I’ve watched the first two episodes of the BBC2 series “Trust Me, I’m A Healer” over the last fortnight. It’s based on the premise that lots of people are going to healers when they used to rely on conventional medicines. Why is this and what phenomena are at work when this healing happens?
The format is that each week the filmmaker spends time with a different healer – last week a guy who believed in water spirits, fairies and the power of dragon eggs, this week a man who is a psychic surgeon (above). Each made (or their patients made on their behalf) fairly extraordinary claims – to have cured people of cancer, to have removed or reduced tumors, etc. The psychic healer this week only charged £25 for up to 30 minutes – relatively cheap in comparison to some of the stuff we’ve seen at MindBodySpirit fairs over the last few years. His wife in particular was really clear with people that miracles cannot be done on command, and there are no guarantees (particularly when someone is proposing to travel from Turkey to be cured of blindness). But he still apparently managed to see up to 100 people a day – £2500 isn’t bad for a day’s work. And one of his associates in Slovenia said that he was “the Christ consciousness in human form”…
In both programmes there were things going on that the filmmaker said he couldn’t explain, although each time he started off skeptically and continued to critically question the process, methods, etc throughout.
For me, one of the most telling things was that the people who went to them were literally at the end of their road – having been given no reason to hope by anyone else, least of all the medical profession. In that sense, many of them needed the hope that the healer seemed to give, and thus had no choice but to (want to) believe.
I’d encourage you to look out for next week’s show (BBC2, Monday, 10pm) – it’s about a man who says his body is frequently taken over by St Paul…
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