Theatre

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An element of theatre also augments the attraction of the faith healer. This is especially pronounced in American evangelists, who perhaps use the sense of the dramatic to a level where it becomes crass and tawdry, yet executed properly by a healer this can be utilized to add to his or her potency. Christ himself had a pronounced sense of theatre, exhibited in his organization of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the Last Supper and, indeed, the dramatic nature of his many healings.

It is easily conceivable that for someone who has been bedridden for ten years, the very prospect of a trip to visit a faith healer could discharge recuperative agents into the metabolism, just as Mary Baker began to feel better before her meeting with Phineas Quimby. And once in the presence of the faith healer, it is hard to maintain your critical faculties when you are surrounded by devout, friendly and well-meaning believers-to keep your head, as Kipling put it, when all about you are losing theirs.

Perhaps the very practice of healing inherently plays to our sense of the dramatic. The knowledge that faith healers pose an ideological challenge and danger to a profession that has become so arrogant as to be totalitarian sets up a sense of dramatic conflict, but more than this, the dramatic defeat of illness by a healer is a Manichean battle between dark and light, and intensely appealing.

It is ironic that the very herd instinct that doctors are wont to follow in pursuit of their profession and that so disables and detracts from that very profession is the same herd instinct that contributes so much to the success of the healing process in the complementary sphere.

A large contributory factor to the patient's first considering the possibility of visiting a healer will be the proximity of friends and relations who have visited a healer in the past and found it beneficial, and who will advocate it as a possible avenue.

It is interesting to note that a large part of the attraction of complementary health therapies to the general public resides in the glamour it is given by the interest that the British royal family has shown in complementary health treat-merits. For several generations they have had a homoeopathic doctor, and, during his term as President of the BMA, Prince Charles extolled the benefits of holistic medicine, most notably in the speech he made to the BMA in 1983. The Princess of Wales also made clear her interest in complementary therapies.