Gary Mannion, Psychic Surgeon

Last night I happened to watch the BBC documentary on Carte Blanche about psychic surgeon Gary Mannion, I’d never heard of him until last night. The documentary wasn’t bad, the interview was well balanced for one on psychic phenomena. However, I cannot say the same about Gary Mannion. I found his performance extremely funny and his healing and psychic abilities just as laughable. There were also parts of the documentary that made me very angry too, which I will get to shortly. If he is the new “wunderkind” in British psychic circles then the woo woo brigade must be scraping the bottom of the New Age barrel.

When I heard that he was a psychic surgeon, I was expecting to see him triumphantly dangle bloody chicken bits in front of the camera as proof of his healing abilities. Icky bits of chicken flesh must be passé in healing circles nowadays because all Gary Mannion did was place his hands on the area that was affected by pain and disease, and voila, the patient was much better – a very disappointing performance indeed.

Gary claims that his hands are guided spiritually during surgery by none other than the biblical Abraham. Gary also channels Abraham and we get to meet him during the program – this was the part that I found hysterically funny – Abraham it turns out, has a posh British accent. One would have expected Abraham to speak Akkadian or some other Semitic language, or even English with a Hebrew or Yiddish accent; instead he sounds like a right toff when he speaks through Gary Mannion. Is there some great spiritual school in the sky that all potential guides have to pass through before they can choose an earthbound human to channel through? They all seem to spout the same airy fairy codswallop; I’ve been to a few New Age fairs and I’ve heard the same drivel repeated over and over. Not only does Gary channel Abraham, but he can chat with other spirits too, although we didn’t get to see him do that during the documentary. He also said that Abraham is constantly with him, except for three days a month; so does he go on ‘oliday then, luv?

Gary also conducted a séance for the cameras, which was hilarious. Naturally all the lights were turned off; the camera crew continued filming so they would have been able to pick up any sleight of hand tricks that Gary might have attempted. Unfortunately, not a single lost soul from the other side made an appearance for the cameras, the table stubbornly refused to move, and not a single spirit felt the urge to knock on the walls to make their presence known. I so wanted to see the table float about, or see some ghostly ectoplasm dribble from Gary’s left nostril, but, sadly, it was not to be.

The documentary focused on a few of Gary’s “patients” and how they have been healed, but there were three that stood out for me. The first was an old man who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease; it’s a horrendous disease that robs you of your memories and your personality. To watch someone you love die from it is heartbreaking; so to watch Gary Mannion sit there with his hands on this man’s head and claim to have made a difference, made my blood boil. I honestly wanted punch him in the nose and tell him to put his hand on it and get Abraham to heal it for him. The doctor examining the cases Gary Mannion has claimed to have healed said that the patient’s slight improvement was attributed to a brief period of lucidity that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes experience during their illness.

The second patient to catch my attention was an overweight woman who suffered from chronic back pain due to an injury. Now this one I could personally relate to. I fractured two vertebrae in my lower after a bad fall and have ongoing problems with my back; I would have offered her the following advice….

1. Lose weight

2. Strengthen your abdominal and back muscles, and…..

3. See a physiotherapist.

It doesn’t stop the pain altogether, but you are more able to deal with it. Instead, Gary placed his hands on her back for a few minutes and that was supposed to have taken her pain away. Later in the program she tells us that Gary’s psychic surgery didn’t really help and that she was trying another New Age technique to help her deal with the pain.

The third patient had been seeing Gary on and off for a year to help her with gallstones. She had one large gallstone that Gary said had broken up and dissolved during the psychic surgery sessions she had been receiving. She had believed him because she had not been in pain for a year, so she was quite confident to undergo another ultrasound when the interviewer asked her if she was willing to have one to prove that Gary had healed her. There are no prizes for guessing what the result of her ultrasound was. Yep, you guessed it, the gallstone was still there. Absolutely nothing had happened to it. The patient was disappointed and Gary was at a loss for words. I could see his mind searching desperately for a reason to give the interviewer as to why the gallstone was still there after Gary had said it was gone. I almost felt sorry for him. Then it was my turn to be gob smacked when she said that she would continue to see him for psychic surgery because although the gallstone was still there, he had taken her pain away.

The doctor who was asked to look into  Gary’s healed patients said that all of the cases could be attributed to the placebo effect or to the medication that the patients were already taking before seeing Gary Mannion for psychic surgery; so in fact, not one of them had been cured by Gary Mannion.

The interviewer said that what he saw in Gary Mannion was pure faith and that it was this faith that perhaps made people continue to come and see him; all I saw was a well rehearsed conman, and not a very good one at that. He’s quick to cover his arse with disclaimers by saying that he is not a doctor and the advice he offers on a range of illnesses is purely his opinion and that people are free to make decisions regarding their health based on his opinions. Until recently, he claimed to be able to heal people suffering with cancer, but had to take those claims off his website after complaints by skeptics. In my view, Gary Mannion is a fraud and a dangerous one at that; but hey, that’s my opinion and you’re free to listen to it or ignore it.