part0017

If something seems too good to be true, goes the old saying, it probably is. This applies to strangers who send you email offering you a percentage if you will help get hidden millions out of their country, it applies to get-rich-quick schemes, it applies to perpetual motion machines, and it applies in spades to miracles. The Indian skeptic Basava Premanand came up with the most cogent explanations of why debunking miracles matters: miracles, he said, are how religions and holy men sell themselves. The same is true of lesser folks like faith healers, self-styled psychics, and, dare we say it, business gurus .

Some of the most dogged opponents of deceptions of the faith healing kind are people of faith. Dr Peter May is a GP in Southampton and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England. As such, he is exceptionally well placed to investigate claims of miracle cures; in this investigation, he examined the 'healing' of Mrs Jean Neil by German healer Reinhard Bonnke. You can find video clips of Bonnke on YouTube. A copy of this report was sent to Mr Bonnke with a request to withdraw the video. As of April 2009, although other videos of Reinhard Bonnke are readily available online and accessible as YouTube clips, this one seems to be available only from a single German site. Appeared in V.5.

In the wake of my contribution to a debate book Signs, Wonders and Healing (Inter-Varsity Press, 1989), which some considered to be unduly skeptical, I invited readers of the Southampton Evangelical Alliance Quarterly Bulletin to submit claims to miraculous healing to me for investigation and comment. By far the most striking of the few responses received was a video recording of what was presented as the miraculous healing of Mrs Jean Neil at a meeting led by a German evangelist, Mr Reinhard Bonnke.

The video, which is entitled Something to Shout About – The Documentation of a Miracle, is being marketed internationally. It shows Mrs Neil attending the meeting in a wheelchair. Mr Bonnke laid his hands on her after which she stood and to the astonishment of the assembled crowd, ran round the auditorium and appeared completely healed of what she described as a spinal injury. The video went on to show a written report from an orthopaedic surgeon, and an interview with her GP, Dr Colin West, who is quoted on the video cover saying, 'Life is stranger than fiction'. Mr Bonnke concludes the video by claiming her healing is 'an outright miracle'.

People use the term 'miracle' in a variety of different ways. Everyday events such as childbirth are popularly called miracles and Christians commonly describe any dramatic answer to their prayers as miraculous. I prefer to use the word in a narrow sense in order to highlight the extraordinary character or the events attributed to Christ in the Gospels. They were immediate (or almost], complete, and lasting. Many were physical illnesses that remain incurable today (such as kypho-scoliosis, the 'withered' hand, congenital blindness). We are told they involved every kind of illness including the raising of the dead. In those miracles, the very nature of things was instantaneously changed. Water was changed into wine.

It is the sort of miracle where there is a change in the very nature of things that I have tried to find for twenty years – without success. That does not mean that God does not exist, or that he does not answer our prayers. If he does exist, it seems to imply that when he answers our prayers he normally respects the integrity of the created order he has set in being. He is not changing dogs into cats! That is not to say that he cannot heal secondary cancer, Down's syndrome, or a club foot, but it is to say that such a change in the very nature of things is not his normal way of working, and if I have not been able through wide enquiries over a long period to find one such example that withstands scrutiny, such healings must anyway be very rare indeed.

Mrs Jean Neil of Rugby, England was a truly hopeless case – spinal injury, angina pectoris, a hip out of joint and one leg two inches shorter than the other. She underwent 14 operations, spent 4 years in hospital, suffered 3 heart attacks, and was treated with traction and plaster jackets. Mrs Neil was confined to a wheelchair, used three respirators, applied heart patches and took 24 tablets daily. This was her situation throughout the course of 25 long years – until the 12th of March, 1988. Now she has a brand new story! (video cover, CfaN Productions)

Mrs Neil's address appears on a letter on the video, enabling her telephone number to be obtained. She was found to be entirely cooperative and forwarded copies of a number of medical letters and reports in her possession as well as numerous newspaper cuttings and a second video of a Central TV feature presented by Michelle Guinness. She also wrote to her doctor asking him to cooperate with my enquiry and release whatever information I should request. From the information she sent, a list of questions was compiled and sent to her GP. A further lengthy telephone interview was then conducted with Mrs Neil.

Mrs Neil could not have been more helpful or enthusiastic about what had happened to her. As implied by her two GPs, who both featured on video, her recovery had evidently been sudden, complete, and lasting. Eighteen months after her healing she appears to be in entirely good health and very active. She has recently travelled in Europe and Africa telling her story at meetings led by Mr Reinhard Bonnke. There would appear to be no immediately satisfying medical explanation as to what had happened to her. Her prayers have been answered in a remarkable way.

The fact that she is now well raises questions about the nature of the illnesses from which she had been suffering and of the 'miracle' which is said to have occurred .

Her problem is presented as having been predominantly a spinal injury originating in 1964 with a fracture to her coccyx (the little bones at the very base of the spine). However, she also suffered from a number of other conditions and claims to have been healed of seven diseases: a short leg, an out of joint hip, a spinal injury, heart disease, a hiatus hernia, bronchitis, and poor vision.

The orthopaedic report from Mr Eisenstein at Oswestry Hospital makes no reference to differences in her leg length. Legs are notoriously difficult to measure and it would probably require X-ray measurement to be sure of a discrepancy. There is no mention of such X-rays nor suggestion of a significant clinical problem with her legs in the reports I have been able to see.

Of the fourteen operations she had had, four were on her spine. The other operations included two Caesarean sections, an appendectomy, an operation for hammer toe and about four procedures on her elbows. She could not recall the others. The four years spent in hospital was an estimate of the total of all these procedures plus a number of medical admissions. Apparently she had ten admissions in about a year for chest infections and the appendectomy had been complicated by peritonitis.

The spinal operations included removal of her coccyx in the 1960s, removal of a prolapsed disc in 1973, a laminectomy in 1975, and a further disc removal in 1981. On the last two occasions adhesions were divided and nerve roots were wrapped in silastic. Since that time it seems that she walked with a stick until January 1987 when she again developed low-back pain which persisted until her healing fifteen months later, in March 1988.

It was mainly during that fifteen-month period that she made use of a wheelchair. According to her GP's referral letter to the orthopaedic surgeon, dated 23 September 1987, 'She remains in some pain, has to use two walking sticks to get around, or a wheelchair for longer distances.' In December 1987, Mr Eisenstein's report stated, 'Patient is ambulant on walking sticks approx. 20 yards and very slowly, otherwise uses wheelchair at home and for shopping.' It does not appear that she was at any stage confined to a wheelchair.

Of the 'twenty-four tablets' required daily, some were painkillers, two taken every six hours, that is, eight a day. They included at times sleeping tablets, drugs for angina, and anti-depressants. They were not twenty-four different medications .

The orthopaedic report of December 1987 itemizes her drug regime as follows, naming only two different tablets: Acupan 2 tablets 4 times daily (painkiller), Angina – on treatment (probably skin patch/mouth spray), Propranolol 1 twice daily (presumably for angina), Inhalers – for occasional bronchitis (i.e. asthma).

In September 1988, six months after her healing, she was reassessed by the orthopaedic surgeon. Two paragraphs of his three-paragraph report were shown on the video. The first paragraph was read aloud by the presenter and reported that, 'She has a full range of completely painless spinal movement'. The third paragraph, which was not shown, reads: 'X-rays have been repeated today and these confirm that there is absolutely no change from the X-rays taken prior to this evangelical healing.'

Clearly she had improved dramatically subjectively, but there was no objective evidence of any change in the condition of her spine.

Mrs Neil believes she has had three heart attacks – leaving her subsequently with angina. She describes having been on a number of anti-anginal therapies all of which were subsequently discontinued. Writing six months before her healing her GP stated that her chest pains 'after vigorous investigations were felt not to be cardiac in origin'.

Mrs Neil reports that about eight years ago she had an X-ray which showed her to have an hiatus hernia. This has not been repeated since. Acid reflux from her stomach into her gullet from such a hernia could well cause chest pain similar to angina. It may well have been aggravated by antiinflammatory painkillers for her back. Anyway, it appears not to be troubling her at the moment.

It seems as though no one has ever used the term 'asthma' to describe this problem to her, but the use of 'respirators' implies as much. She told me that when her chest was really bad 'and required ten admissions in a year' she was taking Propranolol for her 'angina'. A common side effect of this drug is bronchospasm (that is, asthma). It would seem probable from the information available that the treatment given for suspected angina (which she didn't actually have) caused her 'bronchitis' which settled when the treatment was withdrawn.

Apparently her vision deteriorated seriously while she was taking another anti-anginal drug, Nifedipine. If this is true, it is a highly unusual side effect and is not listed a potential problem on the drug's data sheet. It appears that her vision subsequently improved dramatically after she discontinued the drug, but she does continue to need spectacles.

In the light of this information, the claims made on the video – and not least in the paragraph quoted above from the video cover – seem to be seriously incorrect and misleading. To clarify the situation and gain fuller information, I compiled my list of eighteen questions which I sent to her doctor, Colin West. He replied:

I have given the matter considerable thought. Whilst I have some sympathy with your aims, I cannot convince myself that to answer your questions would be in the best interests of my patient at this time. I regret that this may appear unhelpful and seem as though I am dodging the issue.

The case of Mrs Neil illustrates many of the problems that are uncovered in the search for truth in claims of miraculous healing. On the one hand it is difficult to deny the amazing improvement in her sense of well-being and enjoyment of life. Clearly she is only too aware of how much better she feels but is not in a good position either to understand the pathological details of her condition or the nature of her healing. Neither is she likely to be conversant with the difficulties involved in trying to define a miracle. Like the blind man of John's Gospel, the one thing she knows is that once she was disabled, now she is not. Given the complexity of her symptoms, the nature of her disability was not easy to evaluate even by experienced medical observers. This is nearly always the case with back pain in particular. Most medical practitioners usually refrain from using precise diagnostic labels in these conditions.

In Mrs Neil's case, the uncertainties surrounding her back pain were compounded by other conditions of which no less than four (nos. 4-7) may have been wholly or in part iatrogenic, that is, caused by treatment.

Both video interviews with her general practitioners are striking for the non-committal guardedness of the doctors' answers. For various reasons, they were being very careful as to what they said. The last thing they would have wanted would been to upset Mrs Neil's new-found health.

The other major complication has been the interpretation of her medical condition by non-medical personnel who were interested in making and marketing the video tape. Some of their statements may well have resulted from innocent confusion or unwary enthusiasm. Certainly their zeal exceeded their wisdom and they did not adequately check the details of her story.

However, more ominously, the video cover allows the reader to conclude that the four years in hospital and fourteen operations were due to an interrelated disease process (for example, 'she was a hopeless case'). Furthermore, they knew from the report that they videoed that no change had occurred in her X-rays. To state that she was confined to a wheelchair 'throughout the course of 25 years' is difficult to excuse.

A further complication is the refusal of her doctor to answer the many questions that her case raises. His decision here must be respected, for it may well not be in his patient's best interests to be as open with her details as she had requested. For instance, to what extent did depression play a part in her illness? Dr Shamian concluded significantly on the Central Television interview that, 'The most striking thing is in her mental state ... She was miserable and introverted. Now she is happy and outgoing.'

It should be a matter of concern to consider how her healing is perceived by other sick people, not least the many invalids with organic disease who were present at the healing meeting. The video for instance showed deaf people who were watching sign language. Others less obviously may have attended because they were suffering from secondary cancer. They must be very confused as to why God healed something that seemed as physical as an injured spine but did not heal their physical disease. Some must be wondering why it is always like that! Is it something in the nature of God that causes him to be concerned about short legs and back pain while seeming to ignore the blind, the deaf, the paralysed and the dead. Did they not have enough faith? And why do the Gospels record Jesus healing exactly such conditions as those which never seem to be healed today ?

Imagine this: someone who looks like an Indian guru, presents mysteries like Agatha Christie, and then debunks and demonstrates them like a magician ... say, James Randi. That is Basava Premanand , the convenor of the Indian skeptics and an extraordinary and tireless fighter against the deceptions practised by Indian 'godmen'. Lewis Jones , a London-based freelance writer and editor, went to see him perform at Conway Hall in March 1992. Appeared in VI.3.

Three hundred and fifty people came to see miracles. They were not disappointed.

The performer was everyone's idea of a bearded Indian guru. He ate glass, ran flaming torches along his bare arms, handled lighted camphor freely and put it into his mouth, hung a weight on a hook stitched through his skin, shoved a nasty-looking spike through his tongue without harm or any bleeding, caused pieces of paper to burst into flame by the power of thought, changed a single biscuit into a pile of dozens of them, produced enough holy ash out of thin air to be able to deliver some to a great many people in the audience, showed spoons that bent and broke at a touch, and, of course, turned water into wine.

And that would have been enough for any self-respecting guru. But this was no guru. This was Premanand, whose mission was not only to demonstrate miracles, but to explain how they were all done. And this he did, to the further amazement and amusement of his audience.

There was a time in his youth when Premanand was highly impressed by the miraculous feats of those of his fellow-countrymen that he calls 'godmen'. He was willing to learn from them, and he spent a great deal of time and effort trying to acquire their magical powers, but doubts began to creep in. The yogis were forever telling other people how to achieve good health (not to mention immortality). So how come a number of the godmen had cancer, rheumatic complaints, liver complaints, tuberculosis, asthma, diabetes ...?

One yogi's reply to Premanand's query was 'I could achieve health, but I am consciously atoning for sins in a past life.' But it was soon obvious that a critical frame of mind was not welcome. The yogi Sivananda's response to Premanand's probing was 'No questioning! Get out!'

The young Premanand's skepticism took a practical turn. One godman was regularly brought out and put on a show while apparently possessed. Premanand wondered if gods ever went to the toilet. So he laced the godman's bottles of country liquor with Epsom salts. In mid-performance the mystic called out for a wooden barrel. He sat on the barrel and evacuated into it while his head and body continued to sway. A disappointingly human response. It was soon clear that every one of the godmen's miracles was merely a trick, and since 1976 Premanand has been mercilessly exposing their methods.

To be allowed to infiltrate the inner circles of the godmen has sometimes required large expenditures of money, and Premanand himself is a man of modest means. He had to find 2 million rupees (about £65,000) in order to worm his way close to his bête noire – the highly influential Satya Sai Baba. To do this, he had to give away 90 acres of fertile land.

Premanand became particularly incensed that poor people were being tricked into handing over sizeable amounts of their hard-earned money for worthless remedies and advice. 'Religion', he says, 'is a means to exploit people who believe in god.' Even more ominously, Sai Baba 'has followers amongst bureaucracy, law enforcement departments, revenue departments, the judiciary, the state and central ministry, and among the elite and the influential'.

Premanand toured the villages and small towns of India in a jeep, and deliberately set off the car's alarm when he stopped at the roadside. He treated the crowd of onlookers to a miracle show in the manner of a godman, and then set about exposing the trickery, if the claims of the godmen are false,' he says, 'then godmen should be prosecuted for cheating the credulous public in order to exploit them. Or, if they are true, the education department should stop teaching the theory of conservation of energy and relativity to the students.' Right now, Premanand is gunning for Sai Baba in particular, and is proceeding with legal action against him.

Premanand has given over 7,000 lectures, 'educating our people in the scientific temper'. And by now he has met about 20 million people, and visited twenty-seven countries. Twenty-five days of every month are spent travelling, and he has written thirty books in Malayalam and six in English.

In 1989, he was awarded a fellowship by the Director of the Communication Department of India's Council for Science and Technology. His brief is to complete a video library of 1,200 miracles, to write books, and to train a thousand people to tour 50,000 villages.

'They will explain the science and tricks behind miracles, superstitions, and blind beliefs, so that exploitations in the name of gods and miracles are stopped.' He is now close to fulfilling a dream of 40 years: the building of a research centre with a library where explanations of religion, magic, science, miracles, and psychic phenomena are available to everyone. This is to be on a 15-acre site in Kerala, at a spot that the poet Rabindranath Tagore named 'Shrishaila'.

Premanand has not achieved all this without attempts on his life. He has been physically attacked by the godmen's followers. He has been hospitalized, his car has been tampered with so that it overturned at speed, and a lorry has tried to run him down. None of these things has dampened the energy of this remarkable 62 year old: he is Convener of the Indian Rationalist Association, and since 1976 he has been Convener of the Indian Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

In 1988 he began publishing Indian Skeptic (www.indiansceptic.in), and it still comes out every month. It's a magazine that goes in for plain speaking. Premanand led the August 1991 issue with an article strongly critical of Uri Geller. And to make sure the message reached its target, he sent a copy of the magazine to Geller, by registered post.

Each issue includes the methods for performing a number of miracles – and there are 1,200 of these to get through. Talking of miracles – everyone who was in that Conway Hall audience can now perform the feats that at first seemed impossible. And so could you. If you want to run a flame along your arm, just keep the flame moving: you'd need to apply it to one spot continuously for about three seconds before you got burnt. A piece of glass just needs chewing into very small pieces before you swallow it: after that, it will pass through you without harm. But make sure you use glass from a clear light bulb: opaque bulbs contain toxic mercury.

Create psychic fire with ingredients from your local chemist's shop. Beforehand, secretly add a little potassium permanganate to some pieces of paper on a plate. In performance, pour on a little glycerine (call it melted butter), and wave your hands impressively. Within seconds, the paper will smoke and then burst into flame. For holy ash, begin with a pellet of anything that will crumble into a powder. (In India, cow-dung works wonders.) Hide the little pellet between your fingers, and when you're ready for the miracle, start crumbling. The supply of 'ash' can seem endless.

Some of the other items require simple gimmicked apparatus. The spike doesn't really go through the tongue: there's a little U-bend in the middle that fits around the tongue. But it looks alarmingly realistic.

Is there anything else Premanand would like to accomplish in his lifetime? 'Oh yes,' he told me. 'To see a real miracle before I die.'

But I can't convey in print the twinkle in the eye, or the blossoming grin. It was like so many of Premanand's performances. You had to be there .

We began this book with an account of investigating psychics from Richard Wiseman , professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and one of the youngest-ever members of the Magic Circle. We conclude with another of his investigations, this time of a rather more dangerous arid unscrupulous group. What harm can belief in psychics do? Read on. Appeared in IX. 1.

A few weeks ago I was invited to see a demonstration of psychic surgery. I didn't expect to see anything new or exciting. I thought perhaps the surgeon would pretend to make some cuts on the patient's stomach, pretend to remove some diseased tissue, and then cause the wound to 'miraculously' recover. I was totally unprepared for the scenes that I encountered.

I arrived a few moments before the scheduled start of the demonstration and met up with Tim Haigh (editor of Psychic News). Tim was covering the event for his newspaper and we both sat at the back of the crowded room. The surgeon's helpers asked individuals who wished to be treated to make themselves known. About 30 people raised their hands. They were given small slips of paper and noted down details of their illness. Then the service began. A preacher sat at the front of the room and started to talk about his spiritual philosophy. After a few moments the surgeon's helpers selected the first 'patient' and led them into a back room. Tim and I were eager to know exactly what was happening there and so told one of the helpers that we were covering the story for Psychic News and were allowed into the room.

The surgeon was a young man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a white shirt and jeans. He was standing by a large couch holding a tray of surgical instruments (including scalpels, syringes, needles, and scissors). A patient was shown into the room and asked to sit on a chair next to the couch. The surgeon picked up the syringe and started to prod its needle into the back of the patient's neck. A few moments later spots of blood started to appear. The surgeon placed a piece of cotton wool over the wounds, secured it with surgical tape and asked the patient to lie on the couch. He picked up a scalpel and made an incision into her abdomen. It was a shallow but real cut. The surgeon picked up some scissors and rammed them into the wound. Blood emerged from the cut. The scissors were removed and the surgeon pushed the two sides of the cut tightly together, secured some cotton wool over it and sent the patient to the post-operation area – a duvet spread out in one corner of the room.

I saw about five of these 'operations' and they all followed roughly the same pattern. More importantly, I saw no evidence of the surgeon washing his hands or instruments between patients and I was horrified at the obvious risk of the surgeon transmitting blood disorders from one patient to another. That night the surgeon operated on approximately fifteen people. The following night Tim returned and saw him carry out more operations – only this time the medical dangers were greatly increased because several of the patients were HIV positive.

All of this may sound as if it's another story of psychic surgery from the Far East or South America. It isn't. These events took place in a function room of a London public library. Worse still, this is not the only negative report to emerge from the British psychic world in the last few months.

A few weeks ago a young man went to a medium for a reading. The medium stated that the man would be dead before he was 28. The young man returned home and hanged himself. The coroner's report noted that the man had left notes describing how he saw his death as inevitable and thought there was little point in waiting for it to happen.

Recently, a Scottish newspaper exposed two psychics who were conning hundreds of pounds out of their clients using a classic mediumistic scam. The mediums told their client that 'bad spirits' were following them and that they would have no luck in business or their personal lives. In return for a large amount of money the psychics offered to make these spirits leave the person's life.

Only a couple of days ago I was contacted by a young woman who had been desperate to get her boyfriend back after he had finished their relationship. She went to a local psychic who told her that the spirits could bring them back together, but it would cost her £400. The woman paid most of her savings to the medium. The spirits failed to get her boyfriend to come back and the medium suggested that she pay another £400 for a second attempt.

It is difficult to know the extent of the problem, in part, because many people may not go to the police after being the victim of a psychic scam because they feel ashamed and stupid. What is more certain is that while some psychics represent a harmless form of entertainment or act as benign counsellors, others knowingly hurt and con vulnerable clients.

Perhaps most worrying of all, there are no official bodies that deal specifically with these problems and it often falls to individuals to pick up the pieces and try to prevent further incidents. The psychic surgeon had operated on about 40 patients before the alarm was raised. The library was contacted and told about the operations. They quickly cancelled the remainder of the scheduled meetings. The police also received an anonymous phone call from one of the patients who claimed that the surgeon had operated without her consent. Unfortunately, the surgeon left the country before legal proceedings could be instigated against him.