Misdiagnosis And Healing Miracles

How many healing claims can be dismissed as cases of mistaken diagnosis? Even if illness A was mistaken for illness B by a doctor, not all evidence of an illness is of a medical nature. Often, the person suffering from the illness can notice bodily pains, diminishing of the usual capabilities of his body, etc. without something like an X-ray or doctor's diagnosis. If the symptoms noticed by the person with the illness end at the time of a prayer for healing, for example, then suggesting that illness A was mistaken for illness B doesn't, by itself, explain why the illness was cured in coordination with prayer. The argument for misdiagnosis would have to be accompanied by other arguments, such as an argument that the actual illness was one that could be cured psychosomatically and an argument that the person was in a condition to experience such a psychosomatic healing. Critics of the miracle in question should be expected to make a full case for their alternative scenario rather than merely making a case for misdiagnosis.

Craig Keener writes:

Those who question supernatural healing claims often attribute the more convincing cases to an initial misdiagnosis. Although genuine misdiagnosis does occur at times, this approach sometimes has been used as a means to explain away extranormal healings retroactively, and sometimes the initial evidence is too firm to aver a misdiagnosis. (Recall the case above in which physicians preferred to claim that they must have misdiagnosed and mistreated the patient for twenty years rather than allow that the patient had been miraculously healed during prayer.) To simply dismiss every cure as a case of prior misdiagnosis is to allow one's presupposition to determine the outcome, especially when it involves many cases and the prior diagnoses involve multiple physicians. One healing evangelist reasonably complains that if critics really believe that so many hundreds of healing cases result from initial misdiagnosis, they should be raising an outcry against such widespread misdiagnosis instead of against divine healing….

Among more recent cures at Lourdes, the standards of documentation for case histories are too stringent for possible misdiagnoses to pass (Cranston, Miracle, 259)….

Matt Marsak, phone interview, Aug. 21, 2010, noted that his surgeon found no trace of cancer, even though all the lab tests showed cancer. When Matt suggested that God had answered prayer and healed him, the surgeon insisted that he must have been misdiagnosed, implying that all the previous experts were wrong. Matt suggested that if he really did accept such a position it could invite a malpractice suit, whereupon, he reports, the doctor quickly backed down from the misdiagnosis proposal….

Given all the claims of healings in the world, attributing most of them to misdiagnosis would also present a very incompetent medical industry meriting far more pervasive lawsuits – an evaluation I think as wrong as the antisupernaturalism it would be constructed to support.

People who can explain away reliable eyewitness testimony of cataracts instantly disappearing (a recognition that should not require graduate training in ophthalmology) are people who have designed the rules so they can explain away whatever is necessary. In a culture shaped by Enlightenment assumptions about miracles, Western skeptics could conceivably deny tens of thousands of claims by attributing all of them to misdiagnosis, misinterpretation, and so forth. Such dismissal of any possible evidence, at the expense of viewing malpractice as pervasive and coincidence as extraordinarily rife during prayers, makes the collection of any eyewitness claims and medical documentation superfluous; such skepticism is impervious to correction.

(Miracles [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011], 661, nn. 98 and 101 on 661-662, 667-668)