Even before he died last year in an automobile accident at the age of 49, the peasant known as Arigó had become a legend in his native Brazil. Claiming to be guided by the wise voice of a long-deceased physician whom he had never known personally, the uneducated healer saw as many as 300 patients a day, diagnosing and treating them in minutes. For some he suggested minor surgery, frequently performing the operations himself with a pocketknife. For others he recommended drugs, writing prescriptions for unorthodox pharmacological combinations that somehow worked. He treated almost every known ailment, and most of his patients not only survived but actually improved or recovered.
A few years ago, reports on the exploits of such miracle workers would have drawn little more than derision from the scientifically trained. Now, however, many medical researchers are showing a new open-mindedness toward so-called psychic healing and other methods not taught in medical schools. Of the more than 400 doctors, engineers and biophysicists attending a four-day conference on parapsychological medicine at Stanford University last week, few were ready to endorse Arigó's methods. But they were willing to listen as Dr. Henry Puharich, formerly on the faculty of New York University Medical Center, confirmed some of the Brazilian's cures.
Puharich told the conference that his research team had studied firsthand 1,000 of Arigó's cases without learning how the healer made his diagnoses or effected his cures. "But," said Puharich, "our nice modern equipment proved that genuine healing took place under bizarre conditions and unbelievable circumstances. Clearly we have a lot of research ahead of us."
The Stanford conference was full of other tantalizing phenomena that seem to merit thorough investigation. Olga Worrall, director of the New Life Clinic at the Mount Vernon Methodist Church in Baltimore, told how she had cured warts and emotional disorders, and even helped cancer patients by the laying on of hands. Dr. Robert Bradley, a Denver obstetrician who is also president of the American Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, reported on the use of hypnotherapy, long ago proven effective in relieving pain and easing childbirth, to speed healing from surgical wounds.
Elmer Green, director of the Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Menninger Foundation, described new findings about the effectiveness of "biofeed-back." In this technique, the patient is taught to achieve some degree of control over such normally involuntary functions as heart rate and blood flow. Using electronic sensors that tell the patient when he has succeeded in altering some internal function, Green and others have been able to train patients to avoid or relieve migraine headaches, control the body processes that may cause ulcers, and raise and lower their body temperature.