one.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Here's a word from our sponsors.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Here's where it gets crazy. The answer, but whether or
not faith healing works and laying on hands is not
as clear cut as we might like to think. Science
has proven that physical human contact and yes, in some ways,
even the process of laying hands on people may have
(23:08):
genuine medical benefits. That is a very very bold claim,
but it's maybe not as crazy as it sounds.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I actually have first hand experience with this because it
appears that the laying on of hands. The physical touch
is crucial, absolutely crucial to early childhood development. If you're
a parent, you may have experienced this. I certainly did.
You've probably had multiple conversations early on after having your child,
(23:38):
before having your child, perhaps talking about the importance of
something called skin to skin contact. And you know, there
is a lot of misinformation out there that you can
find on the internet and in so many books about babies.
There's so many of this, but it does seem to
be very important, and it appears to be important, at
least in our case with my son, my wife, where
(24:01):
that immediate skin to skin contact was very much encouraged
by everyone around us and.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Was told we were told to do this prior to
having the baby.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
But also it was good for I would say, for
me to have like my child touch my skin and
like the sense and there. It's one of those weird
things that feels.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Like it goes beyond.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
Science, but in reality it does seem to be things
that are very scientific like this, like the very animalistic
almost like the scent, the touch, the tactile feel, the warmth,
the sounds.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's fascinating stuff.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Matt, did you notice a line item on your hospital
bill for skin to skin contact. Yes, that's a real
thing they'd charge you for. Like the act of it's
like it's a service they're providing, but it's basically just
dicking the baby and giving it to you.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Really quickly.
Speaker 5 (25:01):
Though, Matt, it's also important for bonding, you know, Like
I mean, we've seen scientific studies of like animals where
that's you know, what was the study with the wire
monkey versus like the actual real mom, you know, touch it,
like a newborn baby monkey given contact with this like
wire monkey, and then the ones that actually were able
(25:23):
to be you know, skin to skin nurtured by the
real mother, and there was you know, the bond was crucial,
and that's something that I think is important with humans
as well.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, it reminds me of the infamous Romanian orphanage studies
that show there are lasting developmental effects based on the
amount of interaction a very very young human has with
an adult. There's a professor of developmental psychology at Saint
Francis Xavier University in Nova, Scotia. Her name is Anne Bigelow,
(25:53):
and she says she agrees with you, Matt, that the
science is there and it's compelling and to with your
point all about emotional bonding. It's proven that babies who
have this skin to skin contact do appear to cry less,
they have more RESTful sleep. And additionally, the practice can
benefit the parents. It reduces levels of stress in the
(26:16):
parent the caregiver, It reduces levels of depression, and it
does this by releasing oxytocin. There is neurochemical science here,
and of course that helps with bonding on an emotional level.
You can kind of envision the positive feedback loop. I
feel calmer when I hold my child. My child also
feels calmer because they're picking up my vibes. For a
(26:39):
super scientific term, and this works again, this works with
fathers as well.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
Really clearly, the thing I was talking about, the experiment
that I was referencing was the Harlow monkey experiments, and
it wasn't with the real mother ever. It was one
monkey surrogate was made of wire and provided nourishment, and
the other one was made of soft terry cloth, felt
much more like a real mother kind of experience and
(27:04):
didn't provide nourishment, And that was the more important bond
than the one that.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Felt less motherly.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
And and you know Cuddley, it proved that that was
a more important connection than even the providing of food.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I just want to say that study is messed up.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Oh, all of this guy's studies were.
Speaker 5 (27:23):
This guy's an awful person whoa Parlow. Yeah, big, big,
very very bad reputation.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
In the scientific community.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
I'm imagining it being done to humans and just what
that would actually look like. And I'm horrified, and now
I kind of want to write something about it.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I'm sure it happened, but maybe without the veneer of
scientific experimentation. Humans are so messed up, and there's so
many of us, and we've been around for a pretty
long time. So yeah, one of us did something like
that easily.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Yeah, well, speaking of psychologically being messed up or okay,
let's talk about the psychological effects of the stuff.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
We're talking about skin to skin connection.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, we know that, we know that there is something
that babies can innately's sense about a human caregiver. And
this is part of why I imagine the Harlow experiment
occurs with another primate, right, because that's something you can
get closer and closer to human comparison with This is
(28:34):
proven and as you said, Matt, There are a plethora
of books about this. I am using the word directly.
I feel like there are too many. But we know
that relationship is real. That is a situation where laying
on hands or skin to skin contact does matter. And
if you are a mother, shortly after you give birth
(28:55):
you get a couple of superpowers related directly to this.
You'll find that the temperature of the skin in your
chest area is a degree or two higher than the
temperature of the skin across the rest of your body.
This makes a natural kind of like warming cradling area
for the yourkido and additionally, your body as a recent mother,
(29:19):
can also thermo regulate the child if the baby's this crazy.
If the baby's temperature rises, yours goes down in response.
That's fascinating. Yeah, but it's also not quite the same
thing as laying hands on someone to heal an injury
or condition. To talk about that, we have to talk
(29:39):
about being healed versus feeling healed. We have to introduce
the placebo effect.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
We sure do.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
And again, like I always kind of lump these two
and together, the placebo effect is a very measurable metric
of the power of belief. The idea of actually being
healed versus feeling like you're healed, And a lot of
that has to do with your belief in the individual
that is imparting this, either medicine or touch or something bigger,
(30:12):
whether it's some kind of ritual or you know, whatever,
it might be, some.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Sort of holistic approach.
Speaker 5 (30:18):
You know, there's a lot of power of belief and
placebo effect tied up with some of that kind of
stuff too, and that's lumped into the realm of pseudoscience,
like the idea of colloidal silver or certain you know,
kind of medicinal herbs or what have you that maybe
people swear by and they swear that it changes their
entire life when they take witch hazel. But then science
(30:40):
maybe says we the jury still out on that. But
faith healing operates as the name implies, on faith. Thus,
from a scientific perspective, you can't measure faith. Faith is
a very individualistic thing. It is a very personal thing.
So that makes it a non starter scientifically because it's
not measurable. Faith is by nature, it's an unexplained, dare
(31:02):
we say, kind of magical and ephemeral thing that's incomprehensible
in the realms of science, which relies on scientific measurements
and being able to objectively compare two different things and
the effects, so it can't be weighed, can't be measured,
You can't you know, meet it out in doses like
you can drugs or pharmaceuticals, et cetera. You know, it's
(31:26):
just a completely different universe than science or medicine.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
And there's certainly no shortage of individuals who believe they
themselves have been healed or they know someone who has
been healed through faith alone, through the laying of hands,
through the touch of God, or someone you know manifesting
God's power through them. And I mean, it's amazing and
(31:52):
it's actually really cool to read a lot of these stories.
It's a hopeful thing to go down that pathway. But
those personal anecdotes don't add up to real evidence, at
least scientific evidence, unfortunately, and it's not going to satisfy
those listening right now who are more skeptical.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, and that doesn't mean that anyone is automatically wrong.
That means that we have to do our due diligence
and investigate it right. So faith healing when it appears
to work, they're very compelling cases where it appears that
something happened. When this appears to work, it may be
one of the earliest examples in humanity of what we
(32:36):
call the placebo effect. Record scratch. Some of us listening
today may think that calling something the placebo effect is
the same thing as dismissing it. But this could not
be further from the truth. And Paul editme. Here here
is the crazy part. Placebos are proven to work in
(32:57):
about thirty percent of patience. You can find more research
on this sided in how Stuff Works article How the
placebo effect works. This means that the simple act of
taking something on a doctor's recommendation is more similar to
taking the advice of a religious figure than we may
want to think. In the modern day, you get a
(33:21):
sense of well being, you get what's called subjective verification,
and some research indicates that the placebo effect may indeed
go beyond the psychological realm, inducing or inciting a physiological response.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
It's crazy, It's super crazy.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
And just to double back to what I brought up earlier,
the idea of like what's the opposite of faith healing?
And this is for another episode. I just wanted to
point out placebo effect does have an opposite and it's
called the no cibo effect, and that is a detrimental
result of an inert substance based on belief.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
So you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (33:59):
I mean, I really think that those things do go
hand in hand with this, and I'd love to explore
that in conjunction with the idea of a curse or
imparting some kind of malady or a negative effect to
somebody you know through touch or psych you know, or suggestion.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Right, So there are there are multiple studies that confirm
the efficacy of the placebo effect, and I do want
to mention just for the Latin nerds, placebo is Latin
for I will please. So a major doctor is just
like convinced that you will feel better even if they
(34:37):
don't believe you have a real condition, if they give
you sugar pills. That's the one of the common examples.
But a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute in two thousand and two gave two different groups
of patients experimental antidepressants. They gave a third group a placebo,
and after several weeks of taking these pills, the real
(35:00):
ones on the placebo version each group's brain activity was
measured using EEGs. The patients who had been on the
placebo and also reported a positive effect, I feel less depressed.
In other words, they showed a greater increase of brain
activity than the people who had responded well to the
actual drug. The activity also recurred in the prefrontal cortex.
(35:24):
That's important because it suggests to us that the brain
isn't necessarily being fooled by a placebo after all. Instead,
it's responding to this placebo in a different way than
it would respond to an actual drug.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Hmm.
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Or maybe that drug was just garbage. Antidepressant was just
a depressant.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, I don't know, maybe it was.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, But then you could you can see that, you know.
There's some other excellent research at two thousand and four
study at the University of Michigan that shows placebo effect
has some relationship with endorphins, your brain's natural pain relievers.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
And so.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
When you do brain scans when they did in the study,
and you see someone given a placebo, then what you'll
see is that their brain activity will change, particularly in
their opioid receptors which receive endorphins, and there will also
be activity in areas relating to processing and responding to pain.
(36:29):
It is then scientifically proven that the mere expectation of
pain relief caused the brain's pain relief system to activate,
and that means it works. And that also means that
the important part of why it works hinges on our perception.
The nature of the placebo doesn't matter, you know what
(36:52):
I mean. There is no curative spoon to bastardize the matrix.
So long as the patient has some sort of faith
in the individual administering the treatment, or more importantly, in
the process of receiving the treatment, then a pill is
the same as a pall. So we have a scientific
case for how this process could in some instances work,
(37:16):
a could function. But when we talk about faith healing,
we also have to address a darker, more controversial, more
disturbing aspect of the practice, which we'll do after word
from our sponsors. We've returned, and as we continue delving down,
(37:41):
we're reaching the rotten route of the controversy surrounding faith healing.
Make no mistake, this involves real life conspiracy, not theories,
no guesses or speculation, proven conspiracies that are both dangerous
and ongoing. Perhaps in an area near you. Sadly, one
(38:03):
of the most common insidious conspiracy surrounding faith healing involves
con artists, by which we mean people who know they
cannot cure cancer through the power of their physical touch
or connection with the divine, but will gladly pretend to
cure anything you want so long as the price is right.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, it's very true.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
You may remember from a previous episode we did on Televangelists.
There's there's quite a bit of crossover in this episode
and that episode. And you know one person that I
don't think we mentioned in that episode. Guys, correct me
if I'm wrong, is someone known as Marjoe.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
We did not.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
I went back and checked.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah, okay, cool, so mar Joe.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
The name, by the way, is Mary and Joseph Portmanteaud
shoved together there. It's not really Portmantad, but it's shoved together.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
At least.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Marjo is the name of a boy, or at the time,
a very young boy. I believe he was four years
old when he got his start as a preacher. At
least that's when he got his start, when his parents
began putting him in front in front of executives in
media and other industry saying, hey, let me introduce let
(39:20):
me introduce you to our son Marjo, and he would
go in and recite passages from the Bible. He began
preaching I think at the age six, maybe he was
even younger than that when he was out giving sermons
to enraptured audiences hanging on to his every word. By
the way, it's Marjoe Gordoner. That's the person's name. And
(39:45):
there is a documentary that you can check out. The
one that I was able to actually find was titled
The Story of Marjo. I was able to find that
on Vimeo if you're interested in checking it out. It's
about an hour and a half hour twenty something and
it goes over the entire life story of this child
who grew up doing this pretty much forced by his family.
(40:09):
I mean, anytime you were a child as young as
he was at the time, your guardian or your family
is going to have a lot of say in what
you do and do not do. And in this case,
it was his family that pressured him to continue doing
things like this. I think he married. I know he
started marrying people around the age of five before or five,
Like he was officiating sermons but it continued and continued,
(40:36):
and I would say an evolution of a snowball that
was rolling down a hill that was pushed by his parents.
By the end or towards the middle, he was laying
hands on people like huge, huge, essentially tense you know,
ten style revivals where they're just hundreds and hundreds of people,
(40:57):
and he would go around and touch people where people
would look like they're having a seizure, in at least
the televised or the recorded versions of it, where people
would claim to be healed by him, where he and
his parents were making those kinds of claims. And here's
the problem. He came forward a little bit later in
his life and essentially rejected everything that he had done
(41:20):
because he felt very bad. Least according to what I've read,
that all of this stuff was a sham and it
was a show that they were putting on and people
were getting you know, essentially, he said that people were
getting hurt and he felt terrible about it. Anyway, there's
more we could talk about. It might even be a
whole episode, but fascinating stuff. It's one example of how
(41:45):
this can go wrong, how the concept of faith healing
can be used by someone or a group of people
to just get money from others.
Speaker 1 (41:55):
And then we have other examples such as stage acts
like Peter Popoff spelt like it sounds, who claimed to
get messages from the divine. This is unfortunately a common grift.
He was actually getting information from his wife and co
conspirator who was sending it to him via a pretty
(42:16):
modest headpiece, and they would collect this information when people
wrote about their lives on these index cards as they
entered the grift. So there are also some things that
appear to be cures because the condition itself was incorrectly diagnosed,
So the actual medical condition went away on its own
(42:38):
over time, but now the healer is able to take
credit for the miracle, which happens a lot with the unscrupulous.
Some deadly serious conditions Furthermore, like multiple sclerosis or cancer,
can go into remission for months or years at a
time for reasons that we don't fully understand. However, the
(43:00):
the healer will still be there front and center to
claim responsibility for yet again something that they didn't do.
And should the condition return, the healer is long gone.
You know, maybe they'll performatively pray for their victim. If
it comes up in conversation right on the way to
(43:20):
another grift. And I know maybe the language I'm using
is strong here, but if you are doing this to
people and you know that it does not work, then
you are a terrible person. These swindlers rely on what's
called subjective validation, the idea that because I feel this
(43:40):
is true, it is true, right, and my certitude is
of a higher priority and value than any objective evidence presented.
Speaker 5 (43:52):
And you know, it reminds me of what we're talking
about at the beginning of the show, the whole King's
Evil thing. But if that came back, I mean, it's
the king, you would never call that into question, right,
But it's the same situation where that particular malady I
can't remember the long form, but the King's Evil was
the kind of shorthand had a tendency to disappear on
(44:13):
its own, or at the very least some of the
symptoms would go into remission. So this is a much
more specific grift than that, even but kind of relying
on the same principle, right.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, yeah, And the process has been ironed out so
that it can work even if you are at royalty.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Think about it.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
The people are self selecting right for a hopeful positive outcome.
That means they're pre selected to validate what they're told
is happening. Additionally, unlike a medical appointment, there's not going to.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Be a follow up.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
They're not going to check back in on you after
they blow through town. That makes it easier to sweep
victims under the rug. And, of course, as horrific and
inhuman as this is, if there is an obvious failure
that you can't you know, sideline, or you can't sort
of negate or diminish, then you, as a faith healer,
(45:14):
have one super mooved. You can just imply that the
victim didn't have enough faith or they didn't follow the
procedure you set forth for them.
Speaker 5 (45:22):
Which is extra punishingly awful because these people all they
have is their belief. They're they're they're they're entering into
this agreement based on their belief. Uh, and then you're
taking advantage of that, and then when it doesn't work,
you're calling their whole like basis for existing into question.
(45:43):
Can you imagine if if you believe your cancer was
healed by a faith healer because of the power of
God and your faith in God and this individual and
then it didn't work and you were told, well, I
guess you don't believe in God enough.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Well, there's there is that, and that's often.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
That's mind boggling.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
But there's also an internal logic to some spirituality, and
a lot of it is based on a belief in
destiny or you know, predetermination or a version of you know, God.
Whatever entity has a plan or a map, and we
(46:25):
are just following along on this map and this timeline
and this story and our time when it is our
time is our time, right. So if this faith healing
didn't work and the person still passed away, it was
just God's plan or it was when that person was
supposed to go. And it doesn't matter if they were
(46:45):
going to be healed or if the healing would have worked,
it's what God intended. So I mean there all of
that kind of works with each other to set the
person up that I think we're pretty clearly labeling a
swindler here to win.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, it's a win win situation. I would also add
to that thread of conversation that the interesting part of
that argument is that it means free will at the
best takes a very far back seat in the bust
of existence, and therefore it would be useless for us
(47:23):
to record this episode. But we have to do it
because we're not choosing to do so. And the illusion
of choice is you know, it's a big thing in
stage magic and all kinds of scams. But you're right,
it's the game is rigged for again these unethical faith healers,
who I would say are not faith healers because they
don't believe in what they're doing. These people are setting
(47:46):
up this win win. Anything bad that happens is not
the healer's fault. If for some reason anything good happens,
for like due to any variable, then the con artists
can take every bit of the credit. And then, of course,
if they're super good at their job, they'll make sure
(48:06):
to pay a little lip service to a divine being
that they probably don't believe in, just because that keeps
the show going. You know, it's kind of a Kfei
sort of thing. But this isn't to say that there
is not science a play. Patients will feel better, the
endorphins are churning. This leads to the physiological stuff we
outlined earlier. It can be a genuine, albeit temporary respite
(48:31):
and I think we have to just spend a little
bit of time on this. We're being hard on the
bad actors here, right, We're being hard on the grifters
and the criminals, But we are by no means saying
that all faith healers are bad or cynical parasites or
credit thieves. In fact, many faith healers are practicing in
(48:54):
well good faith.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
It's true.
Speaker 4 (48:57):
There are undoubtedly people out there right now, maybe you listening,
who truly believe that what they're doing is helping someone.
If they are a faith healer, if they're someone who
does lay on hands, no matter what the spirituality and
belief of that person and the people that they're administering
(49:18):
it to, and they believe that, or they at least
truly want to believe that, because they want to help somebody,
and they have the faith and belief in that, you know,
in their abilities and the abilities of whatever deity to
apply that. So, you know, given what we know about
(49:38):
the placebo effect, what we've discussed on this episode in
previous ones, depending on the perception of the person that
the faith healing is being administered to the patient, it
seems like this practice laying on hands could actually genuinely,
provably trigger those positive psychological changes in that person. And
(50:03):
again that's why I bring up something like reiki, where
even if it's over a camera, someone like pulling your
energy out right, having that time and the belief that
it's working, it could do something to your brain. It does, well,
it could thirty percent of the time, right or more.
Speaker 5 (50:23):
In general, though, I mean, like with this whole quarantine situation,
I think people are almost downplaying the mental health aspects
of what this is doing to people not having human touch,
the ones that are so paranoid about getting sick because
maybe they have autoimmune issues or.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
What have you, or they're older.
Speaker 5 (50:43):
It's really difficult to overstate how important human contact and
human touch is for just human beings in general. We're
not designed to be isolated in this way. And who
knows if just the power of having some physically touch
you in a way that has a meaning imparted behind it, right,
(51:04):
that is powerful in and of itself, and it's enough
to turn some screws in your brain that could then
turn some screws in your body. And maybe it's not
actually curing the thing, but it sure as hell can
make you feel better. You know, there's even this idea
of self soothing where if you're going through anxiety, or
if you're experiencing physiological responses to anxiety, you can just
(51:27):
touch hold yourself, you know, like literally give yourself a
hug or stroke your arm if there's no one else around,
And that's got proven positive qualities as well, no substitute
for having somebody else do it though, right So, I
don't know. I think a lot of this is really
wrapped up in that how the power of touch, the
power of human interaction, I think is at the core
(51:49):
of all of this.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
And we know that regardless of whether or not you
consider yourself a skeptic, there is at least evidence, we've
at least built a case of how this stuff called
faith healing could impart psychological and physiological changes. It can
alleviate pain. Faith healing has a clear scientific path.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
To do that.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
But we have to remember alleviating a pain is not
the same thing as curing an ailment. And many, many
people who are with the with full sincerity practicing as
faith healers have you know, they're not trying to rip
people off, they're not trying to harm people. They may
(52:35):
in many cases be saying, hey, let's go through this
process together, and also let's do that in addition to
traditional medical care. You know what I mean, These things
aren't always at loggerheads, even though that would make for
you know, a more sensationalistic story. A lot of these
faith healers, again, not the con artists, the people who
(52:56):
really believe in what they're doing. They will say that
they are working with powers human beings do not readily understand,
and to a degree that is absolutely true from everything
we know about this process right now, however, it seems
that the power at hand, the prime mover here, is
(53:18):
science rather than something divine.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Agreed, but we can't prove that it's not something divine. No,
we can just.
Speaker 4 (53:27):
Prove that over the course of history, a lot of
people have abused the concept of having divinity or experiencing
divinity or channeling it.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Yeah, I mean, I like that point because we see
here the character of humanity writ large. We see some malevolence, right,
we see lack of ethics, but then we also see inspiration. Right.
We see people trying to help each other, which is
one of the most beautiful things this species can do.
And we know that we know as we always say
(54:02):
when we're addressing matters of faith, we're showing that faith
does have a scientific impact on individual human life. Like
another thing would another you know, pin to put in
this conspiracy board is the fact that strong faith in
something can help bolster the human immune system. Your body
(54:24):
seems to know when you believe in something. That's maybe
a very simplistic way to put it, but it holds true.
And we want to hear what you think. Have you
or someone you know experienced firsthand, I'll stop faith that
that appeared to work? Right? And do you believe this
(54:44):
can be explained through something like the placebo effect or
to your earlier point, know the power we feel the
way our bodies and our hormones and our intecrine systems
respond to human contact. What do you think about some
of the research here? Do you think that science maybe
should not attempt to explain faith healing? Should it exist separately?
Speaker 3 (55:08):
Well? Like should? Right? Is this something that I don't know? Man?
Speaker 5 (55:12):
Like it's one of those things where it's like, aren't
some things better left to the realm of the metaphysical
as opposed to trying to like explain them with science?
I don't know like, I think some things about religion
are wrapped up in the placebo effect. To me, in general,
they can make you feel better even if quote what
you're quote unquote believing in isn't provable. That's what faith is, right,
(55:37):
So I mean, like, do you do we want science
to explain whether there is or isn't a God? Doesn't
that kind of fly in the face of the whole
concept of faith.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
That's the whole point of science proving if there is
or is some invisible hand guiding everything.
Speaker 5 (55:54):
Then science is kind of a buzzkill sometimes, Like, I
don't know, I'm not a religious person. I'm not, but
I would consider myself a spiritual person and I don't
know that I need science to put that in a
box for me. You know, I don't know, like you
should to hear what listeners, what you folks think.
Speaker 1 (56:12):
And it also reminds me of Arthur C. Clark's famous quote,
any sufficiently advanced technology, well just insert science here, maybe
indistinguishable from magic. It also reminds me of anybody who
is interested in the intersection between technology and the divine.
If you have not read it yet and you have
a spare ten minutes sometime after you listen to this,
(56:33):
please check out the Nine Billion Names of God. It's
a short story. I won't spoil the ending, but it
is just Chef's kiss, top notch reading. And while you're
on the internet, let us know something about your take
on some of these questions we post. You can find
us all over the place except on a couple of
(56:57):
live journal it's just they got too popular. Want to
answer our emails?
Speaker 4 (57:01):
You guys, we got a message about Pinterest. We got educated.
Speaker 3 (57:05):
Are we being shamed? Are we being Pinterest? No?
Speaker 4 (57:07):
No, it's very kind actually about Hey, here's exactly what
pinterest is and what you use it for and how
I use it.
Speaker 1 (57:13):
And thanks for writing in on that one, because I
too remember the days when access to Pinterest was a
pretty exclusive thing that was sort of a digital velvet
rope around it.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
That's Catherine, by the way, Thanks Catherine.
Speaker 1 (57:26):
Thank you, Catherine. So you can find us at the
dive bars and gin joints of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
You can find us on Facebook and Twitter as conspiracy Stuff.
We're on Instagram as conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
If you wish.
Speaker 5 (57:42):
You can also finds as an individuals on social media.
I am on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown.
Speaker 4 (57:49):
I am at Matt Frederick Underscore, iHeart and special shout
out to all the ASM artists out there, thanks for
helping us all get to sleep easier and comforting us
in these lonely times with your virtual faith healing and
reiki sessions that I looked at for this episode.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
And of course special thanks to our fellow listeners who
write in every so often to say love your show.
It helps us fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (58:16):
That's all my favorites.
Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, you can find me Twitter at Ben Bolan HSW
what's the HSW for longtime listeners? You know you can
also find me on Instagram at Ben Bollan. But I
hate social media, you say, shaking your fist at the sky.
I have no faith that there's a salve for that.
I'm a phone call person. Well you are in luck.
Speaker 4 (58:39):
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. Leave us
a message exactly what you want to say, anything you
want to say, everything you can. You can have a
musical soundtrack, although we probably can't play that in the
background because we wouldn't be able to afford the rights.
Unless you're playing the music and it's your own original
score or and you send us a license agreement, it'll
(59:02):
get complicated public domain.
Speaker 5 (59:04):
That's cool shit, And you can just comment and now
or or whatever, play it on the.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Kazooe, or just use your voice.
Speaker 4 (59:09):
Whatever you want to do, give us a call. If
you don't want to do that, you can always give
us an old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (59:39):
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