Psychic Surgery - Medical and Legal Criticism

Medical and Legal Criticism

In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission declared that "'psychic surgery' "is nothing but a total hoax"." Judge Daniel H. Hanscom, when granting the FTC an injunction against travel agencies promoting psychic surgery tours, declared: "Psychic surgery is pure and unmitigated fakery. The 'surgical operations' of psychic surgeons ... with their bare hands are simply phony."

In 1990, the American Cancer Society stated that it found no evidence that "psychic surgery" results in objective benefit in the treatment of any medical condition, and strongly urged individuals who are ill not to seek treatment by psychic surgery.

The British Columbia Cancer Agency "strongly urges individuals who are ill not to seek treatment by psychic surgeon."

While not directly hazardous to the patient, the belief in the alleged benefits of psychic surgery may carry considerable risk for individuals with diagnosed medical conditions, as they may delay or forgo conventional medical help, sometimes with fatal consequences.

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