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Oh God, let her go! That's the power of the Holy Spirit! Give the Lord a clap offering! Come on! Come on!

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Faith healing is a part of modern life. Are the cures it claims to accomplish real?

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I think at a meeting of faith healing where a person gets up, actually walks, who did not walk prior to the faith healing,

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is a case of questionable pathology.

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Between religion and medicine, the laying on of hands remains a subject of intense controversy.

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Faith healing is as old as illness in mankind. It was the first treatment for sickness.

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Combining the mental and the spiritual, it is part of medical practice in Kenya.

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For the natives of Haiti, the ceremony of Voodoo is the key to spiritual and physical health.

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Here, modern Catholicism is mingled with the superstitions of an ancient history.

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Voodoo compels the people to cast off evil spirits and welcome good ones.

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The rituals of the Peruvian witch doctor are uniquely her own.

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It is a fact, however, that throughout the world, the practices may differ,

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but the religious principles behind faith healing are the same. It claims to be divinely inspired.

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Nowhere is divine healing so well documented as in the Christian faith.

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In the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus performed his first healing in the Galilee.

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He cured the son of a nobleman.

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This began a tradition which evangelists have continued into modern times.

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In the 1920s, the founder of the Angelus Temple used radio to bring the ancient practice of faith healing to the masses.

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America was stirred by the popular broadcasts of evangelist Amy Semple McPherson.

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Sixty years later, the healing traditions of Amy Semple McPherson continue to be practiced.

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Religion claims they are miracles. How do we define miracle? Is it what medicine calls a cure?

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Whatever the term, staggering numbers of healings are claimed by such evangelists as Catherine Coleman.

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You better know the why of these miracles. You better know the why of it.

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It's not Catherine Coleman. It's not some personality.

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I'm giving you the picture, the world picture.

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But remember something.

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There is the spiritual side.

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Somebody received the healing for emphysema. Just breathe very deeply.

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You'll find that you're breathing perfectly. There's not a treat that emphysema there.

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Just breathe very deeply as the parable of the ghosts has gone through that body of ghosts.

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It happened while I was speaking.

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There's another cancer healing someplace and every bit of pain has left that body.

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Something, I don't know what it is, but something is happening in the wheelchair section.

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That's the only thing that I know. Something is happening back there. It's all over this place.

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There will be a miracle service or services when literally every person in that place will be healed by the power of God.

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And I believe that with every out of my heart.

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In the eight short decades of the 20th century, medicine has created drugs which control viruses and kill infections

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and has virtually eradicated such killer diseases as polio, smallpox, cholera and malaria.

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Faith healing also claims to have cured these diseases.

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Should it be added to the arsenal of modern medicine? How does faith healing work?

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When modern medicine pronounces a disease incurable, the ill and the handicapped turn in new directions.

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In the summer of 1980, hundreds of people gathered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to hear evangelist Morris Cirillo preach salvation and healing.

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They came seeking remedies for multiple sclerosis, chronic back pain, spine conditions, kidney problems, even cancer.

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The thousands who attended each meeting are testimony to their belief that faith can heal.

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Do you believe that the power of the Holy Spirit could come so strong that everybody could be healed?

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Come on, do you believe that? When you leave this building tonight, I promise you as God's servant that you will never be the same.

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I do, on many occasions, lay hands on the sick in obedience to the scriptural admonition.

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The Bible says they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.

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We believe that the final word and the final authority over all sickness, all disease and all authority over pain is in the hands of Almighty God.

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Mr. Rebel, this is Lydia. Eight years she has had terrible swelling in her hands.

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So much so that she couldn't even begin to take these rings off of tonight. They're loose.

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Give the Lord a clap, come on, give him praise.

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We believe in people using medicine and using pills to alleviate their sufferings and their pains and their ills.

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But what do they do when the doctor says there's nothing more that I can do for you? Do they give up? We teach them don't give up.

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In the name of Jesus, everybody with a bone disease, everybody with a back infirmity, misplaced vertebrae, a spine disorder, swelling in your legs, everybody with that kind of a condition.

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In the name of Jesus, raise your right hand. Quickly, raise it right up.

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Alright, workers, with these people here, please bring them right down over here to the side. Please help them, help them out.

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Please help them out. Father, we give you praise. Please help them right out.

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Did you ever feel anything like this? Please. Did you ever feel it? It's like warm liquid fire flowing over this whole building.

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Come on, give him praise. Come on.

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Father, I thank you for this meal.

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Oh, come.

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Oh, God. Let her go. That's the power of the Holy Spirit. Come on, give the Lord a clap offering. Come on.

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Come on.

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Come on.

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Keep moving around.

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Go on and give him the glory. Go on.

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What's happened before?

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Come on. Come on. Give those praise.

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Come on.

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That's a big, tall branch.

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Way around. Come on.

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Way back.

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Dr. Council Miller, an orthopedic surgeon, questions the validity of these immediate cures.

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I think at a meeting of faith healing where a person gets up, actually walks, who supposedly had not walked prior to the faith healing,

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healer touching that person, is a case of questionable pathology.

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I'm not quite certain that that person had any anatomical or physiological deficit to begin with.

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Perhaps that person was, quote, siked into thinking he couldn't walk.

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And then on the suggestion of the faith healer, that person actually showed that he could indeed walk.

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I wouldn't call that a cure necessarily for any medical disease process that that patient had.

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And I think it may have been a suggested physical defect, more so than a physiological anatomical defect.

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Do it again.

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Do it again.

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Do it again.

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Help me. Help me.

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Help me.

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Help me.

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Hallelujah.

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Medical science and what people call healing by faith or faith healing,

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these which were worlds apart many years ago, are coming closer and closer and closer together.

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There is a great appreciation in the heart of all true doctors for what can happen in the life of an individual through the power of faith in God.

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Give the Lord a clap for him. Come on.

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No single disease raises as many fears as cancer.

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Its victims reach beyond conventional medicine toward any scrap of hope.

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They are vulnerable to such remedies as leitreal and faith healing.

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Can these help?

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Dr. Michael Vanskoi Mosier is a specialist in the treatment of cancer.

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Why patients leave establishment medicine such as we are and go to, let's say, non-conventional kinds of therapy, I think is very individual.

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Some patients go because of a long feeling of distrust of the medical establishment.

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Some go because they recognize that conventional therapies have nothing to offer.

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And rather than accept no chance or no hope, really, they go where there is some kind of hope at least.

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We all get to the point of realizing that specific therapy can no longer reverse the patient's medical condition when we realize that there is no realistic expectation for reversing the course of their illness.

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The will to get better and a positive attitude are very important parts of the therapy of cancer.

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I can provide certain things to a patient in terms of treatment that I believe is useful, but the patient has to provide something else which is a real strong, positive approach to things and a need and a will to get better.

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Science is always looking for miracles. It's just a matter of what you call a miracle.

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But as a physician, I don't go looking for miracles. I've come to see very little magic really in the treatment of cancer and I focus on what's realistically possible.

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It is the answer and he'll wait for you.

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For some, like Reverend Joseph Lee and his congregation, miracle cures are real.

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It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right.

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I'm so glad that I had the answer that you would speak to the point.

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Isn't it wonderful?

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Isn't it wonderful?

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Isn't it wonderful?

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Isn't it wonderful?

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In rousing moving ceremonies, Reverend Lee claims hundreds of cures.

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What is this impelling force that encourages the body to heal?

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Is it possible for science to discover its source? In search of, we'll explore this possibility next.

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Doctors can only guess to what extent the brain controls the body. They do know it is our greatest untapped resource.

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This is the major premise behind the newly emerging field of medicine known as holistic.

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Are all forms of unconventional healing merely a question of mind over matter?

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Or is there another force at work, an objective force that can be measured?

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Dr. Bernard Grad of the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal attempts to isolate this objective healing factor.

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I believe that these were the first studies done on plants and animals that showed that the so-called psychic healing

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was in fact a real and objective process and not due to any so-called placebo effect or suggestion of any kind.

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I want to emphasize one point that all of these studies that we had done were done by conventional techniques.

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If I had studied a drug or a vitamin, I would have used similar techniques.

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So the only thing that was unconventional about it was the question I asked, that is, can laying on of the hands actually accelerate a healing process?

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Dr. Grad devised an experiment which requires uniformly wounding the backs of three sets of mice.

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The experimental mice will be held between the hands of a faith healer twice daily for two weeks.

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The other two are control groups.

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Except for the healing treatments, all maintenance procedures are identical for the three groups.

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Two controls are necessary in order to prove that heat alone is not the healing energy Dr. Grad is seeking.

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Oscar Estabani, a healer, agreed to participate in the experiments.

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Estabani is a political refugee from Hungary.

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It was there he discovered the healing energies which seemed to emanate from his hands.

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Can Estabani significantly accelerate the healing process?

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Pain's taking observation and record keeping are documented.

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Dr. Grad is able to accurately gauge the healing rates of the separate groups by measuring the size and shape of each wound.

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He takes these measurements regularly and plots them on charts.

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The results are startling.

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In two weeks, 75% of the mice in Estabani's group, those in the center, will be able to measure the healing rates.

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The mice are almost entirely healed.

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It must be understood that this healing takes place by stimulating the body's own processes of healing.

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It's not some magical thing which is taken from the outside and put in like a tape cassette.

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We're playing the music that comes from the body itself.

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I feel in this process of healing by the laying on of hands, a transfer, I believe, of an energy.

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I've called it an energy of healing.

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I believe that in a sense, it may be the energetic basis of consciousness.

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It seems to know what to do.

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I think the power of the mind alone in the treatment of diseases is a completely unknown quantity.

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I think that there is potential power there.

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I've become convinced of that and I think a lot of physicians have.

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But I am totally unconvinced that anyone's learned how to tap into that power.

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And therefore, since we can't tap into it reliably, it's hard to know what its ultimate strength is going to be.

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Is the power of the mind so great that it can cure cancer?

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In 1976, while our cameras were filming in search of life after death,

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we found a poignant story which may hold the key to tapping this potential.

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Seven-year-old Michael Friedman was stricken with cancer of the kidney.

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At that time, he began a highly unusual therapy with Sheldon Ruderman, his teacher and his leader.

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This is their story as we presented it four years ago.

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In fact, he was dealing with a seriously advanced lung cancer.

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The emotional tone of both the letter and the subsequent meetings we had

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spoke really powerfully to me about the powerful emotional reality they represented in the present.

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Sheldon Ruderman's encounter with death began in 1960.

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The experience had a profound effect on him and changed the direction of his life.

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He now counsels cancer patients like Michael Friedman

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and believes that the power of the mind can reinforce medical treatment.

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Thus far, the results have been positive.

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When's your birthday again?

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January 29.

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Okay, by January 29.

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If we keep doing this, if we keep doing it, the doctors will tell you to do.

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It's coming on.

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When I asked my surgeon what he thought, he gave me less than two years to live.

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Like a lot of other cancer patients, my original diagnosis seemed to me unbelievable.

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I mean, somehow it still seemed a little unbelievable.

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Six years after Sheldon Ruderman was told he had only two years to live,

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his cancer is in complete remission.

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What could he tell us about Michael Friedman?

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The first day I came over and saw Michael,

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I kind of bribed him a little bit with a bag of bagels.

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But Michael, right from the beginning, looking at him,

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struck me as somebody that was going to be able to do this,

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primarily because he was not a grown-up,

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and he didn't have the built-in skepticism that grown-ups have about thinking about pictures and stuff like that.

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So I asked Michael about what was the matter with him, and he told me about his monster.

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And we talked about the idea of somehow shrinking and killing that monster.

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On the very first day I saw Michael, something prompted me to ask him,

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how long will it take for you to get rid of this monster?

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And after warning me that this was a big monster, so I shouldn't be too optimistic,

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he thought about it for a while and he said, by the time I'm eight years old,

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his eighth birthday was six months away.

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The sight of Michael moved us deeply.

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He was so frail, so emaciated, none of us were convinced that he could survive.

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Four years later, Michael is a healthy, vibrant, eleven-year-old.

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His cancer is fully in remission.

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Michael describes the cancer he called a monster.

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Well, the monster when I had cancer had big giant feet and long fingers,

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and it had holes everywhere.

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Inside of each hole were two little holes at the top,

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and the little holes at the top were for breathing.

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And what I did was I took some gooey stuff and put it in a gun,

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and shot it at the holes, clogged it up, and it couldn't breathe and it shrank,

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until it became nothing.

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Michael Friedman has defeated his harrowing monster.

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He continues to create mind stories.

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They have kept him alive.

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I do my mind stories at night before I go to bed.

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First I count down from 20 to zero to relax myself,

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and I walk over to a tub-like thing and change into a sponge.

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And once I'm a sponge, I squeeze myself to get all the bad emotions out.

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And then I change back into a person,

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and then I walk back over to the elevator, count from zero to 20,

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and then I call my dad.

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Michael Friedman's story is a success story.

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There are many failures.

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It is, however, an indication of what faith-heaving might be about,

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and where modern medicine might be headed.

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Coming up next, In Search of continues with the probe into the powerful forces of biofeedback.

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Then on FBI the untold stories,

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the agency's behavioral science unit creates a profile of a brutal killer.

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And later tonight confront the massive power of one of the most extraordinary places on earth,

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Niagara, a history of the falls at Ninety-Stern-Ten Pacific.