Faith healers attack cancer with prayer

THE PRESS

IN GOD THEY TRUST: A faith-healing group prays over Stacey Edmonds at the Healing Room in Linwood yesterday. The faith healers are, facing camera left to right, Pastor Dee Rea, Adele Marsh and Ruth Taueki.

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A Christian faith-healing clinic has opened in Christchurch offering to cure cancer, broken bones and mental illness through prayer.

The New Zealand Healing Rooms clinic in Worcester St, Linwood, is set up like a doctor's surgery, with a waiting room leading to treatment rooms, where two pastors and divine-healing technicians pray for patients.

Pastor Marie Rea said they used "aggressive" prayer techniques based on the teachings of Canadian evangelist John Lake.

"It's a place where Jesus is the healer," she said.

Patients were not charged and were counselled to not stop regular medical treatment.

Rea said patients with problems as diverse as stroke paralysis, cancer or dyslexia were cured, usually within one 20-minute session.

Shirleene Turnbull, a member of the group, said she had a stroke on Boxing Day last year and was paralysed. With treatment by prayer, she was able to walk out of hospital 16 days later, she said. "The doctors called it a miracle," she said.

Adele Marsh, another member of the group, said her daughter suffered from dyslexia and her handwriting was illegible. After a prayer session, her writing became legible.

Pastor Dee Rea said the group did not want to give false hope to patients but it got "very high results" in the treatment of cancer.

The patient did not have to convert to Christianity and did not even have to be a believer, he said.

One sceptic, Phil Tauwhare, said he had a history of bladder disease. On two occasions he went to the healers in great pain and urinating blood. After his healing sessions he felt worse than before, he said.

He went to a doctor who gave him antibiotics that cleared up the problem in three days. "I thought, `What's going on here?"'

However, he became a believer when a subsequent checkup showed he had seven tumours in his bladder. He had several prayer sessions, and surgeons could find only three tumours after that.

GP and former New Zealand Medical Council chairwoman Pippa MacKay said the claims about curing cancer were "mischievous".

"To imply that that kind of quackery is as good or better than medical science is dangerous. How can they claim that? How many controlled trials have they done?"

McKay said the group would give people "the wrong kind of hope".

Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences Associate Professor Dee Mangin said it was important people with serious illnesses sought treatment that had the strongest evidence for efficacy.

Mangin said seriously ill people were "vulnerable to hope".