The “healer” mutters prayers, flutters his hands over the patient’s belly, then rubs his fingers close to her navel. A stream of what looks like blood shoots out from between his fingers. After a few more finger wiggles, he appears to pull several bloody cocktail shrimp out of an invisible incision. The patient is healed. Of something.
Welcome to “psychic surgery.”
Documentarian of the uncanny, Brad Abrahams, takes our correspondent seat this week to explain how Shirley MacLaine, Burt Lancaster, Andy Kaufman, Charlie Mingus, and tens of thousands of Americans got drawn into the morbid healing craze that kicked off in the 1970s, and which may have seen its last hurrah with the imprisonment of Brazil’s John of God.
Centuries of colonization in Brazil and the Philippines, Brad explains, made conventional medical care basically unavailable for anyone poor or outside of major cities. This left a void for traditional and alternative healing to fill as the only real options, as well as provide a connection to a cultural identity that had been systematically repressed. And of course, charlatans rode the wave.
Brad brings his characteristic curiosity, empathy, and cultural competence, holding the door open for us to imagine why this abject form of medical and spiritual fraud speaks so deeply to so many.
Show Notes
Brad Abrahams
Love And Saucers — Brad Abrahams
Do you see what I see? | Short Doc about Controversial Conspiracy Theorist Artist David Dees — Brad Abrahams
72: John of Fraud (w/Lisa Braun Dubbels & Mirna Wabi-Sabi) — Conspirituality
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So, Angel's Presence was starting to drive a wedge between factions at Willy World.
Oh, here we go!
That's a great sentence!
That's the cold open right there.
Angel's Presence was starting to drive a wedge between factions at Willy World.
Cartwright, the author, says, Those who had faith stopped talking to those who did not.
The believers thought that the non-believers were infidels, and the non-believers looked on the believers as kooks.
After a while, no one dared mention the subject of psychic surgery.
Hello everyone!
Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, we can add to that tagline, sometimes we host correspondents who cut open the body politic to pull out the tumors of modern poisons or religious belief.
I'm Matthew Remske.
I'm Julian Walker.
And I'm Brad Abrahams.
Yay, Brad!
Welcome!
We are on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
In 2001, I was sitting in the common room of Endeavor Academy.
This is one of the cults I was in in my wayward youth.
And we were gathered to watch a grainy VHS video that Diana, one of the cult's main lieutenants, had brought back from her visit with John of God, a Brazilian spiritualist channeler who practiced something called psychic surgery.
But it wasn't psychic, though.
It was goofy.
It was gruesome.
Diane lay face up on a hospital bed in a New York hotel room with her t-shirt pulled up to reveal her midriff and John, muttering in Portuguese, Fluttered his hands over her belly and then started to rub his fingers close to her navel, steadily applying more pressure, and suddenly there was a stream of what looked like blood shooting out from between his fingers, and everyone on the tape and in the common room watching it on the tape gasped.
But Diana lay serenely on the bed and then as she's watching the replay, she has equal serenity.
So there was like some consistency there.
And so John gives a few more finger wiggles and then he appears to pull several large bloody like cocktail shrimp out of what appeared to be in an incision which immediately closed up afterwards.
So Diana had been healed of something.
So Brad Abrahams is here to tell us what the fuck was going on with that.
And also he's here to break some news that Kate Middleton has been missing for months because she underwent a similar surgery in an undisclosed location, but the results were very mixed.
So she's currently recovering with homeopathy along with Charles.
We should just leave them alone.
Welcome, Brad.
Thanks for coming.
Oh, of course.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I've been a big fan and just been waiting for the opportunity to join you.
Well, it's a fantastic topic, and, you know, I just wanted to say that we've really enjoyed your work on QAA.
But through that, I've become a real fan of your documentary approach, because this is an age in which a lot of interesting, odd people are exploited on film, and you just don't do that.
And I'm going to encourage our listeners to check out your film Love and Saucers.
It's about a guy named David Huggins, who you interviewed for a really It's been a really long time about his, like, imagined or hallucinatory but very meaningful experience of alien abduction and seduction, in which he winds up believing he has fathered a hundred or more hybrid children with this stupendously beautiful humanoid alien called Crescent.
So he was doing the seducing, it sounds like.
No, no, she actually seduced him.
Because he apparently lost his virginity.
To her.
Yes, in what how he described is not the most consensual situation, though reflecting back on it, he said he had a good time.
Got it.
Well, the story you're going to tell us today starts with a short documentary piece in a similar vein that you did about David Dees.
And he's a conspiracy theory illustrator who suffered from heavy metal poisoning, and he sought out psychic surgery.
But I just want to say that Like, you really seek out people who live in this space between the worlds of imagination and reality, you know, pronoia and paranoia, spiritual ecstasy, political cynicism, but you let them tell their stories in empathetic ways.
So, we end up walking right up to the line of credulity with your reporting, but we never quite cross over, or at least we're left to assess the credibility and feeling on our own, and that means we can really shoulder the the human burden of coming to either reject
or accept what the subject has to say.
So, you really let them speak for themselves.
And I wonder, how did you develop this style and ethics, and why do you think it's important?
Right, so, it's kind of, uh, it's been a parallel development.
So, I've always just been interested in these fringe subjects, either from, you know,
intellectual curiosity or, you know, You know, it's just fun.
It's fun to.
Leave just a little bit of the door cracked open for, you know, what if, what if, you know, parapsychology, there's something to it?
Or what if people have been abducted by aliens?
And so I'm still sort of really interested in that and try to keep an open mind in that.
But it is a very small crack, as I've, I've mentioned.
And what has always fascinated me more, though, at the same time is the nature of the belief of true believers to To sort of devote their life to the pursuit or the subject regardless of the consequences in their personal life.
And it often means loss of family and friends and job, etc.
But there's still something that is driving them with complete, you know, blinders on to pursue this.
And so I think that By treating them sort of with respect and with empathy, we can more effectively get at the nature of that belief and to understand it.
And if we can understand it, we can then talk to these people.
And I think the more you talk with them and the more they get to talk with someone outside of the belief system, they can see another world in another, perhaps, way out of that.
Yeah.
I think that's really beautiful and it strikes me too that in that process one may come to perhaps understand what are some of the needs that are being served by this false belief that people might be compelled to imperil everything in their life because they're so invested in it.
What's that really about and might there be some other ways for that to be addressed that potentially could be healing and balancing?
Yeah, and I think there's... I don't want to sort of lump everyone into the same silo, because there are less harmful beliefs.
Like, I think David and his experiences, I don't think that that's very harmful for him to, you know, talk about that and share what those were.
And in reality, he's a happy guy.
And, you know, where he is in his life right now, he's being adulated by fans.
And then on the flip side, you have David Dees, You know, him sharing his art is obviously a bit more destructive, and he was, before his death, completely isolated.
Didn't really have anyone in the outside world that he was talking to, and sort of got further radicalized because of that.
It's a great juxtaposition, actually, because the thing that is consistent in the work is the creation of this really parallel world that you enter into as a viewer that nobody else really inhabits.
But you're right that, you know, Huggins is able to reach out or to connect with people at the end of things, but Dees really isn't.
Right.
Okay, so you're telling us about psychic surgery.
Yes, yes.
So, in the simpler days before the pandemic, I was filming that short documentary about David Dees, who, for people that don't know, he's most known as a conspiracy collagist.
But back in the 90s, before he devoted his days to researching conspiracies and making collages about them, he was actually a highly successful airbrush artist in Hollywood.
Yeah, and he started, he was illustrating for Sesame Street and Disney, and he did illustrations for The Little Mermaid and Hanna-Barbera, where he worked on the Flintstones, right?
Yes, it was all very wholesome stuff.
And even, you know, in his bathroom at home, he's got his original art for, you know, The Count and Oscar the Grouch and stuff.
And he, in the film, he says, you know, mothers would sort of stop him in the street and be like, oh, my, you know, my daughter loves your work.
So then he gets pilled on 9-11 conspiracy theories, especially about why the Boeing that crashed into the Pentagon didn't seem to leave any wreckage behind, according to the video he had access to, at least.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
And that's, you know, time and time again, 9-11 seems to be back then what the pandemic was now to tripping people to fall into these rabbit holes.
And that was actually the best piece of conspiracy media that was created at that time, was that video about the Pentagon.
I mean, I remember watching that many, many times going, wow, maybe there's something to this.
So, this short is only 12 minutes long, and you just spend the first four minutes establishing his life and rhythm, and then he's describing his artwork, and then you say, at what point in your art career did conspiracy theories start coming into your life?
And it's such a great, welcoming, receptive phrasing that, you know, it's the kind of question that allows him to emote with you.
Like several minutes later, you know, he's feeling his dead father in the room and he's crying.
It's very different from, you know, another approach which might be, so when did you become a conspiracy theorist?
And so, I think your phrasing allows him to have the sense that he is like one person who grew and changed.
He's not someone who fell off a cliff or lost his mind.
And so, then it also keeps him in his chair because you establish a kind of bond with him when you bring up his really misguided support of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, and then the anti-Semitic imagery in his work.
Like, he sits there and he takes those questions.
Yeah, and the approach was to, you know, make him not feel like he was being attacked.
As well, and yes, by linking it with his art, which is the most important thing to him, it doesn't put him, you know, take a step back.
He's still sort of engaging with me in a conversational way, right?
Right.
It's amazing.
So what I found out through this sort of line of questioning was that while he was airbrushing all of these years, he never wore a mask.
And, you know, as we know, and I think as they knew back then too, aerosolized paint is not good for you to inhale.
There's a lot of lead and a lot of cadmium.
And he basically poisoned himself through inhaling these aerosols over probably a decade or so.
And as he told me, the effects were profoundly debilitating for him.
He had nervous system damage, cognitive impairment, extreme fatigue.
He sought out conventional help, going to doctors, etc.
But he was no better after these treatments.
And for the most part, people just were saying, you know, it's psychosomatic.
We can't really help you.
Quick question that I'm curious about.
Did he stop He did.
Mostly just because he couldn't work.
He was so debilitated that he couldn't even airbrush or continue working for years.
So at this point, you know, modern medicine seemingly failing him, he was willing to try anyone.
And he heard through a friend about a bizarre-sounding healing modality that was out of the Philippines.
And he sort of dragged his sickly self all the way across the world just to be treated by a stranger named Alex Orbitow, who was renowned in this strange healing modality.
And the practice was unlike anything David had experienced with conventional medicine.
And here's a couple of pictures I've added in of a very young-looking David with the healer orbito.
He's being healed in a cave.
In one of the photos, he's getting his, you know, stomach basically entered by a pair of hands in another one.
And apparently just after one session that lasted only a few minutes, David said that he rapidly recovered and soon was cured of all of his symptoms.
So because of that, he later became an advocate for psychic surgery and Alex Orbito in particular.
He made repeat trips to the Philippines and he even underwent training himself and he has a little certificate to show that he's now been trained in psychic surgery.
Wow.
And so, although I'd heard of psychic surgery before chatting with Deez, but I never had sort of looked into it.
You know, I'd seen like clips of it and I just thought this is kind of a silly thing.
But after hearing him talk about it, I became interested again.
So, let's just plunge our unwashed hands through the fleshy epidermis and reach into the guts of the topic at hand.
Look out for the cocktail shrimp.
What if there was a definitive cure for your own or a loved one's chronic illness?
One that didn't involve the alienating environs of a hospital, the trauma and danger of some operations, the unwanted side effects of medication you're on for life, or bankrupting medical costs?
The perennial dream.
There appears to be an answer, and it's a miraculous one, called psychic surgery.
The phenomenon first emerged in parallel in both Philippines and Brazil in the 1940s and 50s.
It was born out of the strange three-way marriage of forced colonial Catholicism, New Age spiritualism, and traditional Filipino shamanism.
Here's the gist.
A patient will come to one of these practitioners with any kind of ailment, from back pain to cancerous tumors to depression to spirit possession.
After disrobing and lying down, the surgeon, without any surgical tools, sterilization, or anesthetic, will begin to press their fingers and ply on the patient's flesh.
All at once, the surgeon's hands will push through the flesh and into the body, with a cascade of blood flowing from the opening.
Here's a couple photos of someone working on a woman's neck there.
That's not Orbito, though.
No.
That's somebody else.
Yes, yes, correct.
And he is wearing one of the flashiest ass watches I have ever seen on his left hand as he digs around in her neck.
Yeah, and also a very chunky bracelet, too.
Very chunky bracelet, yeah.
After digging around in there, they'll pull out fleshy bits of organic tissue that are claimed to be tumors, damaged organs, or blood clots.
In the Philippines, where belief in spirit possession is common, the surgeons will sometimes remove inanimate objects like rusty nails, string, bits of plastic, and palm leaves as objects inserted by malevolent entities.
It sounds like in that animistic vein, there's part of the practice that's about pulling out modern impurities.
Yeah, and this may be entirely obvious, but it does seem telling that which kinds of objects are supposedly being removed varies based on the cultural context and the metaphysical beliefs about this relationship between the spirit world and objects in our world.
Yeah.
And also just like whatever junk is lying around.
Like, I'm wondering if one of those guys came to my house, he'd end up pulling Lego bricks out of my butt cheeks, right?
But those would really be there, Matthew.
They would really be.
Well, that's right.
They'd really be there.
Oh, God.
Once the offending tissue has been extracted, they'll run their hand over the opening to seal it up, leaving no trace whatsoever of an incision.
The patients report no pain or discomfort and, in fact, says it tickles a little.
Like in some of the videos, you'll see them laughing as people are ripping their flesh open and plunging their hands inside.
Right.
They also often say that they're cured, or at least have some relief of what ailed them.
So here's a little reel I put together to let this really sink in for you two.
Okay.
All right.
Now get up.
Ooh, so there's a really squishy noise going on there.
As the blood squirts around.
Now, what about the music, Brad?
Who put this together?
I did not put that music on, unfortunately, but it's probably exactly what I would have put on because it sounds kind of circus-y and carnival-esque.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is what they chose to put on.
Josephine Sison is the youngest and most renowned of all the healers who have been operating in the Pangasinam region over the past 30 years.
She works quickly with complete self-assurance.
A land with clots of blood and tissue, she may even extract a piece of plastic or rope.
It's a strange coincidence that the extraneous matter she often extracts from her patients is similar to the objects most commonly expelled by those who undergo exorcism.
Yeah, the plastic or rope, the plastic is like really shredded, like you would pick it up off of a beach or something like that, and the bits of rope are also like all frayed.
It really does just look like trash, right?
None of these practitioners have any medical training or even formal anatomical knowledge.
Doubling down, they say that institutional training would actually inhibit their craft.
The healers claim to be performing surgery on the patient's astral body, with the changes then manifesting in the physical.
Some say they channel famous surgeons or healers from the past that guide their hands.
It's important to mention here why psychic surgery came about in these times and places.
Centuries of colonization and subjugation made conventional medical care basically unavailable for anyone poor or outside major cities.
This left a void for traditional and alternative healing to fill as the only real options, as well as a connection to a cultural identity that had been systematically repressed.
Yeah, I mean this part is such a tragic artifact of colonialism and its intersection with these traditional cultures because more reasonable forms of care that were less manipulative that came out of those traditions could have been the default as opposed to this pastiche, right?
This combination of sleight of hand charlatanry and modern medical surgery.
There is a form that did survive called Helix, which is like a massage, a sort of traditional massage that has been shown to relieve back pain and just like regular massage therapy does have real benefits and is still being practiced today.
It seems that the body of the patient, though, becomes this battleground between traditional and modern forms that are in a kind of competition and power struggle over which is going to come out on top, right?
Right, right.
In the Philippines, it all started with a man named Eleuterio Terte.
In the early 1900s, he helped start an organization called Unión Espiritista Cristiana de Filipinas, abbreviated as UECFI.
It's a religious movement blending fundamentalist Christianity with spirit channeling and traditional folk healing.
So this sounds almost exactly like the John of God operation, like he started the main business and then there were franchises after that.
Yeah, the parallels are really fascinating and striking because it seems like they were happening independently.
The UECFI has since exploded in growth as one of the largest religious sects in the Philippines and centers around the world.
But it was back in the 40s that Eleuterio started performing what we now know as psychic surgery.
And here's a photo of him looking pretty dark and badass.
He does look like an assassin.
He looks like he's about to make you an offer that you can't refuse.
Yeah, in a Jackie Chan film.
Exactly.
This bizarre blend of cultures caught on like wildfire.
By the 50s and 60s, he was training other practitioners.
His star pupil was an ambitious and charismatic man named Tony Agpia.
While Terté kept his focus on treating locals on a donation basis, Agpia had designs to turn the practice into an international moneymaker.
He boasted they were transforming village shamans into global healers.
Because it was the 70s, baby!
And you gotta love that entrepreneurial spirit.
I just want to say here, this is not an unfamiliar story, right?
We see this across multiple traditions and multiple cultures of all sorts of different religious beliefs.
There is going to be a group who go down this particular path.
You know, I'm thinking of the massive arena preachers in the US and the guys on TV who will, if you send them some money, they will send you prayer water that you can then pour on your plants and it's going to make your prayers come true.
Yeah, and he was also savvy enough to introduce the idea that repeat treatments would be necessary.
Of course.
And that healing might not happen until up to a month after the surgery.
So, you know, you might have even forgotten that you had gone to get this surgery done by then.
So Brad, this phenomenon emerges, explodes in the Philippines, and then it goes global,
involving spiritual tourism and lots of international travel.
How does that start?
Right, right.
So, Agpia had created a Manila-based tourism company that partnered with travel agencies in the U.S.
and Canada as a way to offer these services, these exclusive services to foreigners.
And so a couple of these agencies in San Francisco sold almost 2,000 of these health tours in just two years.
So that was just two agencies.
Incredible.
So were you able to find the price points on the packages?
Sadly, not exactly.
But the equivalent would be like thousands of dollars in our money.
Today's money.
Right.
Yeah.
Was there a pilgrimage element to these trips?
Like, is there a Catholic shrine circuit in the Philippines?
Yes, so it was meant to be like a real tourism package, but I think that stuff was just, you know, rapid fire, like, okay, here's a shrine, you know, here's a beach, but now it's time for some surgery.
Right, here's Mary and the Potato.
And these were also, these were sick people.
Yeah.
So, I don't think they really had, you know, the energy, a lot of them.
Like, these are people with advanced cancer and, you know, Parkinson's, etc.
I mean, I have all of the Catholic questions usually, and my last one for now anyway is, like, were the Filipino surgeons, psychic surgeons, competing with the church in the sense that they, you know, were making claims to having the real embodied healing power?
Yeah, I didn't read About much controversy there.
The competition was with their just sort of conventional Western kind of medical establishment who constantly were calling it a fraud, you know, from the beginning.
Yeah, there's an interesting piece here that I can't help but hear, Matthew, you know, around Orientalism and around like how in conjunction with colonialism you have a certain amount of fascination that emerges with this culture of the other and
then you end up having opportunistic people from within the colonized population who then say,
oh we can sell spiritual tourism or we can sell paranormal healing claims to credulous westerners
who think that we have access to some special you know secret ancient knowledge and it's very
similar to yoga right.
Yeah.
And I have to say, too, as a white Catholic who grew up in Ontario, there would be a particular mystique to Filipino shamanic Catholicism.
There would be something about it that would say to me, oh, these folks have some connection to something material and ancient and direct that I am really not experiencing in my suburban Catholic life.
Catholic plus, as opposed to the sort of dryness of your Western experience.
Yeah, kind of.
Exactly, right.
Well, these Americans and Canadian seekers started to have buyer's remorse.
On one tour in 1967, 109 ill Detroit residents took a tour to be treated by ACPIA.
A group of them felt they had been built and filed a suit soon after.
He was arrested in the USA on multiple counts of fraud, but fled back to the Philippines to continue the tours.
Once Agpia died in 1982, a man named Alex Orbito, the healer who treated and supposedly cured Deez, was the one to take over.
He described his own technique as magnetic.
Do any of you want to read the quote?
In the body, my hands are like a magnet so that even if the sickness is a distance from my hand, it is drawn to me and I feel the current.
When I feel the current, I know the sickness is now in my hand and I remove it immediately.
That is why the operations don't last very long.
To shake the specter of fraud caused by Agpia, he founded an organization seeking to, quote, professionalize faith healing and check the harmful practices of charlatans that are giving their healing practices a bad name, end quote.
He was soon touring the U.S., and with the help of an endorsement by actress Shirley MacLaine, became wildly in demand.
Oh man, she knew how to pick them!
Like, she's primarily responsible for boosting Bikram Chowdhury, the hot yoga predator in the 1970s.
Oh god, I forgot that part, but she never met a pseudoscience or paranormal fantasy she didn't find plausible.
For any younger listeners, she's the very acclaimed actor and happens to be Warren Beatty's big sister.
But she has claimed as well in one of her autobiographies that 35,000 years ago in Atlantis, her other brother was actually the self-same Ramtha, supposedly channeled by Jay-Z Knight.
Oh man, I did not know about that.
What does Jay-Z Knight have to say about that?
Did she cut loose the defamation lawyers?
There's some IP going on there.
Drama.
One day in New York in 1987, Orbido was observed operating on over a hundred people in five hours, pulling in $10,000 in donations.
But the North American honeymoon soon ended in the mid-2000s when he was charged by Canadian authorities for fraud.
He too fled back to the Philippines shortly after.
I came across a hilarious account by Texas author Gary Cartwright from 1986.
He heard that a psychic surgeon was doing a couple stints at Willie Nelson's Country Club outside of Austin, which was affectionately titled Willie World.
The ley lines in Austin, they go way back!
He interviewed some of the patients and even went for himself for a treatment.
He saw the surgeon, Angel Domingo, treat nearly 200 patients a day.
He worked on each person for just a few minutes and would operate on two of them at a time.
So like one hand for each person.
Oh, that's like the chess players who play like 10 different matches at the same time?
Yeah, also paging Dr. Stammelweis.
Right.
A man named Shrake went in for a blocked colon and watched as a pool of black liquid spewed forth from his abdomen while Domingo ripped out what looked like a piece of hog intestine.
He didn't notice any relief, but said that could have been his lack of faith.
Oh, that's so awesome.
I mean, it sounds like his lack of credulous placebo reaction to this really elaborate and gruesome theater.
Yeah, he was getting nocebo, sadly.
Of his own session with Angel, Cartwright said, His assistants rubbed my chest and stomach
with an aromatic balm.
I then watched closely as he plopped a moist piece of cotton
onto my belly and began to apply pressure with the fingers of his left hand.
The fingers of his right hand fidgeted and probed until one finger seemed to stab into my flesh and vanish for maybe two seconds.
He blocked my view with his stationary hand, but the next thing I saw was a small stringy piece of gristle, which he exhibited for my brief inspection and tossed in the trash can beside the table.
He then extracted more gray meat from my body.
I didn't see any blood.
It wasn't even good sleight of hand.
I didn't feel energized.
I felt depressed and a little stupid.
I mean, here's where I have to say that how these spectacles are interpreted has a lot to do with what kind of audience the storyteller has in the aftermath.
Like, I told the story about Diana off the top.
You know, that was my first contact with psychic surgery.
She was there, and she had gone to John of God because the leader of my Course in Miracles cult in Wisconsin.
was both fascinated by John of God and a little bit jealous of him.
So he sends Diana to New York City.
She comes back to the group with his tape.
And I'm watching it and I'm thinking, this is bullshit.
And I think part of Diana might have thought that too, but I didn't say anything because
our cult leader was like leaning into validating this guy.
And suddenly everyone in that room who is the least bit skeptical is feeling very self-conscious and, like, miserly and unfaithful and ungenerous to this whole, like, amazing process that's going on.
So it sounds like Shrake, like, just didn't have those pressures to deal with.
He was talking to normal people afterwards.
Yeah, so that's like the aftermath.
I think it's also like how someone is set up as they enter the experience, right?
To the extent that they believe they're entering into this being in the presence of someone with extraordinary paranormal power, to the extent that they are very motivated because of a diagnosis that they have that's potentially life-threatening where they found no other potential cure, they're probably more likely to swoon during the experience than to be able to look at it the way this guy did and be like, that's not very good sleight of hand, actually.
Yeah, it's a good point.
And I'm also thinking that he's looking down at his own belly and he's recognizing that the guy is shielding his sleight of hand, which means that the people who are gathered at other angles must be shielded as well.
The sleight of hand must be pretty good, but he's saying it's not good because he can tell what's happening.
Right.
And it seems like this light of hand is actually more to trick the audience watching than the person, because usually the person can't see, you know, their head is back or their eyes are closed.
Right.
So, Angel's Presence was starting to drive a wedge between factions at Willy World.
Oh, here we go.
That's a great sentence!
That's the cold open right there.
Angel's Presence was starting to drive a wedge between factions at Willy World.
Cartwright, the author, says, Those who had faith stopped talking to those who did not.
The believers thought that the non-believers were infidels, and the non-believers looked on the believers as kooks.
After a while, no one dared mention the subject of psychic surgery.
So right away we get into the Orthodox versus the heretics.
It was bound to come, right?
As soon as this sort of thing takes hold, it almost, you know, I know we're skirting the lines here between empathy and sometimes, you know, just being a little bit mocking.
But to me, it's the type of stuff you could see in like the life of Brian or something.
Another pop culture artifact of this modality had to do with the great Andy Kaufman.
In 1984, after being diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, he opted for a six-week course of psychic surgery by another famed practitioner named June Labo.
Labo claimed to have removed all traces of the tumors and had Kaufman convinced he was cured.
But Kaufman died soon after from complications of the cancer.
I had totally forgotten that this was one of the last scenes of the film Man on the Moon that was about Kaufman's life and sort of revisited that.
And I think that was like a lot of people's maybe first exposure to what psychic surgery was.
I've got some photos from the actual surgery being performed and Kaufman looking very thin and unwell after.
Yeah, so those are photos straight out of newspapers, because I imagine what people were reporting on his trip at the time.
And then also actor Burt Lancaster was under June Labo's spell, and I've got a little clip of that.
As we travel about the world, we become increasingly aware of alternative methods of healing.
What are considered orthodox techniques in one society are considered peculiar in another.
There are many within our medical profession who are exploring other methods In an attempt to increase our knowledge and to further the healing arts.
We believe that the value of a healing technique should not be measured by where it is practiced, but only by how effective it is.
We are in La Crosse, Wisconsin, at the Pain and Health Rehabilitation Center, with me is the director, Dr. Norman Sheely.
Dr. Sheely, what exactly was it that was taken from Alan Newman's... It was pus, mixed with a tiny bit of blood.
And was it real pus and blood?
Yes, indeed.
We had it analyzed in our pathology laboratory.
It's important to remember that if you've seen one genuine healing, it doesn't mean that they are all genuine.
And conversely, one fraudulent healing does not mean that they are all fraudulent.
We believe that the healer we observed, June LeBeau, is genuine.
Burt Lancaster is so fair and balanced in this.
And I love how this comes out of this period of TV that reminds me of, like, Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of series.
It's kind of like, Yeah, I mean, Nimoy is much more of a skeptic, of course, but it's that same kind of early history channel, you know, we're taking a deep look at this very serious thing.
And I just have to say, in honor of my old cult days, La Crosse, Wisconsin was only right down the road from where John of God actually came and practiced psychic surgery in our midst.
So, long history there.
At the height of the psychic surgery fever, between 7,000 and 9,000 Americans travel to the Philippines each month— Each month!
—for treatment.
Each month.
But its popularity outside the Philippines plummeted after some high-profile legal cases.
The most damning was from a married couple named Donald and Carol Wright.
They claimed to have went to the Philippines to earnestly train in the practice, but after witnessing such brazen fraud, decided to spill all the beans in front of the Federal Trade Commission.
Here's what they said they witnessed.
Maybe you guys want to read the bullet points?
That materials pulled from the patients were just bits of cotton and animal tissue.
Through sleight of hand, the practitioner would drop said objects onto the patient's body.
They even shopped for animal parts with the practitioners, preparing bullets that consisted of clotted blood and chicken guts.
This is just giving away the teacher training secrets.
It's the proprietary trade secrets.
They shouldn't be revealed.
It's actually incredible that, you know, there weren't whistleblowers before that if the training sort of economy was going before that, because that's kind of amazing.
I can imagine a lot of people going and showing up, oh, we're being sent to the market to get chicken guts.
Yeah.
So with the pellets, the bullets, I'm imagining kind of like soft paintball sort of pockets that they would squeeze and pop?
Yeah, like little, made out of thin plastic.
Okay.
Their testimony caused the FTC to come down hard on the practice, ruling that psychic surgery is nothing but a total hoax.
And that's their quote.
One of the judges said, Psychic surgery is pure and unmitigated fakery.
The surgical operations of psychic surgeons with their bare hands are simply phony.
There were also other high-profile exposés by magicians, including theatrical demonstrations by James Randi.
Here's how Randi described the technique.
Okay, I'll try to do my Randi voice.
The healer would slightly roll or pinch the skin over the area to be treated.
When his flattened hand reaches under the roll of skin, it looks and feels as if the practitioner is actually entering into the patient's body.
The healer would have prepared in advance small pellets or bags of animal entrails, which would be palmed in his hand or That was very good.
Uh-huh.
Oh, thanks!
Well, we're gonna listen to him now, so we'll see how he did.
Yeah, so here's a clip of him demonstrating.
tissue that the healer would claim to be removing. If the healer wants to simulate
bleeding, he might squeeze a bladder of animal blood or an impregnated sponge. If
done properly, this procedure may deceive patients and observers. That was very
good. Uh-huh. Oh, thanks. Well, we're gonna listen to him now, so we'll see how he did.
Yeah, so here's a clip of him demonstrating. Now what you're about to
see is a barehanded operation which appears to take place by actually
penetrating the body.
Believe me, what you're seeing is strictly special effects.
It's sleight of hand and nothing more.
And this is the way it looks.
Oh, do you hear the audience groan?
Yeah, because the blood is spurting all over his sleeves too.
He's so methodical.
The mess is simply mopped up, and the patient is none the worse for the operation having taken place.
Yeah, always deadpan, always in character.
The music!
Yeah.
I think one of them was on Johnny Carson, one of those performances.
Oh, right.
Monty Python's Michael Palin visited the Philippines for a 90s travel show and confronted a psychic surgeon about this light of hand here.
Okay, here he is.
There was some slight of hand that you were perhaps popping a little blood capsule or something like that, because I could see no way in which blood could come out of Gustav's leg without piercing the skin.
There was no mark on the skin at all, yet there was blood.
Were you actually popping a little pill to make him feel better?
You know, you cannot see what I am doing, the operation, unless you have the third eye.
If you have the third eye, this is one, two, and then the third eye here.
Yes.
If your eye, the third eye, is open for you, then you can see.
What is that?
Well, I could see with my two eyes.
But your eyes, you can never see.
Oh, man.
Okay, so I want to report this guy to the Archdiocese of Manila because that is not very Catholic.
Like, we just believe in the true presence of the body and blood of our Lord.
Not the third eye stuff, though.
All of this negative press started to bring the hammer down on the practice, and other medical organizations started to put out official warnings.
The National Council Against Health Fraud had this to say about psychic surgery.
One, it wastes money, often in substantial amounts.
Two, it causes psychological harm.
Three, it may cause needless death by keeping people from timely, effective health care.
Four, may result in needless, avoidable suffering or discomfort by denying patients good quality medical management of terminal diseases.
And to quote the American Cancer Society in 1990, And in Canada, the British Columbia Cancer Agency said, And finally, the Philippines' own medical association put out this critique.
benefit in the treatment of any medical condition.
And in Canada, the British Columbia Cancer Agency said, strongly urges individuals who are ill not to seek
treatment by a psychic surgeon.
And finally, the Philippines' own medical association put out this critique.
The surgeons take advantage of the gullibility of people.
We know that they are fooling the people, but it is hard to do anything about it.
Patients won't complain.
Either they are ashamed that they have been made fools of, or they have died.
So we usually have no proof against faith healers.
You know, they really came out swinging against this stuff.
And so, Julian and Brad, I'm just wondering whether this is a very rare Rebuke of a fraudulent healing practice?
Do we know of any other modality that's been so thoroughly trashed by authorities?
And if not, why this one?
Why is this the case?
Is it a combination of spectacle and the sheer number of high-paying marks?
Not only was it rebuked so effectively, it also caused it to kind of disappear.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think the thing about this is that the sheer theatrical magic trick, blatant dishonesty with regard to the central outrageous claim being made makes it especially easy to decry and even to prosecute.
I mean, it's not as complex as some other quote-unquote modalities, right?
There's an elaborate model of the body as in acupuncture, or there's some arcane taxonomy of remedies as in homeopathy, or even a complicated map of the stars and their transits as with astrology.
There's no clever cold reading going on here.
There's no vague mechanism of action that's being proposed that could take a while to have the desired effects.
I mean, you know, maybe to some extent, but it's like there's not enough that you can hang your head on that appears legitimate.
There's just the central performance.
I think the idea that I'm literally sticking my hands into your body and emerging with
blood, guts and darning needles, you know, that's something that even big tent Christian
faith healers and mediums who talk to the dead, they're not really going that far, right?
So Brad, let's hear your most generous set of questions about this set of practices.
Your most empathetic documentation self comes out, and what does he see?
Right, so yeah, I can't help myself but to look at the other side and sort of play devil's advocate in these sorts of situations.
Well, it might seem obvious, especially for this audience, that the phenomena is not what it seems.
I do think it's worth digging deeper, seeing if we can get to the other side.
So I do think the story is more complicated than just simple fraud.
And I think we can start by acknowledging that, at least at its core, it's not just a health scam.
It's more of a complex interplay of cultural beliefs, performance art, And with this treatment, you know, they don't feel any pain.
They get the benefits of placebo-enhancing supportive group atmosphere.
There's also the religious and theatrical element that bolsters confidence further.
And so do the physical bits of tissue, even if, you know, they're totally fake.
If they're chickens.
Yeah, if they're chickens, right?
And also, you know, based on a plethora of landmark studies, it's not woo to say that positive mindset does correlate to a faster recovery, you know, especially in cases of breast cancer, etc.
And there has been some data that psychic surgery can benefit people with poorly defined conditions like headaches, back pain, chronic fatigue, things that the types of illnesses that are alleviated by the placebo effect, ones that don't necessarily have a physical root cause.
Dr. Pascal James Imperato, Dean and Distinguished Professor of the School of Public Health at SUNY Medical Center, said this of studies of traditional healing and practices.
Confidence between the healer and patient is more germane to treatment than the medicine itself.
And even some of the psychic surgeons themselves have given up the game, with Agpia saying, I merely plant the seed with my surgery.
The patient's mind does the rest.
And another psychic surgeon said, If you can heal the patient with a trick,
the trick becomes legitimate.
Right.
I mean, they're just, you know, they're saying it.
They're saying it.
Yeah.
Coming right up.
Plainly and clearly for everyone to read.
So, the controversial question to you two is, could psychic surgery have a place, even ethically, if traditional medicine has been exhausted or in cases of a terminal prognosis?
What do you think?
And, you know, I don't really have a set position on this.
Yeah, I mean, you know, if Matthew's going to always have the Catholic questions, I'm always going to have the skeptical objections.
So I'm just going to come right out and be the dick and say, absolutely not.
It's too much of a stretch to apply ideas like the placebo effect or the power of positive thinking and the empathic relationship to an authority figure.
Who is nonetheless betraying that by perpetrating an elaborate and cynically dishonest lie in exchange for money.
Like I just, you know, I'm not there.
The placebo effect I think often gets over exaggerated by folks who are wanting to be really open minded.
It's sort of touted as a loophole almost through which you can then drive the bus of magical thinking with regard to alternative medicine.
I see that done a lot in this space.
As if it's a strong determinant of whether or not a treatment or a drug works.
But look, there's a reason that in clinical trials performing no better than placebo is not a positive outcome.
There's also a reason that well-evidenced medical treatments work, even on people in comas, you know, who have no ostensible belief about whether or not it's going to work.
It doesn't matter what culture they come from or their relationship to the medical staff.
And typically, like the strongest examples, I don't even want to say typically, the strongest examples of the placebo effect Have to do, as you said, Brad, with symptoms like mood and pain and mental clarity that can be temporarily modulated via what are actually neurochemical shifts driven actually by relational care, practitioner charisma, optimism and belief in the treatment that it's going to work, and that the improvement, quote unquote, is then based on self-report.
Like, yeah, I felt better and I had this miraculous cessation of my symptoms.
And with Deez, who we started with, is the reason why I wanted to ask you now, had he in the intervening time stopped doing the spray painting without the mask?
Because it's likely that he gradually was detoxing and then somewhere in the midst of that process, he went and got these treatments and then believed They were the reason that he had gotten better when maybe it was no more cadmium in his brain.
Yeah, he could have just been very depressed and then this trip to the Philippines and getting all this attention brought him out of it.
Totally.
Totally.
Yeah.
And, and, you know, I, I hear what you're saying in terms of like the last part of your question is, might it make sense in terms of terminal patients, you know, where they're not actually being prevented from access to care that, that could potentially help them.
They have no other, um, no other recourse.
And maybe this is something that, you know, is, is a benefit to them psychologically.
And I can see a kind of, uh, perhaps I would say a weak case for that as a, as an avowed skeptic.
Yeah, I think you have to.
I mean, the problem is that the fraud is so brazen, as you mentioned, where these people are being bilked out of thousands of dollars and they were having to fly across the world.
Yeah.
For these treatments.
Yeah.
And even in the cases where we do have some evidence for placebo having some effect, the central sort of conversation within the medical community is to how can we ethically give people drugs and lie to them about the evidence that they're going to work, right?
In order to elicit some kind of placebo effect.
So that's always a sticking point too.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, I think it's such a great question, Brad, and I think that Julian has provided an excellent scientific ethics review, but I tend to want to take that question out of the science, pseudoscience framework, especially when I think about how you approach David Dees.
So, we learn about an artist.
His art has poisoned him.
The most important thing in his life has actually given him a terrible illness.
He lives like a hermit.
He's having paranormal experiences through meditation.
He weeps remembering his dead relations in the room.
He's obviously a very intuitive boy growing up and as a young man the same way.
It seems like he's that way for most of his life and then this whole country of the internet opens up for him around 9-11.
It's like the ground falls away.
And he starts following this twisted thread that validates his doubts or whatever paranoia he has going on.
It leads him towards QAnon, anti-vax territory, anti-Semitic imagery while he's saying that he has Jewish friends.
So, eventually, like, he's telling that to you because you're standing there and saying, well, no, I'm Jewish.
How do you feel about, you know, how somebody like I would feel about your depictions?
And he says, well, you're my friend, too, and it's not really about people or, you know, he kind of tries to weasel his way out of it because I think he's probably good-natured or he wants to be.
But then you wind up your interview with him, and he says he's given all of that up, that he's really enjoying his meditation, and we can see that he's probably the same guy as he was all along.
So, I think this question, like, could psychic surgery have a place, is premised on the notion that, like, somehow it could go away if we made the right arguments.
Like, if it could be permanently delegitimized by You know, these institutions.
But you have made the point that actually this actually happened with all of that, you know, institutional slamming.
Right.
But in the broader field of alternative treatments, I don't see how they will ever really go away so long as medicine has knowledge gaps or exhibits cruelty in how it's rationed in capitalism.
In the same way, I don't think conspiracism is going to disappear through rational interventions.
So long as there, you know, is a lot of corruption and abuse in the world and people can feel how networked and systemic it is because sometimes people need answers like more than they need the facts or the truth.
So with Dee's, you know, I had this sense that it was only at a certain point of alienation that his art kind of slid into conspiracism and this nasty stuff.
And that's kind of like him resorting to psychic surgery for a solution to an insoluble problem.
Like, there's a parallelism there, too.
His creativity crosses a line into spreading really harmful, hateful ideas.
And in the same way, with his body, his pursuit of healing crosses a line into this willing participation in fraud.
And in both cases, I just wonder if he would have stayed on the right side of epistemology and health if he'd had other forms of support, if he hadn't been so lonely, maybe.
And to go further with that, he, you know, he sadly died a couple months after I filmed with him from melanoma.
And he, when he had the first signs of melanoma, he went to the doctor, was diagnosed.
He decided to forego treatment and to look up on YouTube what he could do instead.
And the answer was, you know, Cancer only thrives in an acidic environment, so you need to drink a lot of baking soda.
Yeah.
So he drank baking soda and told me he'd cured himself.
And only when it got to stage basically four or five did he go to the doctor and they basically said, you're too late.
There's likely nothing we can do.
And then he went through very, very extreme, you know, chemo and radiation that just, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't going to help at that point.
And he died a very, probably painful, sad, miserable death.
That is really, that is really tragic.
I mean, I'm hearing like a few things here.
Okay, so one is we're wanting to be really thoughtful about like, what are the, what are the cultural, what are the economic, what are the sort of situational Things that contribute towards someone being credulous to pseudoscience like this or to charlatanry.
We're looking at someone like Dease and we're saying, okay, so he seems like a mild case in a way, right?
Like he's not, he had found no other success for his, for his chemical poisoning.
He believed it really helped him.
Then he came back and, you know, Okay, so maybe it wasn't so bad after all.
But then we're also seeing that the way his beliefs got structured around the health and around medicine meant that when he had a cancer diagnosis and when he had access to medical care for the cancer, which he ended up availing himself of after he then tries a bunch of untested pseudoscience cures, he ends up dying.
I would also wonder, given his profile, to what extent he influenced a certain number of people who were desperate to go and get psychic surgery because of his anecdotes of success.
And then I think we're also talking about, okay, so To what extent do rational and scientific debunking essentially eradicate forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, charlatanry and forms of conspiracism?
And obviously they don't completely eradicate it, but then we also have the reality that the types of critiques that were leveled at psychic surgery, which at one point you say thousands were going every month from the US.
It's basically doing DILT to almost nothing, I would imagine, because enough people have basically realized this is a con.
So yeah, it's a whole interesting set of topics that I think we're trying to make sense of together.
Yeah, I think it's a very worthwhile exploration.
Did you talk to David by phone up, you know, close to his death?
He never told me he was sick.
Oh.
So basically he had been emailing me just asking to see, you know, what I've been working on with the footage.
Right.
And he seemed, it was odd because he seemed kind of desperate to see.
Um, and he wanted, cause I had filmed him singing as well, like playing music and singing.
He was like, Oh, I'd like to hear myself.
And, and I was just like, Dave, you know, David, the process takes a while.
I haven't really even looked at the footage and I just sort of kept putting it off.
And then I saw the obituary and I was like, Oh man, like if I had known, he just never, never said a word.
And he kept it private obviously too.
But, um, I wish I had known I would have.
Shown him anything, you know.
Yeah, especially his singing.
That's a difficult job you have.
Right, right.
And he, it's mentioned in the film, but he, prior to being sick, one of his activities, he would actually go sing to patients who were convalescing in hospice.
Yeah.
Because he was a good guitar player and a good singer.
And then he ended up in that very same hospice where he had sang.
For his last days.
Wow.
So, I guess we can maybe bring up the energy a little bit here.
To finish out?
Yes.
Yeah, I was wondering, should we wrap it there?
I don't know.
Yeah, well, we can at least go through this last little part.
Yeah.
So, you know, I've mostly talked about the Philippine tradition of psychic surgery, but there's actually a couple other modalities that I wanted to mention.
One oddity is known as psychic dentistry.
All right.
Yeah, which emerged in America in the 70s, which is something I would really be interested in because, you know, I kind of have a phobia of going to the dentist.
So a man named Willard Fuller was the most well-known practitioner.
He claimed he could make dental fillings materialize out of thin air, as well as turn silver fillings into gold and straighten crooked teeth all with the power of his mind.
However, sometimes these dental miracles had less than psychic explanations.
Gold fillings, for example, turned out to be tobacco stains.
And a miraculous new silver filling, it turned out that the patient admitted they simply forgot that it was already there.
Well, Brad, as you know, we don't have dental coverage here in Canada, so I would like to apply for some psychic dentistry, actually.
Maybe we can get it included in one of the healthcare plans.
In Mexico, there was a psychic surgeon named Pachita who channeled an Aztec healer king.
Oh, wow.
And this story was so wild, I think it could be its own episode or even like a series.
It involves Jacobo Grinberg, who was once a renowned Mexican neuroscientist and psychologist who dedicated his work to exploring human consciousness.
And his work is like, it's really fascinating and you can track as it gets more and more sort of unhinged over time.
He was all in on Pachita's abilities before mysteriously disappearing in 1994.
And it's still a cold case today.
Nobody knows what happens to this man.
And he was right on the verge of, you know, Apparently explaining the origin of consciousness, so.
The deep state got him.
And even jazz musician Charles Mingus and filmmaker Alejandro Hodorowski were totally taken by Pechita.
But that's all I'm going to say about her story here.
Okay, so this is the part where you pitch us on these fascinating tales.
I'm really excited for this episode.
I'm picturing a surrealist murder mystery adaptation of Dune with a bass-heavy free jazz score in which the neuroscientist, who's the main protagonist, is found to have been sacrificed at the top of an Aztec pyramid.
This is going to be great.
I have a question for you, Brad, as we wrap up, which is that Dease, Kaufman, Mingus, Like, not everyone attracted to psychic surgery is super competent as an artist, given to trance states, but is there something specific about the artistic temperament that is attracted to this body magic?
And I'm wondering, is that part of what, you know, attracts you to cover these stories?
Yeah, I do think so.
You know, as you were saying that it's all a ritual, right?
Like, making art is a ritual.
And so are these practices, too, and I think that the artist sees that and is attracted to and gravitates towards that ritual.
And I also think artists are, in general, a little more open to these types of experiences, especially experiences that shift consciousness in some way.
So I do see it, and you know, I have a lot of artist friends, too.
And just like myself, are more interested in these types of fringe practices, beliefs.
Well, Julian, it makes me want to ask you.
You're like a super competent musician.
You've played your entire life.
I know that you are ecstatic with music.
And why does that not sort of open a doorway or did that open a doorway into the paranormal world?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, of course, of course.
So for me, like that musical temperament, I would say it's The way I understand it is a labile kind of susceptibility to altered states and a real valuing of creative states and of tapping into that mystery where something is coming through you that is intuitive, that is creative, that has deep meaning, that is moving, it's emotional.
And part of that too I think is a, I would hazard a guess, there's probably a neuroscientific explanation for the temperament where there's a propensity for metaphor, to be captivated by metaphor, to be captivated perhaps by synesthesia.
And so I relate to all of that creating a kind of fascination with spirituality, a fascination with psychedelics and what psychedelics might reveal about the spiritual truths.
of the human condition, I think I just happen to also have a particular kind of rational
critical thinking kind of desire to not be fooled. So those, those things sort of developed
in tandem. And by the time I got to my late twenties, I was like, yeah, I don't think,
you know, my, I don't think any literal inter and also I don't think any literal interpretation
of that makes sense to me anymore, but the metaphorical piece of it is still really fascinating
and obviously central to so much of what we understand as human culture.
We have normal spaces in which our executive function is fully online, in which we're doing things that we need to get done in capitalism.
And then we have ritual spaces in which those things can be dissolved or thrown away for a time.
And I imagine that there's a huge crossover between artistic ecstasy and religious ritual that way.
I mean, this is not a new thought, but I think these are very similar states.
And I got this sense pretty consistently with the cult leader who was talking about Charles Anderson at Endeavor Academy.
Who was really jealous of John of God that his sort of highest pleasure in his teaching life was in the mode of sort of free association jazz speak.
Where it wasn't really comprehensible what he was speaking about, almost in tongues.
And that's very, very close to a kind of musical flight, I think, or a fugue state.
And there's something in that.
There's something in that.
And I guess if we just don't hope that that's gonna cure tumors or pull them out of our brains, then that's really best.
Brad Abrahams, thank you so much for this amazing tour through the body of psychic surgery.
And we are so happy that you were able to join us for this Correspondent Gig.
And can you tell our listeners what you're up to, what's coming up, and how to find you?
Yeah, I'm working on a few documentary projects right now that I won't mention necessarily the subject of.
