Cures can sometimes depend very much on 'faith', which is a psychological condition and which can cause regeneration and many other unknown effects on a person's body, mind and spirit. Faith healing is reported by millions from all faiths,- think of Lourdes, from thousands of 'saints' at places all over the globe. It has recently become quite a 'business' in so-called New Age connections, and not least those who claim to be aided by Sathya Sai Baba (which he - however - always vehemently denies is the case). Healing 'miracles' are claimed by countless people following all kinds of gurus, masters, priests and evangelicals (Ramakrishna, Swami Rama, Pater Pio, Billy Graham, the founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy - the list is endless) and even witch doctors in Africa, where many tribes get healed apparently simply by praying to some piece of stone or wood idol . This is of course also reported at many temples - eg. Badrinath (stone Shivalingam) and Puri Jagannath (wooden idol). Shamans ask animals or birds to cure them, and this sometimes seems to work wonders. 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 hundreds of reported major cures... but these fall off when faith in them is lost due to scientific studies of the active ingredients or double-blind experiments are applied.

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 VERY easy to mistake bodily symptoms for being worse things than they really are, and when things improve, many think they have had divine help even though no really bad illness or expected pain stayed away. Though psychology and cognitive neurology may still be in their infancy and there are many things not explained yet, 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. This is not to deny that people do recover from extremely serious - and apparently totally incurable - illnesses and accidents and that faith has played a large and even decisive role. These instances remain fairly immeasurable quantities, so to speak, because they cannot be reproduced and one must rely on statistical analyses only (never very precise, but which give general trends quite reliably). This leaves the question of miracules where it has ever been, a belief without provable basis... a speculation and (so far) not a reliable testable hypothesis.

Mental conditions which distort perception and mislead beliefs: There are states of hallucination - similar to dreaming while yet awake, caused byfrom sense deprivation, physical traumas like extreme thirst, starvation, loss of blood, sleep deprivation, drugs, alcohol and very high fever and much more). There are also subliminal and subconscious mental phenomena (eg. hypnagogic and dreaming states, also so-called hypnotic suggestion). Dream figments can appear as real, because one's brain functions partly as if consciously awake.

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 (See one such claim at http://www.dukemednews.org/global/download.pdf?ids=5136) 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 tudies, 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!

Sathya Sai Baba and 'miracle cures': The hagiographic literature about Sathya Sai Baba's 'miraculous' cures is extensive. Due to the nature of his alleged 'methods', 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 is not to say that he, like thousands of others of reported 'healers', cannot have been involved in a healing process through faith, if only as a catalytic agent on whom one projects prayer, faith and hope. On the other hand, there have been plenty of reports 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! 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 Bhagavan Sri Sathya 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.