Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Obsessed with Reality
about one in a million; you are roughly as likely to recover after
visiting Lourdes as you are to win the lottery, or to die in the crash
of a randomly selected regularly scheduled airplane flight -
including the one taking you to Lourdes.
The spontaneous remission rate of all cancers, lumped together,
is estimated to be something between one in ten thousand and one
in a hundred thousand. If no more than five per cent of those who
come to Lourdes were there to treat their cancers, there should
have been something between fifty and 500 'miraculous' cures of
cancer alone. Since only three of the attested sixty-five cures are
of cancer, the rate of spontaneous remission at Lourdes seems to
be lower than if the victims had just stayed at home. Of course, if
you're one of the sixty-five, it's going to be very hard to convince
you that your trip to Lourdes wasn't the cause of the remission of
your disease . . . Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Something similar
seems true of individual faith-healers.
After hearing much from his patients about alleged faithhealing,
a Minnesota physician named William Nolen spent a year
and a half trying to track down the most striking cases. Was there
clear medical evidence that the disease was really present before
the 'cure'? If so, had the disease actually disappeared after the
cure, or did we just have the healer's or the patient's say-so? He
uncovered many cases of fraud, including the first exposure in
America of 'psychic surgery'. But he found not one instance of
cure of any serious organic (non-psychogenic) disease. There were
no cases where gallstones or rheumatoid arthritis, say, were
cured, much less cancer or cardiovascular disease. When a child's
spleen is ruptured, Nolen noted, perform a simple surgical
operation and the child is completely better. But take that child to
a faith-healer and she's dead in a day. Dr Nolen's conclusion:
When [faith]-healers treat serious organic disease, they are
responsible for untold anguish and unhappiness . . . The
healers become killers.
Even a recent book advocating the efficacy of prayer in treating
disease (Larry Dossey, Healing Words) is troubled by the fact that
some diseases are more easily cured or mitigated than others. If
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