Cures can sometimes depend very much on 'faith', a psychological condition combined with positive self-suggestion. Regeneration both psychic and physical can occur. Faith healing is widely reported by millions of people, from thousands of 'saints' and persons of all faiths all over the world. It has recently become a regular 'business' in so-called New Age connections, and they include many who claim to be aided by the Indian self-professed Divine Master, Sathya Sai Baba. Despite this, he always has strongly denied that any healer has any power of spiritual strength from him! Unexpected and unpredictable recoveries, even from dire conditions, are reported by countless people following all kinds of masters, priests gurus, evangelicals and saints' or 'holy men and women' from Ramakrishna, Swami Rama, Pater Pio, Billy Graham, the founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy to Ananda Mayi Ma and many more - the list is endless). Witch doctors in Africa supposedly heal tribals, sometimes simply by praying to some piece of stone or wood idol. This is also reported at many temples - eg. Badrinath (stone Shivalingam) and Puri Jagannath (wooden idol). Shamans implore animals or birds to cure them, and this sometimes seems to work. This is not always effective, of course. In Scandinavia, through the decades many and various 'nature cures' like water boiled with ash branches in, snake poison salve, have come and gone, with many hundreds of reported major cures... but these fall off when they are subjected to serious investigation. Faith in these palliatives is losst due to detailed studies of the active ingredients and controlled double-blind experiments.

Sathya Sai Baba and 'miracle cures': Sathya Sai Baba and 'miracle cures': The hagiography on Sathya Sai Baba's 'miraculous' cures is extensive. No scientific control study has so far been made of any of the claims of miraculous healing from him, either spontaneously or in answer to prayers. This come of his rejecting scientists because of the 'divine inscrutable' methods he claims to use. This is not to say that he, like thousands of others of reported 'healers', cannot have been involved in a healing process through faith, perhaps as a catalytic agent on whom one projects prayer, faith and hope. On the other hand, many reports have come from persons who have sacrificed and prayed to Sathya Sai Baba constantly for themselves or for another, but all of whom have only got worse, though these are quite hard to come by as they are very seldom published by devotees! Of course, the handy theory of past bad karma is trundled out to explain away the possibility of a cure in this or that persons' instance. All evidence that Sathya Sai Baba does not heal, does not keep his word, or is not able to heal people of himself has to be refuted by the 'true believer', whose agenda is totally to block out all experience that may lead to another explanation or in any way be interpreted to reduce their hard-held belief that Sathya Sai Baba is a divine healer and God himself. Even devotees who feel the need to keep up a front despite themselves not having been healed according to Sathya Sai Baba's promise will convince themselves that they have been helped... and even lie about this, such as Mrs. Phyllis Krystal did about the headaches she claimed Sai Baba cured her of (after being asked point blank in public at the 1990 Sai Baba conference in Hamburg). However, she was still suffering from them for years afterwards, as Lucas Ralli (with whom she stayed when in London) informed me most definitively and to my great surprise.

I have shown from his own discourses how Sathya Sai Baba teaches many mere superstitions, falsehoods or speculatively imaginative half-truths. Further, his abysmal level of his ignorance of basic physics, astronomy, and most non-Hindu religion and history has been demonstrated to the full on exposé websites. Nonetheless, he has said intelligent things (and nowadays at least such is an exception rather than a rule). He may be right in claiming that all 'healing' comes only from within, from the faith of the person who gets cured (Conversations with BSathya Sai Baba - by Dr. John Hislop. page 121, later edition). But he cannot say this of all cures, because medicine is behind the vastest number of known cures of diseases, illnesses, accidents and so forth, which he admits too - and for which purpose he instigated the building of two hospitals with major funds contributed by devotees. He has also said that a doctor's kind approach has the greatest healing effect Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 26, p 47), which - if correct - shows that healing is not only 'from within' or 'from God'.

All the talk about the healing power of 'Sai Baba vibuthi' and other substances he hands out may cause belief in healing, and this may help... but the actual curative/medicinal properties are zero, according to analyses of this vibuthi made in laboratories here and there. The apparent cure due to this substance (actually the ash from burning such materials as cow dung, rice husks or sandal wood etc.) is often called the 'placebo effect' in medical research. Another term used is 'spontaneous regeneration', which refers to unknown aspects of the body's self-regenerative powers. The 'placebo effect' is obviously a psychic phenomenon and remains largely (but not entirely) unexplained.... but it is very common.

The tendency to imagine cures by divine intervention: Often people who have a religious agenda will think they are cured when they were not... because they thought they had (or would have got) an illness or a hurt which actually they did not get. It is so easy to mistake bodily symptoms for being worse things than they really are. Anxiety about knocks, falls and a variety of other minor accidents - which can be strong anxiety, especially in younger or nervous persons - easily makes them think they have had divine help when no really bad results ensued, or expected pain and suffering did not follow. Often, nothing more was needed than to get over the shock, wait some time or a simple remedy etc. This applies also to fears of serious illnesses which one may believe one has, or for which one has even been wrongly diagnosed. It must be a divine helper, a healer, an angel, God etc. But despite all this, people do recover from extremely serious - and apparently totally incurable - illnesses and accidents. It seems clear that faith of some kind can play a large part... but evidentially no one can measure this or know what otherwise would have happened. This leaves the question of miraculous intervention where it has always been, a belief without provable basis... a speculation and (so far) a completely non-testable hypothesis.

There is obviously much about the human mind that is not yet known, but human knowledge has already advanced tremendously through empirical science and the vast broadening of experience and experiment in almost every sphere since the time of the primitive ideas about the causes of things in ancient scriptures, such as the Vedas, Puranas, Bible, Greco-Roman mythology and Arabic Islam.

Mental conditions which distort perception and mislead beliefs: There are states of hallucination - similar to dreaming while yet awake. There can be many causes of this condition, from sense deprivation and physical traumas (eg. extreme thirst, starvation, loss of blood, sleep deprivation, drugs, alcohol and even a very high fever with hallucination) to little understood interference of the subliminal or subconscious mind (such as by hypnagogic and dream states). In such states one can see things as if in a dream, yet which appear to be real, because one is still consciously awake. Usually the body is immobilised as in sleep. This is the subconscious mind going through the standard measurable rhythms of the sleep cycle while the subject is awake but unaware that this 'dreaming' is taking place. Many things can trigger this state of being, not least hypnosis. The latest Western scientific research is at last and slowly getting to grips with this. This would explain how some people can experience visions, have paranormal (telepathic) contact with other minds. It can explain so-called 'spiritual experiences' of the sort where figures appear to a person from far away, or how seeing a person take on a halo or other 'holy' phenomena while other persons beside them see no change at all. This has often been reported of Sai Baba, on whom the persons' whole being is intensely concentrated - and has been so emotionally for long periods. People also see earth spirits, demons, UFOs, aliens thought to be extra-terrestrial and can feel they were abducted, operated on etc. when 'paralysed'. But this is most likely the same 'mechanism' of the organism described when dream and waking states interfere with one another. Meditation states, where the body is as if frozen and the mind becomes open to hypnagogic and other imagery, are evidently very often forerunners to such experiences. Sleep deprivation, starvation and other conditions can give the same results.. as can drugs or many kinds of unusual practices from blood-letting to extreme trance inducement.

The issue of the alleged influence of prayer: The age-old tradition of all mainstream religions is to recommend prayer for healing, and sometimes instead of any other remedy! It may be so one's own prayer, because it induces a state of the psyche which correctly keys the organism's response. It is also widely reported through history that some people have cured themselves by will power, the will or determination to survive what otherwise would normally be fatal. Others have been cured when they believe they were being given distant healing through prayer etc., though in fact this was not actually being done (see http://www.integral-inquiry.com/docs/649/empirical.pdf). Various scientific studies seem to show that prayer by others can affect medical conditions positively (One such claim was made at http://www.dukemednews.org/global/download.pdf?ids=5136 but this page has been removed, and one may wonder why) However, the measured results are often only peripherally significant statistically.

Those who hope to prove the hypothesis that prayer is effective and wish to promote religion make up the main part of those who devise more or less scientifically-valid studies, usually on the hypothesis that prayer affects health. The quality and objectivity of such studies is very difficult to evaluate. One pro-healing source, Laurance Johnston Ph.D., (http://www.healingtherapies.info/prayer_and_healing.htm) claims:
"In addition to the effects of organized religion, prayer-like consciousness also has been shown to exert an influence in numerous scientific studies. Although the effects of organized religion can be explained through readily understandable mechanisms, the effects of prayer cannot. After reviewing the literature, Dr. Daniel Benor (Complementary Medical Research 4:1, 1990) found 131 controlled studies involving prayer or spiritual healing. Of these, 77 showed statistically significant results."
Typically, the author goes on to present samples of these results, but selects only the most positive for his hypothesis. Meanwhile, the 54 studies which showed NO significant results are not mentioned further by him. Such bias is commonplace throughout the field of promoters of prayer and healing through faith.

In response to the relatively recent appearance of pro-faith healing studies claiming scientific medical status, The Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health has presented a review at http://www.sram.org/0802/faith-healing.html
A very recent and large scale experiment in the USA on the effect of distant healing (prayer) on cardiac conditions reportedly shows that it has absolutely no effect whatever, which contradicts the results of several formed studies of a similar nature. An important research project to follow up on is at the University of Arizona, as described at http://www.ahsc.arizona.edu/opa/news/may03/prayer.htm
In any event, the issue of whether prayer is effective, how it works, whether there is any miraculous or 'superhuman' intervention involved and so on is still a very open question from the viewpoint of scientific research.

It would be most interesting if it were possible to get a reliable comparative study of how many prayers are made which remain 'unanswered' or 'answered'. This is clearly far too complex to study scientifically in any reasonable or controllable manner. It would seem, however, that there would be a very great unbalance... but on which side one things this unbalance would be, most likely would depend on which side one wishes were the winner! A small experiment, try praying daily to win a top lottery prize so one can donate to a good cause... someone is likely to win, while thousands are absolutely bound to loose.

Sathya Sai Baba boasts he looks after all his devotees most carefully: In addition to his public proclamations about his supreme care for his followers, Sathya Sai Baba makes many personal promises to people in private interviews. Such are reported in many books and articles about him. One standard sentence he uses is, "I will look after everything", another is, "I give you a long life, healthy life, happy life!". (Unasked, he made both of these 'promises to me'- yet I can hardly be said to have a healthy life since then, having still suffered chronic back and neck problems that made me work disabled from my 50th year). Other assurances he gives are, "I shall protect you"; "I will build an iron wall around you!" and "I give you liberation, you will not have to take on another body!"

People long to believe that these 'divine assurances' are always fulfilled. Alas, they seldom do, if ever! Even the large and amateurish 'literature' praising Sai Baba and telling the most incredible stories contain occasional reference to big letdowns of this kind, but it is quite obvious that many instances are not talked about in these books, which are always strongly self-censored. Another matter is when one talks freely to people, then one hears of all the failures, uncured visitors, disappointed sufferers. V.K. Narasimhan startled and shocked me once by saying that he had never seen a single genuine cure by Sathya Sai Baba in all the years he had been living close to him! Narasimhan himself was told his eye was cured with vibuthi 'made' on the spot for him, but within two days he has lost it completely!

I knew close devotees of many years of devoted service who died with dreadful sufferings. Ashram head Kutumb Rao (massive incurable cancer), N. Kasturi (6 weeks intense lung pain), V.K. Narasimhan (water on lungs & long choking death), two US ladies killed outright and one young American crushed by falling dome in Eternal Heritage Museum in 1992, with 11 hours hell in taxi to Bangalore with 9 fractures and broken cranium before dying en route). One could make a very long list of Sai devotees who have been let down by Sathya Sai Baba utterly, it would include Dr. John Hislop who died of brain cancer, Joy Thomas left to bleed to death in a Sai Hospital by a prominent Sai doctor and so on. How can one rationalise as 'His Grace' the horror gone through which the King and Queen of Nepal - close devotees who visited Sathya Sai Baba? Both shot down and killed by their son along with others in a regular bloodbath! I knew several other Sai devotees who died terrible deaths among Sai devotees, even within the group I led.

Last, but not least, six young men who had devoted their lives to Sai Baba were killed in his rooms, four of them shot down in his bedroom apartment in cold blood while begging for their lives. Sai Baba called the police to the scene and was involved in the long negotiations before the police acted. Whatever his exact role was (one may guess how the all-powerful guru in his private township must be implicated), the very fact that six of his close servitors and ex-students lost their lives in this slaughterhouse shows just how much his guarantees of protection are actually worth!

Some incidents of Sathya Sai Baba's claims and contrary results
Some Scandinavian friends told us about a Dane who had recently died at Prashanthi Nilayam when they were present. He had contracted diahorrea and, rather than seek help or medicines, determined to "surrender himself to Swami", whereby he lay alone in his room outside the ashram of 3 or 4 days, regarding his illness as some form of 'divine cleansing' (a common superstition and/or pretension among Sathya Sai Baba devotees). Being ignorant of the tropics and the need to drink much water and take dietary supplements, his body dried out and he died.

Another Dane went to Sai Baba with a group from his country in the hope of healing by Sai Baba of a tumour on the brain. The poor man was told by SB in an interview a friend of ours attended that he would recover! This from the supposed avatar whose claims his words always come true! For, a few days later the man died in his room. Two Scandinavian friends of ours attended the cremation of his body on the Chitravati sands. The rationalisations we heard about this were many, such as - 'it was better he believed in Sai for he lost his fear of dying because of those words...' But the fact is, Sai Baba told an untruth, which he has stated vehemently on several occasions is NEVER justifiable.

Another incident of belief that a cure came via a Sai miracle
The above kind of case is all too common. When in Kodaikanal in 1994, a young American lady friend of ours was sharing a room with an Indian devotee from Honolulu who was throwing up blood and complaining mightily of her pains. Even vibhuti would not stay down! But she would "trust only in Swami" and would not see a doctor, though begged to do so for many days on end by her often distraught roommate, our lady friend. Since no one else seemed to be available or to care about this lady, I agreed to visit her and try my luck at getting her into medical care - if only to help our lady friend. The sufferer agreed with her room mate to speak to me. So I went to her bedside and the first thing I told her was I was not a doctor, but a friend of her concerned room mate. She told me all about her condition and how she had decided to put her faith wholly in 'svami'. I said o.k. but still thought she could at least get a diagnosis, as this was not necessarily against having faith. Then she would be able to say, at least, from what she was cured 'when' this eventually came about. I was wearing a large Sathya Sai Baba green ring, She looked at this - obviously recognising it was a Sai Baba ring - and agreed immediately, later saying that I has been "sent by Swami".
Upon examination at the local health centre, it soon turned out she had a ruptured diaphragm (which separate the lungs from the lower abdomen), It could not be treated in Kodaikanal, therefore, she accompanied us when we flew back to Bangalore shortly thereafter. There she was friends with a young lady doctor. They were able to operate in the nick of time and save her life, and they claimed that they were the only facility in South India which could carry out such an operation! The lady felt it was 'all svami's doing'! This is another and fairly typical case of 'believe what you will'. I was certainly given no indication whatever by Sathya Sai Baba, but went of my own free will because I wanted to help out. Later, I ran across the lady at Brindavan ashram and she was full of thanks to me and said I was 'an instrument of svami' etc. I was and remain unconvinced... surely almost anyone would have done the same if they had been faced with the same situation.

In the absence of any means scientifically to examine this incident or others like it, one can interpret it quite freely as an example of 'miraculous intervention' or a commonplace instance of ordinary care. That will probably depend on what one wishes to believe, but to a lesser extent in the case of a skeptical approach than one wishing to see 'divine intervention'. The great majority of 'healing miracles' I have heard related about Sathya Sai Baba are no more accessible to controlled observation or well-founded scientific reasoning than this instance... it will depend on how strong are the belief agendas of interpreters, how independent and truly 'disinterested' they are.

An instance of conflicting explanations:
A person in New Zealand wrote in the ExBaba Guestbook in 2005 the following:
"In addition to the effects of organized religion, prayer-like consciousness also has been shown to exert an influence in numerous scientific studies. Although the effects of organized religion can be explained through readily understandable mechanisms, the effects of prayer cannot. After reviewing the literature, Dr. Daniel Benor (Complementary Medical Research 4:1, 1990) found 131 controlled studies involving prayer or spiritual healing. Of these, 77 showed statistically significant results. "
"i was dying in hospital recently . my blood pressure was falling almost to zero . i had had extensive heart surgery. the family had been called in to say goodbye. saibaba instantly stopped the blood presure fall. i got better and was discharched 3 weeks later. i have been a devotee for some years .he looks after his own .thanks sai."

To this I would add that all experience points to the belief that Baba himself was involved as likely wish fulfillment. The mind can become very unstable in such a perceived crisis - big changes in blood pressure often caused by anxiety or faith, a very well-known medical fact. Besides, no one knows that they were actually 'dying', the proof is only when they are dead! That "Sai looks after his own" is self-aggrandising delusion! Close devotees of many years of devoted service died with dreadful sufferings. Ashram head Kutumb Rao (massive incurable cancer), N. Kasturi (6 weeks intense lung pain), V.K. Narasimhan (water on lungs & long choking death), young American crushed by falling dome in Eternal Heritage Museum in 1992, 11 hours hell in taxi to Bangalore with 9 fractures and broken cranium), King and Queen of Nepal - close devotees who visited SB - shot down by their son, John Hislop incurable cancer & many dozens of equally or more awful deaths among close servitors and devotees.

Headaches which will not go away. Mrs. Phyllis Krystal, an elderly lady devotee for decades from the US, who has written about some of her experiences of Sathya Sai Baba has been ill constantly with terrible chronic headaches, which Sathya Sai Baba diagnosed as due to five different kinds of headache (see 'The Ultimate Experience'- publ. Samuel Weiser Inc.). She went through some kind of intensification of her symptoms while with Sathya Sai Baba, which she interpreted as being a part of the treatment in removing one or more of these several headaches. She was a speaker at the 1992 Sathya Sai European Conference in Hamburg and was asked point blank from the audience whether Sathya Sai Baba had now cured her of all her headaches. She hesitated for some time, and eventually said that he had. People clapped! However, later I was in London talking to Lucas Ralli, (Central Coordinator for UK & Ireland until unceremoniously kicked out) and a close friend of Mrs. Krystal, who stayed with him and his wife sometime during a UK visit. He came to mention that she was in constant need of pain killers for her headaches and I was taken aback. So I asked if she had not been cured, but he confirmed that she still suffered greatly from this. This incident typifies the kind of thinking one meets among Sai devotees. Perhaps a kind of self-deceit to protect one's faith, partly a desire not to admit doubts to oneself or others and thereby publicly embarrass the guru, whose promises are supposed to be as cast in iron and whose healings are infallible etc. Incidentally, in character with this, Mrs. Krystal has also known for decades full well about the sexual molestation of young men by her guru, but she covers it up and so untruthfully defends it by her silence!