Benny Hinn

[Physics]

Benny Hinn is a faith healer know for his 'Miracle Crusades'.
He gets tens of millions of dollars from every show he does, he also receives church funding. He spends this money on his lavish lifestyle - he has a private jet.
He brings up 'healed' people at the shows and they are either perfectly, though Benny Hinn claims he healed some leg problem or something they had last year, or, and this is more common, they actually are injured and make themselves worse prancing and running around the stage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hinn

[Blue Wode]

A truly appalling man who obviously has no conscience about exploiting the gullible and the desperate. He does seem to tip rather well, but I suspect that’s mainly for show. To learn more about him, have a look at the very revealing CBC link in this David Colquhoun commentary on the second part of the 3-part Kathy Sykes BBC series Alternative Medicine: The Evidence:

The second programme: healing

The second programme (31st January, 2006). I liked this programme much better than the first, even if it left the crucial questions unresolved.

The programme started with a healing meeting by the notorious Benny Hinn. The meeting had all the mass hysteria of a Nuremburg rally, though no mention was made of the fact that this (very rich) man's financial malpractice had been revealed by a CBC TV programme. On the right is his receipt for £3347 for two nights at the Lanesborough hotel in London (that did not include $1700 he gave in tips).

The lovely Ghanaian lady who cleans my office and lab every morning gives money to this mega-rich man because "he needs it to preach the gospel".

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/quack4.html

[Physics]

I saw a documentary about him and another fella called Reinhard Bonnke, Bonnke's shows are in Africa and often end up with people being trampled to death. Not sure who the documentary was by, but what they found out was appalling.

[al_capone_junior]

...exploiting the gullible and the desperate.

Well, it would be hard to exploit the highly intelligent and very well off, right? Who else is there to exploit then?

al

[Trinoc]

Well, it would be hard to exploit the highly intelligent and very well off, right?

Have you seen the state of the world's financial markets lately?

[Blue Wode]

Well, it would be hard to exploit the highly intelligent and very well off, right? Who else is there to exploit then?

al

The highly intelligent and very well off are not as immune from falling for nonsense as you might think:

If only ignorant and gullible people accepted far-fetched ideas, little else would be needed to explain the abundance of folly in modern society. But, as James Alcock discusses in this issue of SRAM [Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine], many people who are neither foolish nor ill-educated still cling fervently to beliefs that fly in the face of well-established research. Trust in the further reaches of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a case in point. Paradoxically, surveys find that users of unscientific treatments tend to have slightly more, rather than less, formal education, compared to nonusers. [1]

-snip-

It is my purpose in this article to draw attention to a number of social, psychological, and cognitive factors that can convince honest, intelligent, and well-educated people that scientifically discredited treatments have merit.

-snip-

Those who sell therapies of any kind have an obligation to prove, first, that their products are safe and, second, that they are effective. The latter is often the more difficult task because there are many subtle ways that honest and intelligent people (both patients and therapists) can be led to think that a treatment has cured someone when it has not. This is true whether we are assessing new treatments in scientific medicine, old nostrums in folk medicine, fringe practices in CAM, or the frankly magical panaceas of faith healers.

-snip-

So, if an unorthodox therapy:

(a) is implausible on a priori grounds (because its implied mechanisms or putative effects contradict well-established laws, principles, or empirical findings in physics, chemistry, or biology);
(b) lacks a scientifically acceptable rationale of its own;
(c) has insufficient supporting evidence derived from adequately controlled outcome research;
(d) has failed in well-controlled clinical studies done by impartial evaluators and has been unable to rule out competing explanations for why it might seem to work in uncontrolled settings; and
(e) should seem improbable, even to the lay person, on "common sense" grounds;

why would so many well-educated people continue to sell and purchase such a treatment?

Read on….
http://sram.org/0302/bias.html

[The article’s author, the late Barry Beyerstein, PhD, worked in the Brain Behaviour Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.]

Most survey data on CAM use agree with the present findings that it is predominantly female, well-educated, affluent, middle-aged individuals [who use it].

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0965229900908331

My bold.

[Physics]

Well, it would be hard to exploit the highly intelligent and very well off, right? Who else is there to exploit then?

al

Same as Blue Wode pointed out.

Well you can be highly intelligent and gullible can't you? And you can be desperate and well off right?
Anyone can be exploited, particularly those who lack understanding of scientific medicine and not believing hearsay.