John of God

I have always had a fascination with religious healers. PrimeTime Live on ABC is doing a show on a Brazilian "healer" tonight.

They come in the thousands. The sick, the lame, the 'incurable' and the medically discarded, to a small town in central Brazil. They endure long international flights and for some long bus trips to Abadiania, high on the plateaux of Central Brazil. They come to be cured by the miracle healer, Joao Teixeira de Faria ... the man they call John of God.

He will scrape away cataracts and eye tumours with a knife, remove breast cancers with a small incision and cause the crippled to walk with just the touch of his hand. In a meditation room a ceiling high stack of discarded crutches, wheelchairs and braces pays silent testimony to his success. He is acclaimed as the greatest healer of the past 2,000 years.

Read the entire article here:

John of God

UPDATE - 2/12/05 - OK, I watched the show and what do I think? I think something unusual is going on in Brazil. Is it really possible that one man, who is not a doctor can perform 1000s of operations a week? Without anesthesia? With the patient feeling no pain? It sure looks as if that is what John of God is doing.

ABC did not make him out to be a quack. Nor could their doctor expert give any medical reason for the improvements seen in a few of the people followed by Primetime Live. One man even had an aggressively growing brain tumor shrink to almost nothing after visiting John of God. I don't know what exactly is happening in Brazil, but it looked to me that for some people, visiting John of God made them better.