QuackeryWatch Canadian Quackbusting Since 1998 · Dr. Terry Polevoy MD

Full Investigation · Brazil · 1978–2026

“John of God”: The Healer Television Loved, and the 489-Year Sentence

For decades a Brazilian faith healer drew the sick from around the world to a small town, performed “surgery” without anaesthetic, and was celebrated on ABC, CNN and Oprah. In 2005 this site asked why a network had let him go unchallenged. In 2018 hundreds of women came forward. He has since been convicted of rape and sentenced to a total of 489 years.

By Terry Polevoy, MD · QuackeryWatch.com · Rebuilt from this site's 2005 archive, October 2026

What happened in Abadiânia

From the late 1970s Teixeira received visitors at his Casa in Abadiânia, a small town in central Brazil, while supposedly possessed by the spirits of long-dead doctors and saints. Most of what he offered was “invisible surgery” — meditation, rest and instructions — and herbal capsules. A small minority of visitors chose “visible surgery”: scraping an eyeball with a knife, pushing forceps up a nostril, small incisions, all without anaesthetic. Foreign visitors came in organized groups led by guides, many of them former patients, and the town grew a hospitality industry around him.

The visible operations were stage stunts. James Randi and the investigator Joe Nickell identified the forceps-in-the-nose as the “human blockhead”, a carnival trick in which the instrument passes along the floor of the nasal cavity, and the eye scraping as something that hurts far less than it looks. There was never evidence that any of it treated anything beyond what placebo and the passage of time do anyway.

The television years

On 10 February 2005 ABC's Primetime Live aired an hour-long special, reported by John Quiñones, asking whether João de Deus was a healer or a charlatan. It followed five people who made the trip. James Randi was filmed for the program and gave ABC a videotape demonstrating the nasal trick; ABC did not use it. Quiñones had his own injured shoulder treated by invisible surgery and found no change, and the special aired regardless.

This site said at the time that the program read like an unpaid advertisement, and asked how many cancer patients would postpone or abandon chemotherapy to travel to Brazil first. Among the people the special followed were David Ames, who had ALS, and Lisa Melman, who had breast cancer. David Ames died in 2008. Lisa Melman died in 2012 as her cancer progressed.

The coverage did not let up. CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 ran a segment in 2010; O Magazine published a long, admiring article the same year; and in March 2013 Oprah Winfrey travelled to Abadiânia and devoted an episode of Oprah's Next Chapter to him. In 2014 he held a three-day event at the Sydney Showground. The first sustained critical report came from Australia's 60 Minutes in October 2014, which also reported deaths at the Casa that it said had never been properly investigated.

December 2018

On 7 December 2018 the Globo television program Conversa com Bial broadcast interviews with women who said Teixeira had sexually abused them during private “healing” sessions. Within days the Goiás state prosecutor's office had received more than two hundred complaints; the number eventually passed six hundred, describing abuse from 1986 to 2017, the youngest accuser 14 at the time. On 12 December prosecutors asked for his arrest. He surrendered on 16 December.

The access was the product. What made the abuse possible was the same thing the television specials sold: sick, frightened people who believed he could save them, who were told to obey the “entities” and not to question, and who came because a trusted program said he was worth the trip. A healer who is taken on faith cannot be examined, and a healer who cannot be examined cannot be stopped.

The lesson for coverage

None of the networks that promoted João de Deus had to discover anything new to report him accurately in 2005. The tricks were documented. The skeptic they interviewed told them what the tricks were. The patients they followed had diagnoses whose course was predictable. What the 2005 special lacked was not information but the willingness to use it.

The same pattern runs through the Canadian coverage documented on this site: the teenage “distance healer” given national airtime with no scrutiny; Bill O'Neill introduced on CBC Radio as a cancer professional; a thermography operator given four unchallenged hours on internet radio.

Related on QuackeryWatch

Adam DreamhealerA Canadian distance healer and the media that made him. Hamer & Biologie TotaleAnother healer whose followers abandoned treatment. Sylvia MillecamA medium, a cancer, and a court. Bill O'Neill / CCRGUnchallenged on national radio.

Sources

  1. “Is ‘John of God’ a healer or a charlatan?” ABC News, Primetime, February 2005.
  2. James Randi. “John of God: ABC's Primetime Live special about a Brazilian ‘healer’ falls far short of investigative journalism.” Skeptic, December 2005.
  3. Joe Nickell. Report on João de Deus, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, October 2007.
  4. Michael Usher. 60 Minutes (Australia), October 2014.
  5. Joe Schwarcz. Column on John of God, Montreal Gazette, 22 July 2016.
  6. “Women accuse Brazilian spiritual healer once featured on Oprah of sexual abuse.” NBC News, December 2018; New York Times and Telegraph, December 2018.
  7. Washington Post, 19 December 2019 (first conviction); Agência Brasil, January 2020; AFP, 16 September 2023.
  8. “João Teixeira de Faria,” Wikipedia, for the consolidated sentence total and custody status.

The women who accused Teixeira are not named here. The total of 489 years is as reported in 2024; some convictions remain under appeal. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the page.