Psychic surgery

An alleged psychic surgeon at work

Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific medical fraud in which practitioners create the illusion of performing surgery with their bare hands and use sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that diseased lesions have been removed and that the incision has spontaneously healed.[1][2][3]

The US Federal Trade Commission describes psychic surgery as a "total hoax".[2] Psychic surgery may cause needless death by keeping the ill away from life-saving medical care.[3] Medical professionals and skeptics classify it as sleight of hand and any positive results as a placebo effect.[4][5][6][7]

Psychic surgery first appeared in the Spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the middle of the 20th century; it has taken different paths in those two countries.[8]

  1. ^ "FTC Decision, Volume 86, July–December 1975" (PDF). Retrieved 2017-08-11.
  2. ^ a b "F.T.C. Curtails the Promotion Of All Psychic Surgery Tours". The New York Times. 1975-10-25. Retrieved 2007-08-19.
  3. ^ a b American Cancer Society (1990). "Unproven methods of cancer management: "Psychic surgery"". CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 40 (3): 184–8. doi:10.3322/canjclin.40.3.184. PMID 2110023. S2CID 7523589.
  4. ^ Randi, James (1989). The Faith Healers. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-0-87975-535-5.
  5. ^ David Vernon in Skeptical - a Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, ed Donald Laycock, David Vernon, Colin Groves, Simon Brown, Imagecraft, Canberra, 1989, ISBN 0-7316-5794-2, p47
  6. ^ Evan, Dylan (2003). Placebo. Mind over matter in modern medicine. Great Britain: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-00-712613-2.
  7. ^ Brody, Howard M.D. PhD (2000). The Placebo response. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-06-019493-2.
  8. ^ Hines, Terence. (1988). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence. Prometheus Books. p. 245. ISBN 0-87975-419-2

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