Faith healing is as old as there are religious and mystic ritual practices. Evil spirit possession has always been the center of many ritualistic healing practices. From the African witch doctor to the Haitian voodoo doctor all the way to the Roman Catholic Rites of Exorcism, the focus has always been to expunge evil spirits as the cause of any body ailment or aberrant behavior.

In our modern times, the phenomenon has reached world-wide awareness through the wonders of television and CNN coverage. With closed eyes, chant-like invocations or silent prayerful stance, the faith healer touches the ailing patient or goes through the motions of expunging sprits or failed body parts and, voila!! The patient is healed.

Are these faith healers for real? Or are they frauds? It can be difficult to say as the documented number of patients who genuinely recover after a faith healing session can be overwhelming. On the other hand, there have been cases when the healing was contrived or scripted, using associates acting their part in a televised session.

The Faith healer banks on the faith of the patient to heal. In Christian religion, when asked if he has the power to heal, Jesus said that it is the faith of the person that heals. Over the years, there are documented instances of faith healers coming from Christian lay people who seem to have been empowered to effect miraculous healing to people medically diagnosed to have terminal cancer and other fatal illnesses.

But it must be understood that the medical profession frowns on Faith healing as a form of charlatanism. There are no scientific bases for such practices. Then again, there really is no scientific basis where Faith is the prime compulsion. Jesus Christ may have intimated the truth in that it is your Faith that heals, not from any mystical powers of a person.

The charlatanism associated with faith healing, however, should be distinguished from medical quackery. A quack doctor actually looks and acts like a medical doctor, complete with all the tools, except that he either didn’t get any medical degree or the license to practice the profession. This is clearly a violation of the pertinent laws as it effectively plays on the trust of patients who would pay top price for such services.

Faith healing, on the other hand, do border on quackery if indeed, the object is to defraud the patient. But some faith healers don’t even ask for payment of their services.

But is there any medical relationship between faith and the biological processes of the human body? Plain answer: inconclusive. It is a fact that scientists only understand 20% of how the brain works. There is even a documented study in the US purportedly showing that there was a slightly higher incidence of recovery from patients who prayed than those who didn’t. Does that mean there is a relationship? Perhaps. When everything else has failed, what is there to lose with a prayer or two?