Saved me a whole bunch of typing. It’s even more comprehensive than what I had thought, but I did have some ideas and this also inspired some more.
My idea was to work with the Gates foundation. They have whole organizations which are already staffed, and can adopt to a new variable like this. They would be much better at identifying needs as well as logistics, security and schedules.
They would be the gatekeepers to prevent overwork and getting overwhelmed.
It needs to be noted that assuming an average of three minutes per healing, and working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, will only be 40,000 healings per year, only a small drop if the bucket of the 57 million annual deaths and god know how many illnesses which didn’t kill in that year. This is a good case for not over working and getting burned out.
It would take hundreds if not thousands of healers to have a significant impact.
Why would Mexican cartels want to grab me? Sure, they could make money at using me, but at much greater risk to scrutiny for themselves than their current lucrative activities.
But I’m not going to, anyway - why would I cure something that is
a) treatable by normal therapy and medication, and
b) driven by outside factors such that the risk of relapse is so great.
The pope has never claimed he could do miracle cures or other faith healing.
So you have no family that can be used to blackmail you with? I’m not sure your healing powers could handle a decapitation that happened two days before they found the rest of the body of your favorite niece.
I certainly do have family and loved ones. But they, so do plenty of other celebrities and rich people and world leaders. Doesn’t mean that every moment of their existence is spent dealing with blackmail.
Gatekeepers would also help with scheduling to increase effectiveness. Since I’m targeting diseases that take a relatively long time to finally kill, I’d consider contacting insurance companies. Giving me a stipend and covering my travelling expenses would save them money.
How many insanely rich evil people who have incurable health problems are there in the world, anyway? Five?
There are lots of insane people. There are lots of super-rich people. There are lots of evil people. There are lots of people with incurable health problems.
What’s the intersection of that Venn diagram?
When a rich person needs a kidney transplant, they don’t hire mercenaries to kidnap the best transplant surgeon in the world, and force them to operate at gunpoint. Instead they go to a hospital, and pay whatever the bill is.
Same thing with rich people who need magic healing. They ask “how much”, I tell them “a lot”, they pay, and I use the money for whatever.
And yes, you’re gonna need security on the level of a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. I have no idea what kind of security they have, but whatever they have it’s going to have to be something like that.
I honestly don’t understand the fear of ending up at Guantanamo Bay. What good will you accomplish there? Yeah, powerful and amoral people will want to use your power for their own ends. And how does locking me up accomplish that?
The two-tier system of free healing by lottery, and expensive healing for the rich takes care of the incentives for Bill Gates to kidnap me and lock me in the basement of his mansion in Redmond.
It would be kind of ironic if the only person your healing power doesn’t work on is yourself.
I’m glad someone put a figure on it, that really is a low number, even if you worked longer hours its still not that high. Though another way of looking at it is that over 30 years you could heal 1’200’000 people. which is nothing to sneeze at.
I’m not sure that follows, it depends on whether you consider the natural process of ageing to be a disease or not. You could be seventy and in perfect health otherwise.
btw if anyone is interested this thread was inspired by the story of Ze Arigo, a claimed Brazilian healer in the 1960’s:
