A Physician Answers My Request

On April 5, 1986, Peter Popoff brought onto his TV program a physician named William Standish Reed. This man did not offer Popoff any direct support of that particular ministry, but he chortled at the things that had been said against Popoff by me and by others. He openly pitied those who could not accept miracles and related in detail a wonder that he had seen happen in his organization, the Christian Medical Foundation International of Tampa, Florida. I wrote to Reed, asking four simple questions and guaranteeing that his answers, if any, would be published in full in this book. I will not bore you with his responses here, but because they are excellent examples of this sort of shilly-shallying, a copy of his letter may be found in Appendix II. However, I will mention one of Reed’s comments:With reference to the “lady patient” who suffered from ovarian cancer, this patient appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network 700 Club on April 2, 1986 so her personal testimony has been on national television and therefore does not need my statements to further verify her cure.

Does Dr. William Standish Reed, M.D., M.S., really believe that “personal testimony” from a patient is sufficient evidence to prove a miracle? If so, how did he arrive at those standards of proof? And he was the woman’s doctor? When asked for information by another physician, he even refused to give this responsible colleague the name of the patient involved, citing “the doctrine of privilege”! We do not even know if that woman is still alive, let alone if she is cured.

The Newspapers Have a Go at It

On the rare occasions when the media have seriously attempted to investigate faith-healing, they have had no better success at finding genuine healings than scientific investigators have had. Back in April 1956, the Fresno (California) Bee surveyed those who had been treated by faith-healer A. A. Allen in a three-week revival meeting there. They covered some 400 miles, interviewing everyone they could find who had experienced Allen’s efforts. They found that some of the claimed illnesses were entirely imaginary in the first place and had been self-diagnosed. Though a few people still claimed they had been healed, not one case could be confirmed by any medical authority. Of those who had permitted Allen to quote their cases as examples of his powers, some confessed that their illnesses either had never really been cured or had returned. One Colorado victim had traveled 1,000 miles to get treatment from the evangelist, had been declared cured of liver cancer, and had returned home, only to die of the disease two weeks later. Perhaps media in other countries have a more skeptical point of view than those in America. In early October of 1986, ten million West German viewers sat entranced before their television sets as ZDF—one of the country’s two largest networks—offered them a program titled “Healing Currents That Flow Through the Entire Cosmos.” The periodical Der Spiegel called it “a new low point in television and at the same time a high point in healing promises, con artistry, and quackery.” The program featured a couple from Switzerland, the Wallimans, who held forth in a Hannover TV studio jammed with 2,000 paying guests, including many who were blind, asthmatic, and rheumatic, and a large number of cancer victims. Unknown to the TV audience, some 50 wheelchair patients were kept out of sight of the cameras. Bild, the West German equivalent of the National Enquirer, had run ads claiming that the audience would be seeing “today’s greatest faith-healers, live on television.” A prominent medical society, generally said to be right-wing, described the event as “deceptive medieval superstition”; Cologne’s archbishop, Joseph Höffner, was content to comment that the program made him “very uncomfortable.” Protestant pastor Wilhelm Haack declared that the show was “occultism” and “religious trickery, information from the far side of the moon, a massive advertising event for the Walliman family.” German newspapers were not deceived. The Hamburger Abendblatt thundered that the producers of the program had brought forth the “bluff of the year.” The Munich Abendzeitung reported:The mass healing was nothing but a flop. Truly, it is seldom that the fears and hopes of millions of sick people have been exploited in such a foolhardy manner. It is blasphemy for some, obscenity for others.... It is nothing more than an attempt at mass suggestion, a spiritualist seance presented under apologetic terms like “healing meditation” and “autogenic training.” ... No one kicked away a wheelchair, and no one regained mental capacity.

Professor Hoimar von Ditfurth, a science writer and physician with whom I have appeared on West German television, has long been a foe of these irrationalities. He said of the program: “[It is] a scandal that ZDF, under the temptations of high viewing ratings, threw their responsibilities overboard.” Even the presiding judge of the Circuit Court of the City of Mannheim was moved to comment to Der Spiegel: “The Federal Republic of Germany has become a training ground and a playground for magical healers.”