I met Ms. Digan in person, and there’s a bit more to the story than is told on the site; the two most important things are that 1) the doctors who examined her were not, as the site implies, Catholic stooges, just normal doctors, most of them atheist; and 2) her son, a very young child at the time, came with her to Poland and stayed behind in the room, and also experienced a healing—he had some sort of degenerative muscular disorder which prevented him from moving unassisted, and when they returned to the hotel he was sitting up, coloring in a coloring book.
Long-term physical conditions can be caused or aggravated by factors which religious people call spiritual, and which secular people call psychological. See the longer account of this story. The mother spent years of her life depressed, medicated, and in hospital. Perhaps the son’s muscles were atrophying because he had a similar malaise. It was the healthy father who in a moment of despair had a religious experience and took his family across the world. The body is capable of amazing transformations and they can be prompted by a new set and setting. The heart will beat faster, posture will change, and that alone might relieve the pressure on the lymph nodes responsible for leg lymphedema. And then the son can respond to the new psychological mood in the family and show signs of life.
The first account claims that lymphedema does not go into remission. A simple google search refutes this; spontaneous remission of lymphedema is well documented.
The second one doesn’t even state what the man’s heart recovered from.
Accounts of miracles tend to systematically overrate their significance, when they’re not made up entirely. I’d say the rational response is to assume one or the other is going on when you hear such an account. Knowing nothing about lymphedema as a medical condition, I was able to predict in advance that the claim that it does not go into remission would turn out to be false, on the basis of my experience with other miracle claims.
Just realise that the overwhelming majority of people who go to gods or saints with diseases like this don’t get cured in this manner; what about them? What does that say about the effectiveness of miracles?
There are plenty of situations that could have resulted in her getting better. Something to do with the travel, or perhaps the treatments started working, or perhaps for reasons current medicine doesn’t know. Apparently, according to wikipedia we don’t even know what the cause of lymphadema is. It could have been something she ate, who cares? People seemingly inexplicably get better from diseases all the time, and this one is no exception. These people wanting to attribute it to a saint or whatever doesn’t mean anything much to me, and it seems much more likely that they are delusional or liars with regards to the events at the site and hearing the saint’s voice and whatnot.
What is the rational response to something like this? Because I still don’t know what to think.
http://thedivinemercy.org/message/stfaustina/graces.php
I met Ms. Digan in person, and there’s a bit more to the story than is told on the site; the two most important things are that 1) the doctors who examined her were not, as the site implies, Catholic stooges, just normal doctors, most of them atheist; and 2) her son, a very young child at the time, came with her to Poland and stayed behind in the room, and also experienced a healing—he had some sort of degenerative muscular disorder which prevented him from moving unassisted, and when they returned to the hotel he was sitting up, coloring in a coloring book.
Seriously, wtf?
Long-term physical conditions can be caused or aggravated by factors which religious people call spiritual, and which secular people call psychological. See the longer account of this story. The mother spent years of her life depressed, medicated, and in hospital. Perhaps the son’s muscles were atrophying because he had a similar malaise. It was the healthy father who in a moment of despair had a religious experience and took his family across the world. The body is capable of amazing transformations and they can be prompted by a new set and setting. The heart will beat faster, posture will change, and that alone might relieve the pressure on the lymph nodes responsible for leg lymphedema. And then the son can respond to the new psychological mood in the family and show signs of life.
The first account claims that lymphedema does not go into remission. A simple google search refutes this; spontaneous remission of lymphedema is well documented.
The second one doesn’t even state what the man’s heart recovered from.
Accounts of miracles tend to systematically overrate their significance, when they’re not made up entirely. I’d say the rational response is to assume one or the other is going on when you hear such an account. Knowing nothing about lymphedema as a medical condition, I was able to predict in advance that the claim that it does not go into remission would turn out to be false, on the basis of my experience with other miracle claims.
Just realise that the overwhelming majority of people who go to gods or saints with diseases like this don’t get cured in this manner; what about them? What does that say about the effectiveness of miracles?
There are plenty of situations that could have resulted in her getting better. Something to do with the travel, or perhaps the treatments started working, or perhaps for reasons current medicine doesn’t know. Apparently, according to wikipedia we don’t even know what the cause of lymphadema is. It could have been something she ate, who cares? People seemingly inexplicably get better from diseases all the time, and this one is no exception. These people wanting to attribute it to a saint or whatever doesn’t mean anything much to me, and it seems much more likely that they are delusional or liars with regards to the events at the site and hearing the saint’s voice and whatnot.