Faith Healers Are Back, and They’re Getting Rich | Hacker News Reader

Faith Healers Are Back, and They’re Getting Rich

thewalrus.ca

13 pointspseudolus15 comments

They were never gone... this is such a bad article.

> Louis, on the other hand, had always placed New Age spirituality and far-out health ideas at the centre of his life.

Surprise! Someone who already believed in faith healing decided to believe in faith healing.

Came here to say the same, they never went away. The problem with faith healing though is that the person who needs the healing takes it as a test of their faith. My grandfather had stage 4 cancer and Parkinson's and was taken in by one of these charlatans. He stopped taking his meds and the worst part was my family encouraged him. I was the only naysayer, but I was also the primary caretaker. They didn't have to take care of the fallout from him not taking his meds, I did. Now mind you I was already bit of a black sheep in my family because I was the only atheist, therefore my family was already predisposed to ignoring my advice when it came to anything prayer or faith healing related. He fell about a week after he stopped taking his meds, broke his ribs had a hard time breathing and decided to go to hospice rather than be intubated while his ribs healed. He died a few days later. I blame my family for encouraging him to go to that stupid church. Its been three years, I still refuse to talk to my dad and my uncle.

Despite the factual claim headline, this article is entirely a single anecdote

Which is very surprising, considering we have well over a century of snake oil salesmen. And (poor choice of words, I know) God forbid, the centuries of a church dominated Europe with similar stories.

America's abusive, expensive, and inefficient healthcare system has created a total vacuum of trust amongst the populace. Everyone who wasn't born rich has their own healthcare horror stories. The vacuum is thus filled with conspiracy theories and hucksters.

I am vaccinated and encourage others to do so, but it's completely understandable why so many people were suspicious when the government suddenly wanted to give them some healthcare for free.

While arguably true, this is not what happened in the article. Louis had good medical treatment.

Religion over medicine has a very long history. It didn't start in the modern age.

My dad believes one of my relatives with bipolar disorder is demon-possessed. This belief has nothing to do with the state of medicine in the US. Especially because I have bipolar disorder and somehow I'm not demon-possessed.

It behooves me why people claim they cannot understand why people don't trust medical advances made at the speed of "science".

You literally have the two extremes of the bell curve basically outright not trusting a claim unless it's been verified multiple times. Then the fat middle going, "IFLScience" and lining up for the new thing without any actual proof it's safe.

I have all of my childhood vaccines as do my kids that went through the multi decade long trial period but I didn't get the most recent one everyone knows nor did my wife and kids.

Why? For the same reason I don't beta test new tech products.

And because of the arrogance of the credentialed class, we have a whole ecosystem of sham crap that has popped up. Good work guys.

Instead of trialing a vaccine that uses technologies that have been in development for a decade, you decided to trial a virus that no human body has ever had to deal with. Boy, does that makes sense! Godspeed and good luck continuing to roll the die.

As someone who has had the 'Vid several times now, I'll take my chances getting sick for a few days versus injecting myself with an untested drug and risking permanent damage to something far more important like my cardiovascular system.

Sure they've been working on it for years but until it goes through the multi year FDA phase trial, it's still that: untested.

And PS, for the 3 times I've picked it up, I'm 100% back to my old self in about 2 weeks. This "long" nonsense is an injury caused by something else, perhaps an injection of a rushed to market drug?

The COVID vaccines have been tested. They went through the same testing procedures as other vaccines, including three-phase clinical trials on tens of thousands of people. But of course you've probably already been made aware of this many, many times. your reference to "the credentialed class" and "science" in quotes makes it clear this is a political stance for you, so you'll refuse to be convinced otherwise at this point, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Fair enough, just don't stand anywhere close to me when the next pandemic hits and you refuse to do anything for a decade because the concept of epidemiology and science advancing since you were a child is apparently foreign to you.

Lol, lmao even.

The covid vaccine used an "accelerated timeline" and was rushed through it's trials in less than a year.

Every other vaccine took 7-10 years to establish a clear long term understanding of how these vaccines interact within the bodies a broad segment of the population.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/timeline

Answer the question: can you cite the decade long term studies about the safety of the covid 19 vaccine like the MMR vaccine?

No you can't, because they don't exist. In fact, you're living through the long term studies now because you are the test subject.

> Fair enough, just don't stand anywhere close to me when the next pandemic hits and you refuse to do anything for a decade because the concept of epidemiology and science advancing since you were a child is apparently foreign to you.

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

The smugness is comical. Those decade long trials are done so to avoid health crisis like thalidobromide babies. That too was released without much over sight into its effects and guess what happened? Oops!

You're welcome to be my guest and beta test vaccines.

At least if you live in a city with a lot of biomed companies you get paid to be a human guinea pig. You did this for free.

Might as well start installing nightly package builds and pushing them to production after a week of testing. You've essentially done the same thing with your body.

What’s not comical is that you think the virus is doing less damage to your body than the vaccine. What a darkly absurd idea.

Is society in decline?

We have collectively decided that entire worlds medical capabilities must go to like 3 or 5 winners of capitalism, and everyone else gets the placebo. Just like everything else.

At first I thought this headline was about Baldur’s Gate 3.

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