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By Dr. Raj Persaud |
January 2002: Dr Raj Persaud traveled to Lourdes, France to meet members of the medical bureau there whose task it is to scientifically investigate if a pilgrim has been cured by divine intervention.
Almost 6 million pilgrims visit Lourdes each year. Many of the sick come to find courage in suffering rather than a restoration of health but the history of Lourdes is littered with stories of miraculous recoveries.
Making a radio programme about one of the most remarkable places on earth Lourdes was always going to be demanding and precarious.
This is because Lourdes as a place where miracles occur and pilgrims are cured of serious diseases has a very special place in the hearts of the religious. This becomes very apparent when you are in Lourdes and are button-holed by literally thousands of pilgrims to give you their opinion, when they catch sight of the recording equipment. Many broke down in tears, so overwhelmed were they by the emotion of speaking about what Lourdes means to them.
Now, millions from all around the world visit this eerie place. But as a Consultant Psychiatrist at The Maudsley Hospital and a Senior Lecturer at The Institute of Psychiatry in London, I am primarily a scientist and a doctor, and of course science strives constantly to be objective, not subjective. So I wanted to make a scientific investigation of whether miracles really happen or is there some other more mundane explanation for the mysterious phenomena of Lourdes? Are the documented miracles of people seeing again after being blind or discovering that cancerous bone has become healed, for example the product of the strong faith of the believers a kind of dramatic placebo effect?
There is renewed interest in medicine on the powerful mechanisms of the placebo effect for example a brain scanning study of people apparently cured of serious depression by a placebo found their brain had changed in different ways to those cured by an anti-depressant. So what is happening with the placebo mechanism now seems even more mysterious than we had understood previously.
There is also a lot of interest amongst doctors right now in the power of faith and religion to produce cures several scientific studies have found that praying for the seriously medically ill does seem to produce medical benefit. But the most recent study to test the power of prayer, just published this month, found no effect at all.
On top of all this mystery and confusion on the subject are the hundreds of doctors who officially check whether miracles really happen at Lourdes, by thoroughly investigating over many years each patient claiming to be cured by a pilgrimage.
What I found much to my surprise making this programme is that it seems that even hard-headed scientists can still be convinced in the 21st century that miracles, which violate the known laws of nature, still happen. Yet the committee still has to take a vote on each miracle before announcing their decision about the status of a cure, and some of the votes are very close.
But perhaps most intriguing of all was encountering, as we did in the programme, a man who appeared to have been cured of Multiple Sclerosis during an astonishing visit to Lourdes, and whose cure was ratified by the doctors and scientists as scientifically inexplicable.
It was intriguing as a psychiatrist to discover that even being miraculously cured was not without its own psychological problems. This man although largely serene, did seem a little troubled now by the ultimate question, which was given many go to Lourdes and don't receive the blessing of a cure, so, why was he singled out for a miracle?
It seems that even for those who believe in miracle cures or have directly experienced them there remains this last disquieting question why me?