The Anthropologist’s View

Philip Singer, a medical anthropologist at Oakland University, in Rochester, Michigan, long interested in alternative healing possibilities, looked carefully at eight cases of claimed miracles by faith-healer W. V. Grant. Seven took place during a revival meeting in July 1982 at Cobo Hall, Detroit, and one was featured on a Grant TV broadcast in Detroit at that same time. Singer was assisted in the investigation by his students. One case consisted of Grant’s declaring that there were 49 diabetics in the crowd who had just received healing, but Grant made no attempt to identify a single one of these people. Singer decided thatin [these cases] it would seem clear that what is involved is fraud on Grant’s part.... “Healing” the 49 people of sugar diabetes would certainly seem to qualify as a “fraudulent practice” intended to get money from those “healed.”

In the remaining seven cases, Dr. Singer found that the subjects either:(a) had already been healed by orthodox medical methods by the time they visited Grant, but refused to believe it, (b) still had the disease, with no abatement or cure, (c) had only imagined non-existent diseases, (d) accepted Grant’s word that they had been healed and had no intention of checking it out with a physician.

Another patient he heard of had been to see Grant and was told that her diabetes and high blood pressure had been cured. She believed it. She stopped her medication and suffered a diabetic crisis followed by cardiac arrest. Singer also independently discovered that Grant had been using quite transparent means of learning the names and other details about his subjects to perform his “calling out” procedure. His big favorite, the sit-’em-in-a-wheelchair stunt, turned up in Singer’s investigation, too. Singer concluded that Reverend W. V. Grant not only performed no cures for those he ministered to, but also used conjuring techniques to convince them that he spoke with God and that he had the power to heal.

Many Similar Conclusions

The Bay Area Skeptics, the Houston skeptics group, and the Southern California Skeptics, three groups that work in cooperation with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, appointed teams to trace examples of several popular healers’ results. In carefully neutral, fully reported case histories, they found not one example of an organic disease healed. Other researchers over the years have looked into healing claims by the hundreds. Believers and non-believers were involved in these investigations, and they have had the same results, though many ardently believed in at least the possibility that such healings could be brought about. In more than 40 cases that we were able to follow up, the victims were willing to tell us that they were not healed at all and that they were angry and frustrated. Frequently, we were asked what they could do to get their money back and whether there was any hope that something could be done about the deception that they had fallen for. We could offer them no satisfaction.