Spells, Potions and Witch Doctors

Have just picked up this week’s edition of the New Scientist and the lead article is very close to our heart of ABC Simple As … ‘Beware Witch Doctors‘ opens with a true story from around 80-yrs ago.

Vance Vanders had an encounter with a Witch Doctor who delivered a ‘deadly curse’ wafting a ‘potion’ across him, forecasting no chance of survival and imminent death!

From that moment on Vanders’ health declined … he was hospitalised yet no disease was detected.  Vanders wife told the doctor, Drayton Doherty, of the hex at which point Doherty took action, which may have been quite revolutionary for the times.

He told Vanders he’d found the Medicine Man and forced him to reveal how the curse worked; that he’d had lizzard eggs rubbed into his stomach, which had hatched inside his body.  Doherty went on to tell Vanders that one reptile had remained that was now eating at him from the inside.

Next the eminent doctor had a nurse apply a powerful emetic filled syringe, which provoked fierce vomiting from Vanders.  By the following week he was released from hospital and subsequently made a full recovery.

Did you think of the ‘placebo’ effect as you were reading this, I know I did when I saw the original article …

Cancer

In the 1970′s there was the case of Sam Shoeman, diagnosed with ‘end stage cancer’ given only months to live.  Sure enough he died within the predicted period but when they carried out the autopsy their diagnosis had been incorrect.  Although he had a tumour it was small and had not developed.

“He didn’t die from the cancer, but from believing he was dying from cancer” says Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbuilt School of Medicine  in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like this one and Vanders’.  “If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it and everything in your life becomes about dying”.

I’ll leave it here for today … Food for Thought and look forward to returning to the above article sometime soon …  If you have any thoughts or personal experience in this area … please feel free to join in with the discussion … Its a favourite topic around here ….

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