Saint Mother Theresa?

BillyJoe

Penultimate Amazing
B
Joined
Aug 4, 2001
Messages
12,531
From "What's New" (Bob Park, American Physical Society)

This tiny woman had devoted her life to caring for "the poorest
of the poor," built a charity network that spans 120 countries,
and was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, but no miracle, no
sainthood. It was easy in the middle ages; you could whip up a
miracle or two before breakfast, but this is the age of science.
So the Vatican sent a crack team of investigators to India, where
a woman said a beam of light from a picture of Mother Teresa had
cured her of cancer. The team pronounced it a genuine miracle.
But her doctor says no one asked him. He insists it was a cyst,
not cancer, and he cured it with medicine. Who's right? I asked
an old classmate, Dom Credulo, who knows a lot about miracles.
"Do you think this is a miracle?" I asked. "Of course it's a
miracle," Dom snapped, "how many times have you seen a picture
emit light and cure cancer?" He had me there.
Click to expand...

Does anyone have any information about whether the woman had a malignant or benign growth?

BillyJoe.
 
There was a TV programme about this on here last night. She was diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis, and she developed a mass in her abdomen 20 cm wide. No surgery was done because the medics didn't think she was strong enough to stand it, so there was no definitive diagnosis. The medics seemed to think it was probably a non-malignant tuberculous cyst.

There was nothing about a picture or a beam of light. The patient (Monika) was interviewed and described the nuns giving her a medallion to kiss, then tying the medallion to her abdomen with a piece of black cloth. This was followed by a very sudden disappearance of the mass, or at least that 's what the patient described.

The doctors said that the only way such a mass could disappear so fast was if it had ruptured, and if that had happened, the patient would have been critically ill (which she wasn't). However, they didn't subscribe to the miracle theory, they said she was on anti-TB drugs and although they didn't really expect her to recover and certainly not so fast or so suddenly, these things do happen sometimes.

There's no way to exclude either an unusually quick and unexpected recovery (on the other hand, isn't that the very nature of the "miracle"), or that the patient and the nuns are grossly exaggerating what actually happened.

What I wanted to know and what wasn't reported was, was Monika singled out for the medallion and so on, or was this something they did with most patients as a sort of magic ritual? If it was common practice, then the coincidence of a fast and unexpected recovery being associated with the practice is much less surprising (given that fast and unexpected recoveries occasionally happen anyway). However, if they singled out Monika for this ritual for some reason, that does make the coincidence rather more stretched.

Rolfe.
 
Anyone else interested in this?

An opinion from the Indain Rationalist Association

.....the medical records prove that it was sheer conventional medical treatment that rescued her life......The miracle documentation claims that several doctors have certified that the healing was “scientifically inexplicable”, but not a single of these anonymous witnesses could so far be traced. The former health minister of West Bengal, Partho De, revealed that he had been approached by the Vatican agents and asked to name a doctor, who would certify that Monica Besra’s healing was a miracle. He declined support. After ordering the medical records of the case in February 2000 for scrutiny to the Kolkata (Calcutta) health department, he was convinced that there was nothing unusual about the disappearance of the tumor after prolonged medical treatment.

snip>>>>>

Dr. Manju Murshed, superintendent of the government hospital in Balurghat, informed that Monica Besra was admitted in the hospital with severe pain. She suffered from tubercular meningitis and from an ovarian tumor, which was discovered during an ultra-sound investigation. She was subsequently treated by Dr.Tarun Kumar Biwas and the gynecologist Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. After she left the hospital, the treatment was continued in the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital and ended successfully in March 1999. A final ultra-sound investigation showed that the tumor had disappeared.

snip>>>>>

Monica Besra is a 30-year-old tribal woman from Dulidnapur village. She is illiterate and speaks her tribal mother tongue only, laced with a few words of broken Bengali. Until recently she has not been a Christian. The statement is written in fluent English and shows familiarity with details of Catholic belief. It is obvious that the text has not been written or dictated by her. But Monica Besra is not available to bring light into the murky story: she has vanished.
Click to expand...

Pity we can't get hold of the hospital records.
I don't know of any other way to treat an ovarian tumour other than surgical excision but the article seems to suggest it was medical rather than surgical treatment. Also, most ovarian tumours are benign. Was her tumour benign or malignant?

Maybe there should be a "devils advocate" whose role would be to collect contrary evidence.

BillyJoe
 
I don't think they knew for sure what the mass was - the TV programme took the view it might have been a tuberculous cyst. Ovarian tumours can be very malignant (they call it the "silent killer"), but there seems to be no suggestion it was that sort of thing. Ovarian cyst?

Monika was anything but disappeared on the TV programme - they had quite a substantial interview with her, conducted through an interpreter. She described the story in quite a lot of detail - though as I said, there's no way to know how much this tale has grown in the telling.

I thought part of the saint-making thing was supposed to be that they did have a "devil's advocate" to put the no-miracle case, but no such advocate was featured in the programme (and I was actually waiting for that bit). However, given how keen the Pope is to sanctify Mother Theresa, how much chance would he have of being listened to anyway?

This story is so similar to the one-off "miracle cures" touted for homoeopathy and stuff like that, that I just don't see how it's reasonable to view it in a very different light. The only difference is that in this case the claim is one of one-off supernatural intervention, while the homoeopaths would have us believe that the medicine works of its own effect (just not very often and not very repeatably....) As there's no claim of repeatability in this case, however, it's unverifiable but also essentially unfalsifiable.

The Pope wants Mother Theresa to be canonised, and he'll get his way. It's just politics, and that's the way it works.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
As there's no claim of repeatability in this case, however, it's unverifiable but also essentially unfalsifiable.
Click to expand...
You're not seriously suggesting that the Catholic church would accept a second hand, uncorroborated, logically inconsistent story as fact are you? Shame on you!

Rolfe said:
The Pope wants Mother Theresa to be canonised, and he'll get his way.
Click to expand...
Cool, I'd love to see Mother Theresa get shot out of a cannon.
 
Iconoclast said:
You're not seriously suggesting that the Catholic church would accept a second hand, uncorroborated, logically inconsistent story as fact are you? Shame on you!
Click to expand...
You may choose to think so, I couldn't possibly comment....

Rolfe.
 
Personally, I don't really understand why the Catholic Church insists on post mortem miracles as a condition of Stainthood anyway. You'd think a person's actions durring their life would be the important thing. I guess I just don't understand Catholicism.
 
espritch said:
Personally, I don't really understand why the Catholic Church insists on post mortem miracles as a condition of Stainthood anyway. You'd think a person's actions durring their life would be the important thing. I guess I just don't understand Catholicism.
Click to expand...
They sort of explained that on the TV programme. It seems to be about giving God a vote.

Why do I have massive deja-vu about Florida and pregnant chads and people's brothers rigging the count here....?

Rolfe.
 
BillyJoe said:
Maybe there should be a "devils advocate" whose role would be to collect contrary evidence.
Click to expand...

There is! Well, at least, there is supposed to be. For every miracle claim, there is supposed to be an opposer, a vatican rep, who is supposed to fight against the claim.

I have this suspicision that JPII did something like redefined the role of the opposer, or changed the criteria for what constitutes an acceptable miracle in order to push all his new saints through.

From what I have heard about a couple of recent cases, it appears the only thing that the opposer is doing these days is to verify the facts of the case, e.g. she was sick and got better, but does nothing to argue against the claim that a) it is miraculous, and b) that the supposed candidate caused it to happen.

Basically, it looks like they are requiring the opposer to prove that it was not a miracle carried out by that candidate. Of course, because religious claims are really untestable, it can't be done.

It is my guess that this approach ("true until proven not true") is something new installed by JPII to make it easier to make saints. As the original article notes, in today's scientific world, it is a lot harder to distringuish science from a true miracle (even if one did occur).
 
In this thread I am interested only in the medical condition - what was it and what happened?

The husbands version

All this irritates Monica's husband Seiku. "It is much ado about nothing," he says. "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle.".....He concedes that the locket is part of the story of Monica's ordeal but says no one should suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship between it and the cure. "My wife did feel less pain one night when she used the locket, but her pain had been coming and going. Then she went to the doctors, and they cured her." Monica still believes in the miracle but admits that she did go to see doctors at the state-run Balurghat Hospital. "I took the medicines they gave me, but," she insists, "the locket gave me complete relief from the pain."

snip>>>>>

Dr. Tarun Kumar Biswas and Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, who treated Monica over several months, say their patient indeed had a lump in her abdomen, but it was not a full-grown tumor. "She responded to our treatment steadily," says Mustafi. Monica's medical records contain sonograms, prescriptions and physicians' notes that could conceivably help prove whether science or the icon worked the cure. But the records are missing. Monica says Sister Betta of the Missionaries of Charity took them away two years ago. "It's all with her," says Monica. A call to Sister Betta, who has been reassigned to another post of the Charity, produced a "no comment." Balurghat Hospital officials say the Catholic order has been pressuring them to say Monica's cure was miraculous. Calls to the office of Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa's successor as head of the order, produced no comment as well.
Click to expand...

The husband disagrees that a miracle occurred and attributes her cure to medical treatment but the records are no longer available.
Why haven't her treating doctors been invited by the vatican to release a report on their management of her case? It could prove their case

Despite what someone said above, there is no Devils Advocate (ie someone who sets out to collect evidence to disprove the case).

BillyJoe
 
The following report suggest the "tumour" was a tuberculous ovarian cyst cured by conventional medical treatment''

This report says the "tumour" was a tuberculous ovarian cyst

The government's inquiry, which ended on Friday, was headed by South Dinajpur Additional District Magistrate Goutam Ghosh. Ghosh and Arun Sarkar, an official of the Harirampur block, interviewed villagers, doctors, and members of the Besra family before concluding that any talk of a miracle in the woman's cure was baseless.

"Monica Besra's tumour was cured purely by medical science. She received continuous anti-tubercular treatment and went through all the necessary curative processes. So any talk of her case being beyond the comprehension of medical science is baseless," Ghosh told reporters on Saturday.
Click to expand...

Note:
In medical parlance, a tumour is simply a lump. This can be a cyst or a solid tumour and the solid tumour can be either benign or malignant.

Most people who have heard about the case probably jump to the conclusion that the lady was dying of cancer.

BillyJoe
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom