Sathya Sai Baba and ‘miracle cures’
The hagiographic literature about Sathya Sai Baba’s ‘miraculous’ cures is extensive. Due to the nature of his alleged ‘methods’, no scientific control study has so far been made of any of the claims of miraculous healing from him, either spontaneously or in answer to prayers. He is also reported as carrying out ‘exorcisms’ or driving out demons from ‘possessed’ persons and ‘psychic surgery’. None of this is to say that he, like thousands of others of reported ‘healers’, cannot have been somehow involved in people’s healing processes, most likely as a catalytic agent on whom one concentrates deeply with faith and hope and projects any positive results if or when improvements occur. (For a deeper analysis of these matters, see here)
On the other hand, hundreds of reports have come from persons who have sacrificed and prayed to Sathya Sai Baba constantly for themselves or for another, but all of whom have only got worse! Of course, the handy theory of past bad karma is trundled out to explain away the possibility of a cure in this or that persons’ instance. All evidence that Sathya Sai Baba does not heal, does not keep his word, or is not able to heal people of himself has to be refuted by the ‘true believer’, whose agenda is totally to block out all experience that may lead to another explanation or in any way be interpreted to reduce their hard-held belief that Sathya Sai Baba is a divine healer and God himself.
Even devotees who feel the need to keep up a front despite themselves not having been healed according to Sathya Sai Baba’s promise will convince themselves that they have been helped… and even lie about this, such as Mrs. Phyllis Krystal did about the headaches she claimed Sai Baba cured her of (after being asked point blank in public at the 1990 Sai Baba conference in Hamburg). However, she was still suffering from them for years afterwards, as Lucas Ralli (with whom she stayed when in London) informed me most definitively and to my great surprise. Sathya Sai Baba is one among many thousands who claims the power to heal – claims which of course have never been substiantiated by serious medical researchers under controlled conditions – a list which includes many known and highly controversial names: Mary Baker Eddy, Edgar Cayce, Chico Xavier, José (Zé) Arigó, Yokoshiaki Omura, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn and Peter Younggren, Stephen Turoff and so on and on…
Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed 