Psychic surgery
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Psychic surgery, a pseudoscience constituting medical fraud, is when a practitioner creates the illusion of performing surgery with his or her bare hands and uses trickery, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that the diseased lesions were removed and that the incision spontaneously healed.
It has been denounced by the US Federal Trade Commission as a "total hoax", and the American Cancer Society maintains that psychic surgery may cause needless death by keeping the ill away from life-saving medical care. Medical professionals and skeptics classify it as sleight of hand and any positive results as a placebo effect. It first appeared in the Spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the middle of the 20th century, and it has taken different paths in those two countries.
See also
- Faith healing
- Health fraud
- Alternative cancer treatments
- List of topics characterized as pseudoscience