I am certain many dopers have seen TV shows (on The Learning Channel or Discovery Channel) of those people - on Polynesian islands perhaps? - in which spiritual surgeons pull tumors and other diseased tissues from the patients’ bodies, all without penetrating the skin at all.
In the videos, you see the practitioners’ hands energeticlly massaging the patient’s abdomen, for example, and soon, these hands start pulling all sorts of bad shit from the patient’s innards, and throwing it in a nearby pan. They might even send in a second in a team, and a third, and by golly, they will all miraculously remove quantities of diseased body parts that are causing the patient’s illness. There’s a lots and lots of blood on the patient’s skin, but it is wiped away and Ooooh! No sign of an incision!! It is extremely dramatic. The patient is pronounced cured and he flies home, expecting to live longer and prosperouser.
It’s a scam, of course, and chances are he croaks soon after.
In the program, you’re told how the sam is perpetrated. All the practitioners use a hoary prop that magicians call a thumbtip. It’s a fake thumb, hollowed out and kinda looks like a real thumb, but bigger and rather garish.
Before the procedure, the surgeon stuffs the fake blood and animal parts inside the thumbtip, puts the gimmick over this own thumb and when he gets to massaging he deftly removes the prop, spills out its contents on the belly, puts the tip back on and begins pulling that necrotic tissue from the surface of the patient’s skin. It looks for all the world that he’s doing just what the scamming bastards promise. Then he does the same thing with the thumbtip on the other hand.
The patient emerges from the experience convinced he’s cured, pays a tidy fortune for the miracle and goes home happily - for a brief interval.
I went to snopes to try searching on this but I can’t seem to find the right words, so I keep coming up empty. But I’m sure it’s there.
Can anyone help?
