Even Lourdes tests its healings, and you can weigh your own experience the same way

Key takeaways

• More than 7,000 healings have been reported at the Catholic shrine of Lourdes, but only about 70 have been recognized as miracles, and its doctors exclude psychological and “functional” conditions.
• In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 53% of U.S. adults said a dead family member had visited them in a dream or another form, so spiritual experiences are common.
• A 2022 Cochrane review of 202 trials found placebo effects are usually small but can nudge self-reported pain and nausea, the symptoms people judge for themselves.
• Feeling better after a remedy can come from natural recovery or from regression to the mean, which is why fair tests compare people who got a treatment with people who didn’t.
• New voices or visions, sudden unexplained waves of emotion or déjà vu, and confusion after a head injury all deserve a prompt medical check.

In 2009, an Italian woman named Antonietta Raco traveled to Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France. She had primary lateral sclerosis, a rare, degenerative neuromuscular disease. She bathed in the shrine’s spring during that pilgrimage, and church accounts say she was cured there⁸.

Her experience did not settle the matter for the shrine. Doctors studied her case for years. Only in April 2025 did church officials announce that an international medical committee had found her recovery medically unexplained⁸. They called it the 72nd recognized miracle of Lourdes.

That 16-year gap holds a lesson for anyone who has felt healed, guided or touched by something larger. Lourdes, a place built on faith, keeps a medical office whose job is to doubt.

More than 7,000 healings have been reported there⁷. The shrine’s English website still lists 70 recognized miracles, though the 2025 announcement called Raco’s case the 72nd⁷⁸. Its doctors exclude psychological and “functional” conditions, along with any cure that a treatment could explain.

You don’t have to share that faith to borrow the method. A spiritual experience can be real and meaningful to you. Whether a remedy, a healer or a ritual changed your body is a separate question, and it needs separate tools.

Spiritual experiences are common, and having one isn’t a warning sign

Experiences that feel spiritual are part of ordinary life for many Americans. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 5,079 adults, 53% said a dead family member had visited them in a dream or another form¹. In the past year alone, 34% had felt the presence of a dead relative.

A second Pew report that year found that 45% of adults have had a sudden feeling of connection with something beyond this world². About 30% said they had encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.

Psychiatry has made room for this. In the early 1990s, David Lukoff and psychiatrists Francis Lu and Robert Turner asked the authors of the psychiatric diagnostic manual to add a category called “Religious or Spiritual Problem”¹². It appeared in the 1994 edition, known as DSM-IV.

The category lets a clinician note that a spiritual concern, such as losing or questioning faith or a conversion, is the focus of care¹². Its backers wanted to cut down on misdiagnosis and on the field’s habit of treating intense spiritual crises as illness.

What your experience can tell you, and what it can’t

Use this table as a sorting tool. The left column is yours to trust. The right column needs outside evidence.

What your experience can tell you	What it can’t tell you by itself
What a moment meant to you and how it changed your outlook	Whether a remedy, ritual or healer caused a change in your body
That you felt calmer, stronger or more hopeful	Whether you would have improved anyway, with time
What brings you comfort and a sense of connection	Whether the same thing will help someone else with the same illness
That something is worth looking into further	Whether it is safe to stop or delay a prescribed treatment
What you value and want from your care	What a lab test, scan or exam would show

Three reasons feeling better can fool anyone

Many illnesses get better on their own. Doctors call this the natural course, or natural history, of a disease. The CDC says a cold usually lasts less than a week, and symptoms peak within two to three days⁶. Whatever you take on day three, you will probably feel better by day five.

Extremes drift back toward average. Statisticians call this regression to the mean. People often seek help when symptoms are at their worst. Later readings tend to come back closer to normal, even with no treatment at all.

In a 1994 note in the BMJ, statisticians Bland and Altman showed how this fools professionals too⁵. People picked for very high blood pressure tend to show lower readings when retested, treated or not. That’s why fair trials need a randomized control group, people assigned by chance to skip the treatment.

Expectation and reporting shape how we feel. A 2022 Cochrane review by Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche pooled 202 trials across 60 conditions³. Each compared a placebo, such as a sugar pill or sham procedure, with no treatment at all.

Overall, placebos did not have important effects on health³. But they could nudge symptoms that patients rate themselves, especially pain and nausea. The effects were larger with physical placebos, such as sham acupuncture, and in small trials. The authors noted that some of this may reflect how people report symptoms, not changes in the body.

Placebo can work even in the open. In a 2010 Harvard trial, 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome were assigned by chance to take pills clearly labeled “placebo” or to get no pills⁴. After three weeks, 59% of the placebo group reported adequate relief, compared with 35% of the others. The authors called it a small study that needs larger trials.

None of this means your improvement wasn’t real. It means the cause is hard to see from inside one life.

How Lourdes separates a healing from a hope

The shrine’s Medical Bureau dates to 1883, and a permanent doctor meets people who believe they were cured⁷. If a case looks serious, doctors present at Lourdes review it. Promising cases then go through research that can take several years.

Finally, the International Medical Committee of Lourdes votes on whether the cure is unexplained by current medical knowledge⁷. The committee works from seven criteria. In plain words, they require that a cure:

• involve a serious, recognized disease with a poor outlook
• show physical damage confirmed by objective tests, such as scans or lab results
• not be a psychological, psychiatric or “functional” condition
• not be credited to any medical treatment
• happen suddenly, without a slow recovery
• be complete and lasting, not a remission

Several rules line up with the traps above. Excluding functional conditions guards against expectation. Requiring a poor outlook and a lasting cure guards against natural recovery. Excluding treated cases avoids giving a miracle credit for medicine’s work.

Even then, the doctors go only so far. Their verdict says a cure is unexplained, not that it is miraculous⁷. That final step is a judgment of faith, made by the bishop of the person’s home diocese.

What researchers learn when they study spiritual experiences directly

Science can study spiritual experiences without mocking them, and some of the most careful work does just that.

At Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths and colleagues gave psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms,” to 36 adults who had never used hallucinogens⁹. The study was double-blind, meaning neither the volunteers nor the session guides knew which drug was given on which day. The comparison was a stimulant.

Fourteen months later, 67% ranked their psilocybin session among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives⁹. Nearly two-thirds said it had raised their well-being or life satisfaction. The more intense the mystical experience during the session, the more spiritual significance people gave it later.

That research shows mystical-type experiences can be produced, measured and followed over time. It doesn’t show that such an experience reveals facts about the body, or that a healer who triggers one has special powers.

It also isn’t a do-it-yourself guide. The Johns Hopkins center notes that psilocybin is not approved as a treatment, though it can be studied in clinical trials¹⁰. The center also runs a clinic for people having trouble after psychedelic use. If you’re thinking about psilocybin outside FDA-approved research, talk with a clinician first.

Near-death experiences have been studied too. The AWARE II study, whose senior author is Sam Parnia of NYU Langone Health, followed 567 hospital patients who received CPR after cardiac arrest¹¹. They were treated at 25 hospitals, mostly in the U.S. and U.K. Fewer than 10% recovered enough to leave the hospital.

About 4 in 10 survivors recalled some awareness during CPR that standard measures missed¹¹. Among 85 patients whose brain waves were recorded, nearly 40% showed activity returning toward normal, sometimes an hour into CPR. The authors were careful: no study yet, they said, has settled whether these experiences are real or what they mean.

That’s an honest place to stand. Science can describe when these experiences happen. What they mean remains a question for each person and tradition.

The evidence, rated

Claim	Evidence level	What the research shows
Extreme readings drift toward normal without treatment	Strong evidence	A well-known statistical pattern; why trials need control groups5
Placebos have large effects on most illnesses	Evidence says no	No important effects overall across 202 trials3
Placebos can ease self-rated pain and nausea a little	Promising but early	Small effects, hard to separate from reporting bias3
Openly labeled placebo pills ease irritable bowel symptoms	Promising but early	One small trial of 80 people4
Psilocybin can bring on experiences people rate as deeply meaningful	Promising but early	A small controlled trial of 36 adults in a research setting9
Near-death experiences prove consciousness survives death	Not enough evidence	The researchers themselves call the question unsettled11
A single recovery is enough to show a remedy or healer works	Evidence says no	Natural recovery and regression to the mean can produce the same result56

Six questions to ask before you act on an experience

Use this checklist when an experience makes you want to change your health care.

1. What exactly changed? Was it a feeling, a symptom or a measurement such as blood pressure or blood sugar?
2. When did I start? If you began at your worst moment, some improvement was likely anyway.
3. What does this condition usually do? Ask a clinician how it tends to behave over weeks and months.
4. What else changed? Note sleep, diet, stress, the season and any medicine changes in the same period.
5. Who benefits from my belief? Be cautious if the person making the claim sells the remedy, session or retreat.
6. Can I check it? Keep a symptom log, or schedule a follow-up test, before you decide anything.

One rule overrides the list. Never stop or change a prescribed treatment because of an experience alone. Talk with the prescriber first.

When an unusual experience needs a medical check

Feeling a loved one’s presence after a death is common: a third of adults reported it in the past year¹. It isn’t on the National Institute of Mental Health’s list of psychosis warning signs¹³.

Some experiences do call for a prompt medical visit, because they can signal a treatable condition.

Experience	Why it matters	What to do
New voices or visions others don’t share, with suspicion, withdrawal, poor sleep or confused speech	Possible early psychosis, which often begins from the late teens to mid-20s13	See a clinician soon; early treatment often means better recovery13
Sudden, unexplained waves of joy, anger or sadness, intense déjà vu, or smells and tastes that aren’t there	Possible focal seizures, which can occur while a person stays aware14	Tell your doctor; get emergency care for any seizure lasting over five minutes14
Confusion, unusual behavior, slurred speech or a seizure after a blow to the head	Danger signs of a brain injury15	Call 911 or go to an emergency room right away15
Strange experiences after drugs, alcohol, certain prescription medicines or many nights without sleep	Each is a possible cause of psychosis13	Tell your clinician what you took; seek care if symptoms persist
New visions or false beliefs in an older adult	Psychosis can come with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s13	Book a medical exam

If you or someone near you is in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For immediate danger, call 911.

Questions readers ask

The bottom line

Spiritual experiences are common and can shape a life. They can tell you what matters to you, what comforts you and what deserves a closer look.

What they can’t do alone is prove that a remedy, ritual or healer changed your body. Natural recovery, regression to the mean and expectation fool patients and professionals alike, which is why fair tests use comparison groups. Hold both truths: honor the experience, test the claim, and get a medical check when an unusual experience arrives with warning signs.

Related reading

• Most health products aren’t scams, but many just haven’t been proven
• How miracle-cure scams borrow the language you trust
• What a medical test can and cannot tell you
• What meditation groups can do, and what they can stir up
• Purpose tracks with a longer life, while the Blue Zones story is less certain

Sources

1. Pew Research Center. “Many Americans Report Interacting With Dead Relatives in Dreams or Other Ways.” Pew Research Center, August 23, 2023. pewresearch.org
2. Pew Research Center. “Spiritual Experiences,” in Spirituality Among Americans. Pew Research Center, December 7, 2023. pewresearch.org
3. Hróbjartsson A, Gøtzsche PC. “Placebo Interventions for All Clinical Conditions.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2022. cochrane.org
4. Harvard Medical School. “Placebos Work, Even Without Deception.” News release on Kaptchuk TJ et al., PLoS ONE, December 2010. hms.harvard.edu
5. Bland JM, Altman DG. “Statistics Notes: Some Examples of Regression Towards the Mean.” BMJ, 1994. doi.org
6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “About Common Cold.” CDC, February 19, 2026. cdc.gov
7. Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. “The Miracles of Lourdes.” Sanctuaire de Lourdes, accessed October 2026. lourdes-france.org
8. EWTN News. “Lourdes Announces 72nd Miracle: Italian Pilgrim Cured of Degenerative Disease.” April 16, 2025. ewtnnews.com
9. Griffiths RR, Richards WA, Johnson MW, McCann UD, Jesse R. “Mystical-Type Experiences Occasioned by Psilocybin Mediate the Attribution of Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance 14 Months Later.” Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2008. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
10. Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Home page. Johns Hopkins Medicine, accessed October 2026. hopkinspsychedelic.org
11. NYU Langone Health. “Patients Recall Death Experiences After Cardiac Arrest.” News release on Parnia S et al., Resuscitation, September 14, 2023. nyulangone.org
12. Lukoff D. “Religious or Spiritual Problem: DSM-IV Category.” Spiritual Competency Resource Center, accessed October 2026. spiritualcompetency.com
13. National Institute of Mental Health. “Understanding Psychosis.” NIH Publication No. 23-MH-8110, revised 2023. nimh.nih.gov:443
14. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “Epilepsy and Seizures.” NIH, last reviewed March 13, 2026. ninds.nih.gov
15. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Signs and Symptoms of TBI.” CDC, September 15, 2025. cdc.gov