Dr. Oz to feature "faith healer" on his show on January 11th

January 11th update: This episode has been pre-empted because Dr. Oz will have a special show on tonight with guests discussing the injuries sustained by Congresswoman Gifford and her condition. The show featuring Dr. Nemeh will air at a later date. Scroll down for a link to a radio interview featuring Dr. Oz speaking about Dr. Nemeh.

January 12th update: According to the latest information I received, the episode has been rescheduled for Feb. 1. In the meantime, I invite readers to give me their opinion on whether faith healing and energy healing are the same, similar, or different.

Read more.
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This is my original January 8th post:

According to buzz on the web, Dr. Oz will have a "faith healer" on his show on January 11th. The title of the show will be Is This Man a Faith Healer or Not? According to another site, called Path of Faith, the healer in question is Dr. Issam Nemeh, "a Cleveland-based physician and devout Catholic who has prayed over tens of thousands of people from all faiths and all walks of life in the past two decades."

Dr. Oz is here joining something of a trend, as both CNN and Oprah have recently featured shows on John of God, a faith healer from Brazil. Oprah has certainly come in for her share of criticism for doing this, and I look forward to seeing how Dr. Oz handles the issue on live television.

Here is is a radio preview.

From the critics' perspective the problem in featuring selected "faith healers" would be the implied endorsement of all faith healers, not to mention of the concept of faith healing in general, horrifying Western scientific rationalist thinkers who would prefer not to have such a thing exist.

And from the practical point of view while John of God and Dr. Issam Nemeh may be able to perform miracles, your self-proclaimed faith healer down the block might not be. But generally speaking faith healers attract their clientele through word-of-mouth endorsements, so by the time they have been in business long enough to be well known, one has to assume a certain amount of proficiency.

The issue from my perspective is what faith healing is, and through what mechanism it works. Is it simply "anomalous" healing, done through belief in an outside agency? Is this belief even necessary, or does it simply create trust in the healing, and along with it the brainwave patterns that are known to produce such healing? It is known that healers can induce these brainwave patterns in those they treat through a process called entrainment. What is less clear is who or what the entities are that some psychic healers, such as John of God and the late Lew Smith, claim to work with. Are they indeed real entities, or are they projections of the healer's own abilities?

Dr. Bill Bengston, who calls himself a "faithless healer" and claims that belief is not necessary for healing, provides a bridge between the skeptics who say this kind of healing cannot exist and the believers who say it most certainly does. I wonder what the critics would say to Dr. Bengston's experiments, in which dozens of mice were cured of deadly cancers through energy healing. The idea that this kind of healing is possible even without faith, and that there is scientific proof to show it, ought to reassure them. But maybe it will only make them more nervous.