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Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis is a pediatrician and director of the Lourdes Medical Office. His specialty is quite unusual as he verifies inexplicable healings from a medical point of view. Every year at the Sanctuary of Lourdes, pilgrims report that they have been miraculously healed. Such declarations are analyzed by specialists in the field of medicine, before they are considered impossible to explain and submitted to religious institutions for their own verification.
- Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis is a doctor who investigates miraculous healings in the French city of Lourdes
- Declarations of miraculous healings are first analyzed by specialists in various fields of medicine
- If the healing cannot be clarified on the basis of medical knowledge, the matter is referred to Church officials
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Sanctuary of Lourdes and miraculous healings
The sanctuary in Lourdes, France, is a popular pilgrimage destination for Catholics. The sanctuary is dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes and is known as the place of healings. Catholic tradition says that in 1858 there were several apparitions of Our Lady in Lourdes. 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous was supposed to experience them. She discovered a cave with a spring whose waters, according to believers, have healing properties.
The waters of the Lourdes spring have been tested for their chemical composition, but have not been found to have any special healing properties. Despite this, every year pilgrims come to the sanctuary, and bedridden people bathe in pools filled with water obtained from the spring. Every year, an average of 30-40 people report that they have experienced a miraculous healing. What does medicine say?
Who is Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis?
Each miraculous healing declaration in Lourdes is analyzed to help determine if a medical explanation can be found. This is the subject that Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis, a pediatrician by profession, who also obtained a master’s degree in epidemiology from Harvard, is dealing with.
De Franciscis is also director of the Lourdes Medical Office and the Lourdes International Medical Committee (CMIL). The task of these institutions is to medically assess cases of potential healings. If they find that the healing is medically inexplicable, it is up to the Church to proceed, which may declare a miracle.
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How are miraculous healings verified?
Since 1858, thousands of miraculous healings have been reported in Lourdes. Specialists from various fields of medicine have analyzed nearly 7,5 thousand using a special method. cases. According to Dr. de Franciscis, from this pool of the entire verification procedure concluded with the confirmation of the occurrence of a miracle by the Church, a total of 70 unexplained healings (including seven recognized by the bishop as miracles even at the time of the Marian apparitions) underwent a total of XNUMX healings.
Before religious or canonical procedures begin, miraculous healings are analyzed against seven criteria:
- confirmed diagnosis;
- poor prognosis of the disease;
- unexpected healing;
- instant healing;
- complete recovery;
- permanent recovery;
- the possibility of a medical explanation of the healing.
Only after a thorough analysis of all criteria, CMIL can conclude that there is a miraculous healing, i.e. a healing that is inexplicable from a medical point of view. As Dr. Alessandro de Franciscis points out, this process can take up to 5-10 years. CMIL may view a particular situation as an inexplicable healing, but it is up to the Church to proclaim a miracle related to faith and religion.
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Miraculous healings in Lourdes – voices of skeptics
The issue of miraculous healings in Lourdes was also met with skeptical reception in various circles. The skeptic and opponent of pseudoscience James Randi in his book “The Faith Healers” drew attention to the case of a patient with hemiplegia and recurrent blindness of one eye, whose recovery was recognized by the Lourdes commission as a miraculous healing. The case was examined by a group of American researchers.
During the verification, it turned out that no tests were carried out that could clearly indicate the cause of the ailments, i.e. brain x-rays or lumbar puncture. Thus, without the support of these studies, the symptoms could most likely indicate hysteria (hysterical neurosis). The more so as it is a neurotic disorder in which patients react strongly to emotional events, and these include religious ceremonies.
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As a counterbalance, in 2014 there was also a scientific analysis of healings in Lourdes, prepared under the supervision of retired medical professor Bernard François. It shows that some healings could in fact be related to hysteria or mental disorders. Others, however, were purely anatomical (tumors, open wounds), and there were also diseases such as tuberculosis and multiple sclerosis.
The analysis shows that indeed many patients recovered in a way that medicine cannot explain, and health problems have not returned.. In the scientific work, attention was drawn to the fact that miraculous healings can be evidence of the occurrence of somatic and mental processes that science has not yet learned.