Natasha Demkina
Encyclopedia
Natalya Nikolayevna Demkina ' onMouseout='HidePop("88117")' href="/topics/Saransk">Saransk
, Mordovia
), usually known under the hypocoristic
naming Natasha Demkina, is a Russian
woman who claims to possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical diagnoses
. Since the age of ten, she has performed readings in Russia.
In 2004 she appeared on television shows in the United Kingdom
, on the Discovery Channel
and in Japan. Since 2004 Demkina has been a full-time student of the Semashko State Stomatological University, Moscow
. Since January 2006, Demkina has worked for the Center of Special Diagnostics of the Natalya Demkina (TSSD), whose stated purpose is to diagnose and treat illness in cooperation with "experts possessing unusual abilities, folk healers and professionals of traditional medicine."
After describing her mother's internal organs to her, Demkina's story began to spread by word of mouth among the local population and people began gathering outside her door seeking medical consultations. Her story was picked up by a local newspaper in spring 2003 and a local television station followed suit in November that year. This led to interest from a British tabloid newspaper which invited her to give demonstrations in London, as well as further invitations from groups in New York and Tokyo.
brought Demkina to England. She gave a number of demonstrations and her diagnoses were then compared to professional medical diagnosis. A Discovery Channel documentary on Demkina mentions reports of Demkina having successfully identified all the fractures
and metal pins
in a woman who had recently been a victim in a car crash. The Guardian reported that she impressed the host of daytime television program This Morning
by spotting that she had a sore ankle during an interview.
Initially, Demkina's demonstrations were well received. However, after she had left the United Kingdom, it emerged that she had made errors among her diagnoses. In one incident she told television-physician Chris Steele
that he was suffering from a number of medical conditions, including kidney stones, an ailment of the gall bladder, and an enlarged liver
and pancreas
. Later medical evaluation determined that he was in good health and was not suffering from any of the ailments she had identified.
by the Discovery Channel
to appear on a documentary titled The Girl with X-Ray Eyes, and to be tested by skeptical researchers from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) under partially controlled conditions.
As a demonstration for the documentary, Demkina was shown wearing her vision-hat and giving diagnoses to people who had previously given descriptions of their specific medical conditions. Most of the people given these readings felt that Demkina had accurately identified their conditions. The researchers, however, were not similarly impressed. CSI researcher Richard Wiseman
said, "When I saw her do her usual readings, I couldn't believe the discrepancy between what I was hearing and how impressed the individuals were... I thought they were going to walk away saying it was embarrassing, but time and again, they said it was amazing. Before each reading, I asked the people what was the main medical problem and Natasha never got one of those right." Wiseman compared the belief of people in Demkina's diagnoses to the belief of people in fortune tellers, and said that people focus only on those portions of Demkina's comments that they believe.
Then CSI researchers Ray Hyman
and Wiseman, and Andrew Skolnick
of the now defunct Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH) conducted their test of Demkina. In the test, Demkina was asked to correctly match six specified anatomical anomalies to seven volunteer subjects. The cases in question included six specified anatomical anomalies resulting from surgery and one "normal" control subject. The researchers said that, because of limitation in time and resources, the preliminary test was designed to look only for a strongly demonstrated ability. The researchers explained that while evidence of a weak or erratic ability may be of theoretical interest, it would be useless for providing medical diagnoses. In addition, the researchers said that the influence of non-paranormal observations could not be ruled out under the lax conditions of the test. Demkina and the investigators had agreed that in order to warrant further testing, she needed to correctly match at least five of the seven conditions. In the 4-hour-long test, Demkina correctly matched conditions to four volunteers, including the control subject. The researchers concluded that she had not demonstrated evidence of an ability that would warrant their further study.
Subsequently, the design and conclusions of this experiment were subjects of considerable dispute between Demkina's supporters and those of the investigators.
in another, and that she had been presented with two patients who had undergone abdominal procedure, but that she had only one abdominal condition on her list of potential diagnoses, leaving her confused as to which one matched the listed condition.
She also complained that she was unable to see that one volunteer had had their appendix removed because, in her opinion, appendixes sometimes grow back. She said she was not able to compare her own diagnosis to an independent medical diagnosis after key experiments had been conducted, preventing her from being able to see if she was diagnosing genuine conditions that were unknown to those conducting the experiments, and which were thus being listed against her in the overall results despite them being valid (as a result of this complaint, all volunteers in the Tokyo experiments were required to bring medical certificates with them prior to diagnosis).
In response to these complaints, the research team stated that Demkina should have been able to find the plate without extrasensory abilities, because its outline could be seen beneath the subject's scalp, and questioned why the presence of scar tissue in a patient's throat had not alerted her to them having an esophagus condition. Additionally, they noted that it remains clinically impossible for an appendix to spontaneously regrow.
's Mind-Matter Unification project, criticized the test and evaluation methods used by Hyman and questioned the researchers' motives, leveling the accusation that the experiment had the appearance of being "some kind of plot to discredit the teenage claimed psychic."
Stating that the results should have been deemed "inconclusive", Josephson argued the odds of Demkina achieving four matches out of seven by chance alone were 1 in 50, or less than 2% – making her success rate a statistically significant result. He also argued that Hyman used a Bayes factor
that was statistically unjustifiable because it greatly increased the risk of the experiment falsely recording a moderate correlation as being no correlation.
Hyman responded that the high benchmark used in the testing was necessary due to the higher levels of statistical significance required when testing paranormal claims (extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof),
and that a high Bayes factor was necessary to compensate for the fact that "Demkina was not blindly guessing", but instead "had a great number of normal sensory clues
that could have helped increase her number of correct matches".
Bayes factors are used to compensate for variables that cannot be calculated through conventional statistics; in this case, the variable created by the visual clues that Demkina might gather from observing a patient. The Bayes factors used by Hyman were calculated by professors Persi Diaconis
and Susan Holmes of the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
(東京電機大学) in Japan, at the invitation of Professor Yoshio Machi, who studies claims of unusual human abilities.
According to accounts on her personal website, after her experiences in London and New York, Demkina set several conditions for the tests, including that the patients bring with them a medical certificate stating their health status, and that the diagnosis be restricted to a single specific part of the body–the head, the torso, or extremities–which she was to be informed of in advance.
Demkina's website claims that she was able to see that one of the patients had a prosthetic knee, and that another had asymmetrically placed internal organs. She also claims to have detected the early stages of pregnancy in a female patient, and an undulating spinal curvature in another subject.
Machi also arranged for a test to take place in a veterinary clinic, where Demkina was asked to diagnose an anomaly in a dog. Natasha claims to have correctly identified that the dog had an artificial device in its back right leg after being specifically directed to look at the animal's paws.
As with the test conducted in the UK, the Tokyo tests were not subject to independent review.
Saransk
Saransk is a city in central European Russia and the capital of the Republic of Mordovia, as well as its financial and economic center. It is located in the Volga basin at the confluence of the Saranka and Insar Rivers, about east of Moscow...
, Mordovia
Mordovia
The Republic of Mordovia , also known as Mordvinia, is a federal subject of Russia . Its capital is the city of Saransk. Population: -Geography:The republic is located in the eastern part of the East European Plain of Russia...
), usually known under the hypocoristic
Hypocoristic
A hypocorism is a shorter form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment.- Derivation :Hypocorisms are often generated as:...
naming Natasha Demkina, is a Russian
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
woman who claims to possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical diagnoses
Diagnosis
Diagnosis is the identification of the nature and cause of anything. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines with variations in the use of logics, analytics, and experience to determine the cause and effect relationships...
. Since the age of ten, she has performed readings in Russia.
In 2004 she appeared on television shows in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, on the Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...
and in Japan. Since 2004 Demkina has been a full-time student of the Semashko State Stomatological University, Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
. Since January 2006, Demkina has worked for the Center of Special Diagnostics of the Natalya Demkina (TSSD), whose stated purpose is to diagnose and treat illness in cooperation with "experts possessing unusual abilities, folk healers and professionals of traditional medicine."
History
According to her mother, Tatyana Vladimovna, Demkina was a fast learner, but was otherwise a normal child until she was ten years old, at which time her ability began to manifest itself.- "I was at home with my mother and suddenly I had a vision. I could see inside my mother's body and I started telling her about the organs I could see. Now, I have to switch from my regular vision to what I call medical vision. For a fraction of a second, I see a colorful picture inside the person and then I start to analyze it." says Demkina
After describing her mother's internal organs to her, Demkina's story began to spread by word of mouth among the local population and people began gathering outside her door seeking medical consultations. Her story was picked up by a local newspaper in spring 2003 and a local television station followed suit in November that year. This led to interest from a British tabloid newspaper which invited her to give demonstrations in London, as well as further invitations from groups in New York and Tokyo.
Russia
After stories about Demkina had begun to spread, doctors at a children’s hospital in her home town asked her to perform a number of tasks to see if her abilities were genuine. Demkina is reported to have drawn a picture of what she saw inside a doctor’s stomach, marking where he had an ulcer. She also disagreed with the diagnosis of a cancer patient, saying all she could see was a small cyst.United Kingdom
In January 2004, British tabloid newspaper The SunThe Sun (newspaper)
The Sun is a daily national tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and owned by News Corporation. Sister editions are published in Glasgow and Dublin...
brought Demkina to England. She gave a number of demonstrations and her diagnoses were then compared to professional medical diagnosis. A Discovery Channel documentary on Demkina mentions reports of Demkina having successfully identified all the fractures
Bone fracture
A bone fracture is a medical condition in which there is a break in the continuity of the bone...
and metal pins
Implant (medicine)
An implant is a medical device manufactured to replace a missing biological structure, support a damaged biological structure, or enhance an existing biological structure. Medical implants are man-made devices, in contrast to a transplant, which is a transplanted biomedical tissue...
in a woman who had recently been a victim in a car crash. The Guardian reported that she impressed the host of daytime television program This Morning
This Morning (TV series)
This Morning is a British daytime television programme broadcast on ITV. As of September 2011, its main presenters are Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, and Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes, with various other presenters standing in for illness or contributing to sections of the programme.The...
by spotting that she had a sore ankle during an interview.
Initially, Demkina's demonstrations were well received. However, after she had left the United Kingdom, it emerged that she had made errors among her diagnoses. In one incident she told television-physician Chris Steele
Chris Steele (doctor)
Dr. Chris Steele, MBE, is a British medical doctor well known for his many media appearances.He is the resident doctor on ITV's This Morning daytime magazine show. He appeared on the very first show in 1988 and still appears on the show every week....
that he was suffering from a number of medical conditions, including kidney stones, an ailment of the gall bladder, and an enlarged liver
Liver
The liver is a vital organ present in vertebrates and some other animals. It has a wide range of functions, including detoxification, protein synthesis, and production of biochemicals necessary for digestion...
and pancreas
Pancreas
The pancreas is a gland organ in the digestive and endocrine system of vertebrates. It is both an endocrine gland producing several important hormones, including insulin, glucagon, and somatostatin, as well as a digestive organ, secreting pancreatic juice containing digestive enzymes that assist...
. Later medical evaluation determined that he was in good health and was not suffering from any of the ailments she had identified.
New York
In May 2004 she was brought to New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
by the Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...
to appear on a documentary titled The Girl with X-Ray Eyes, and to be tested by skeptical researchers from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) under partially controlled conditions.
As a demonstration for the documentary, Demkina was shown wearing her vision-hat and giving diagnoses to people who had previously given descriptions of their specific medical conditions. Most of the people given these readings felt that Demkina had accurately identified their conditions. The researchers, however, were not similarly impressed. CSI researcher Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.Wiseman started his professional life as a magician, before graduating in Psychology from University College London and obtaining a Ph.D...
said, "When I saw her do her usual readings, I couldn't believe the discrepancy between what I was hearing and how impressed the individuals were... I thought they were going to walk away saying it was embarrassing, but time and again, they said it was amazing. Before each reading, I asked the people what was the main medical problem and Natasha never got one of those right." Wiseman compared the belief of people in Demkina's diagnoses to the belief of people in fortune tellers, and said that people focus only on those portions of Demkina's comments that they believe.
Then CSI researchers Ray Hyman
Ray Hyman
Ray Hyman is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and a noted critic of parapsychology.-Career:...
and Wiseman, and Andrew Skolnick
Andrew A. Skolnick
Andrew A. Skolnick is an American science and medical journalist and photographer. He was an associate news editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association.-Education:...
of the now defunct Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH) conducted their test of Demkina. In the test, Demkina was asked to correctly match six specified anatomical anomalies to seven volunteer subjects. The cases in question included six specified anatomical anomalies resulting from surgery and one "normal" control subject. The researchers said that, because of limitation in time and resources, the preliminary test was designed to look only for a strongly demonstrated ability. The researchers explained that while evidence of a weak or erratic ability may be of theoretical interest, it would be useless for providing medical diagnoses. In addition, the researchers said that the influence of non-paranormal observations could not be ruled out under the lax conditions of the test. Demkina and the investigators had agreed that in order to warrant further testing, she needed to correctly match at least five of the seven conditions. In the 4-hour-long test, Demkina correctly matched conditions to four volunteers, including the control subject. The researchers concluded that she had not demonstrated evidence of an ability that would warrant their further study.
Subsequently, the design and conclusions of this experiment were subjects of considerable dispute between Demkina's supporters and those of the investigators.
Demkina's criticism
After completing experiments in New York, Demkina made several complaints in regards to the conditions under which they were conducted, and about the way in which she and her diagnoses were treated. She argued that she had required more time to see a metal plate in one subject's skull, that surgical scars interfered with her ability to see the resected esophagusEsophagus
The esophagus is an organ in vertebrates which consists of a muscular tube through which food passes from the pharynx to the stomach. During swallowing, food passes from the mouth through the pharynx into the esophagus and travels via peristalsis to the stomach...
in another, and that she had been presented with two patients who had undergone abdominal procedure, but that she had only one abdominal condition on her list of potential diagnoses, leaving her confused as to which one matched the listed condition.
She also complained that she was unable to see that one volunteer had had their appendix removed because, in her opinion, appendixes sometimes grow back. She said she was not able to compare her own diagnosis to an independent medical diagnosis after key experiments had been conducted, preventing her from being able to see if she was diagnosing genuine conditions that were unknown to those conducting the experiments, and which were thus being listed against her in the overall results despite them being valid (as a result of this complaint, all volunteers in the Tokyo experiments were required to bring medical certificates with them prior to diagnosis).
In response to these complaints, the research team stated that Demkina should have been able to find the plate without extrasensory abilities, because its outline could be seen beneath the subject's scalp, and questioned why the presence of scar tissue in a patient's throat had not alerted her to them having an esophagus condition. Additionally, they noted that it remains clinically impossible for an appendix to spontaneously regrow.
Brian Josephson's criticism
In a self-published commentary regarding the New York testing performed by CSICOP and CSMMH, Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the director of University of CambridgeUniversity of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
's Mind-Matter Unification project, criticized the test and evaluation methods used by Hyman and questioned the researchers' motives, leveling the accusation that the experiment had the appearance of being "some kind of plot to discredit the teenage claimed psychic."
Stating that the results should have been deemed "inconclusive", Josephson argued the odds of Demkina achieving four matches out of seven by chance alone were 1 in 50, or less than 2% – making her success rate a statistically significant result. He also argued that Hyman used a Bayes factor
Bayesian inference
In statistics, Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference. It is often used in science and engineering to determine model parameters, make predictions about unknown variables, and to perform model selection...
that was statistically unjustifiable because it greatly increased the risk of the experiment falsely recording a moderate correlation as being no correlation.
Hyman responded that the high benchmark used in the testing was necessary due to the higher levels of statistical significance required when testing paranormal claims (extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof),
and that a high Bayes factor was necessary to compensate for the fact that "Demkina was not blindly guessing", but instead "had a great number of normal sensory clues
Cold reading
Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, illusionists, and con artists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do...
that could have helped increase her number of correct matches".
Bayes factors are used to compensate for variables that cannot be calculated through conventional statistics; in this case, the variable created by the visual clues that Demkina might gather from observing a patient. The Bayes factors used by Hyman were calculated by professors Persi Diaconis
Persi Diaconis
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University....
and Susan Holmes of the Department of Statistics at Stanford University.
Tokyo
After visiting New York, Demkina traveled to Tokyo Electrical UniversityTokyo Denki University
is a private university in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The predecessor of the school was founded in 1907. It was chartered as a university in 1949 with Yasujiro Niwa as first president.-External links:* *...
(東京電機大学) in Japan, at the invitation of Professor Yoshio Machi, who studies claims of unusual human abilities.
According to accounts on her personal website, after her experiences in London and New York, Demkina set several conditions for the tests, including that the patients bring with them a medical certificate stating their health status, and that the diagnosis be restricted to a single specific part of the body–the head, the torso, or extremities–which she was to be informed of in advance.
Demkina's website claims that she was able to see that one of the patients had a prosthetic knee, and that another had asymmetrically placed internal organs. She also claims to have detected the early stages of pregnancy in a female patient, and an undulating spinal curvature in another subject.
Machi also arranged for a test to take place in a veterinary clinic, where Demkina was asked to diagnose an anomaly in a dog. Natasha claims to have correctly identified that the dog had an artificial device in its back right leg after being specifically directed to look at the animal's paws.
As with the test conducted in the UK, the Tokyo tests were not subject to independent review.
External links
- http://www.phillipwarnell.com/x-rayeyes.html Artist Phillip Warnell made a film with Natasha Demkina in 2008. The film can be seen at the IDFA Film Festival, online here: http://www.idfa.nl/nl/tags/project.aspx?id=AE101A29-5529-46DF-9558-2FE82F15F263&tab=-
- The Girl With X-Ray Eyes at Museum of HoaxesMuseum of HoaxesThe Museum of Hoaxes is a website created by Alex Boese in 1997 in San Diego, California as a resource for reporting and discussing hoaxes and urban legends, both past and present....
- The Girl with "X-Ray" Vision at James RandiJames RandiJames Randi is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation...
Educational Foundation Forum* - Special Diagnostic Center of Natalya Demkina Official webpage of Natasha Demkina (In Russian. See also the English translation by PROMT Online Translator)
- The Demkina File at the website of the Association for Skeptical Investigations