Dr. Andrew Weil on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1213

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Weil claims that no native resident of Lourdes has ever been cured there and that a pilgrim's chance of healing rises with the distance traveled to reach the shrine. A 2012 peer-reviewed history of the Lourdes Medical Bureau's certification process, published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, documents that the Catholic Church has recognized 67 cures as medically inexplicable miracles between 1862 and 2005, out of roughly 4,500 cures acknowledged (mostly on weaker pre-WWII evidence) between 1858 and 1976. The article tracks the sex, age, and nationality of certified patients in detail (the 25 cures certified 1947-1976 were three-quarters female, ranged in age from 8 to 52, and were all Western European), but it contains no data breaking down cure rates by whether the patient was a Lourdes resident or by distance traveled to the shrine, and no such analysis appears in the peer-reviewed literature on Lourdes cures more broadly. In the absence of any tracked statistic on residency or travel distance, Weil's specific figures cannot be confirmed or refuted against documented data. The claim functions as long-circulated folklore about Lourdes rather than an established medical or demographic finding, and its status is best described as unverifiable.