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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
A friend of mine, Frank the Magician, performed psychic surgery. And it was fairly grotesque, with blood and tumors flying all over the place. Of course, it was fake, just as the real psychic surgery (mainly in the Philippines) is fake. Evidently, Frank was trying to show people that psychic surgery is a big scam.
Psychic surgeons, in the Philippines, charge big bucks for no cure whatsoever. They are stealing money. But, they give cancer patients some peace of mind. People come away feeling healthier. Sound good? The patients were going to die, anyway? So, why shouldn't some scummy con artist get rich off them and their families? See what I'm getting at? It's wrong.
Besides, some of the patients don't even have cancer. Many have cancer, but would benefit from normal medical methods, maybe living many productive years.
The blood is often chicken blood, or some other kind of blood. The tumors are not tumors, but chicken livers, or blood-soaked cotton, or something else. Any magician can hide these things until he pretends to remove them from the patient's body. The "surgeon's" hands do not enter the patient's body, that's just a simple, but impressive, trick.
Psychic surgeons are the scum of the earth. They don't care if you (or your loved ones) die, as long as they can cheat you out of your money.
Addendum:
Normal medical procedures, to treat cancer, can be very unpleasant. I understand that chemotherapy is hell. Cancer still brings up the image of certain death. You are going to go through hell, and then die anyway? Well, in many cases, it is not certain death. Cancer treatment now often brings many years, decades, of health and productive life.
I received email saying that psychic surgery is not the bloody mess that is described above. Well, sometimes it is; sometimes it isn't. It is a matter of style. The above article is fairly harsh, with good reason. Psychic surgeons perform slight of hand to steal lots of money from people who think they are dying (many of them are dying). A psychic surgeon says that he/she is passing his/her hand into your body, through the skin, without making a wound. No. That is an easily done magic trick. He pulls out tumors? No. That is slight of hand. That was not a tumor. Get it examined in a lab, for God's sake. They give hope to the hopeless. Yes, by encouraging them to not seek medical attention, and by stealing their money with simple magic tricks. They are no better than murderers.
Or they are murderers. I received two emails saying that while most psychic surgeons are frauds, there are a few real psychic surgeons. This sounds like wishful thinking to me. How can you identify the real psychic surgeons? What do they do differently? These two people, who sent me the email, did not answer these questions. Let me answer them myself. A "real" psychic surgeons seems to push his/her hands into the patient's body without breaking the skin, a trick easily accomplished by stage magician trickery. Everything the "real" psychic surgeon does is indistinguishable from what the fakes and stage magicians do. In my opinion, there are no real psychic surgeons, they are frauds, thieves, and murderers.
See Why Bogus Therapies Often Seem to Work by Barry L. Beyerstein, Ph.D.