Psychic surgery
Pseudoscientific medical fraud / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Psychic surgery?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific medical fraud in which practitioners create the illusion of performing surgery with their bare hands and use sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that diseased lesions have been removed and that the incision has spontaneously healed.[1][2][3]
The US Federal Trade Commission describes psychic surgery as a "total hoax".[2] Psychic surgery may cause needless death by keeping the ill away from life-saving medical care.[3] Medical professionals and skeptics classify it as sleight of hand and any positive results as a placebo effect.[4][5][6][7]
Psychic surgery first appeared in the Spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the middle of the 20th century; it has taken different paths in those two countries.[8]