Talking Out Fire

Motion

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M
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Is anyone familiar with this? It's where a person is able to take a part of your body that has been burned and the person is able to "talk out the fire".

I actually had someone preform this on me when I was about 4 or 5 years old after I burned my hand on an iron. The lady who preformed it on me was a neighbor. She preformed the procedure by taking my hand and moving her hand over mine while saying some words(maybe biblica verses). The "fire" or heat suddenly left my hand. Has this practice been studied by any doctors or scientist to see how it actually works? Has James Randi looked into this?

If you want to read more google:

Talking out fire
 
Motion said:
Is anyone familiar with this? It's where a person is able to take a part of your body that has been burned and the person is able to "talk out the fire".

I actually had someone preform this on me when I was about 4 or 5 years old after I burned my hand on an iron. The lady who preformed it on me was a neighbor. She preformed the procedure by taking my hand and moving her hand over mine while saying some words(maybe biblica verses). The "fire" or heat suddenly left my hand. Has this practice been studied by any doctors or scientist to see how it actually works? Has James Randi looked into this?

If you want to read more google:

Talking out fire
Click to expand...



Is there any evidence that it works at all? I very much doubt it.
 
If it worked, wouldn't the fire department use it just a bit instead of wasting water?
 
I wouldn't be too surprised if it worked. Pain is subjective. Anything that reorientated our attention and affects our perceptions is probably going to change how we feel pain.

That said, evidence?
 
Motion said:
Is anyone familiar with this? It's where a person is able to take a part of your body that has been burned and the person is able to "talk out the fire".

I actually had someone preform this on me when I was about 4 or 5 years old after I burned my hand on an iron. The lady who preformed it on me was a neighbor. She preformed the procedure by taking my hand and moving her hand over mine while saying some words(maybe biblica verses). The "fire" or heat suddenly left my hand. Has this practice been studied by any doctors or scientist to see how it actually works? Has James Randi looked into this?

If you want to read more google:

Talking out fire
Click to expand...


Motion, welcome to the forums.

It sounds like your experience is likely due to the placebo effect (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_effect#Mechanism_of_the_effect).

The belief that something is making you feel better can be very powerful, which is the reason it needs to be controlled for in scientific experiments of the efficacy of medicines. You should consider that when it is performed, you are being asked to believe that the pain will go away, you have something else to concentrate on (i.e. someone performing a mysterious, mystical ritual) and time is passing (i.e. the intense pain you feel immediately after a burn subsides as time passes).
 
quixotecoyote said:
I wouldn't be too surprised if it worked. Pain is subjective. Anything that reorientated our attention and affects our perceptions is probably going to change how we feel pain.

That said, evidence?
Click to expand...
It's possible that's the case. All I can say is that it really did work on me. Some may say it was the power of suggestion but being 4 or 5 I really didn't know ahead of time what the lady was going to do so I didn't know what to expect. After she rubbed my hand and said her words my hand stopped burning.

Is anyone from the south(I'am from Georgia). From what I've read this seems to be better known of in the south.
 
Motion said:
It's possible that's the case. All I can say is that it really did work on me. Some may say it was the power of suggestion but being 4 or 5 I really didn't know ahead of time what the lady was going to do so I didn't know what to expect. After she rubbed my hand and said her words my hand stopped burning.

Is anyone from the south(I'am from Georgia). From what I've read this seems to be better known of in the south.
Click to expand...


I'm sure as a five-year-old, a nice lady lovingly rubbing my burn would make me feel better too. Were her hands nice and cool?
 
Akhenaten,

Yeah I did ask about this on a science forum but no one seemed to be familiar with it. People on the Farmer's Almanac forum touched on it more. I actually learned more about it on there.
 
Motion said:
It's possible that's the case. All I can say is that it really did work on me. Some may say it was the power of suggestion but being 4 or 5 I really didn't know ahead of time what the lady was going to do so I didn't know what to expect. After she rubbed my hand and said her words my hand stopped burning.

Is anyone from the south(I'am from Georgia). From what I've read this seems to be better known of in the south.
Click to expand...


I should correct my earlier post.

When I described this phenomenon as 'rubbish' I was only referring to the magic healing aspect of the thing.

I have no doubt about the effectiveness of placebos though. My Grandma could do that stuff too.


You seem to be right about the custom being limited to a fairly small geographical area, although even within that region there are many variations, with or without the bible verse. I'd be happy to describe it as local folklore started by someone(s) with a fairly fundamental view of things who happened to observe the placebo effect.

That would be a bit friendlier than 'rubbish'. Welcome to the forum, Motion.


Akhenaten
 
I've heard of this and have seen it done. It's placebo effect, clearly. I've also seen mothers "kiss the boo-boo" when a child has been hurt, and the kiss magically makes all the pain go away. When a child (or believing adult) receives kind, gentle attention for an injury, the injury subjectively feels less painful. It seems similar to the Rumplestiltskin Effect that my doctor has talked about: if a doctor puts a name to an illness, the patient almost immediately begins to feel a little better--hey, if it's a known illness, it can be treated, right?

I've seen other folk remedies at work, too, including a folk cure for thrush (a fungal infection of the mucous membranes of the mouth and throat), for poison ivy rash, and various other minor ailments. None did anything substantial, but I'm sure most of the time the patients felt (or believed they felt, which seems to be the same thing) better.
 
Children are very suggestable. When my children were little it was "I'll kiss your boo boo and make it all better", type of thing.

ETA: Sorry for the cross post.
 
There was some mention, if I recall, in the Foxfire series (rural american anthropology, basically) about drawing out fire with biblical verses. It's certainly not unheard of. I don't have them close at hand, but I think they said 'drawing fire' not 'talking out the fire' if you're googling.

A

I tried it. The first results for 'drawing fire' are related to art techniqes, but the first results for 'drawing out fire' link to stuff on faith healing in the appalachian mountains.
 
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Motion said:
It's possible that's the case. All I can say is that it really did work on me. Some may say it was the power of suggestion but being 4 or 5 I really didn't know ahead of time what the lady was going to do so I didn't know what to expect. After she rubbed my hand and said her words my hand stopped burning.

Is anyone from the south(I'am from Georgia). From what I've read this seems to be better known of in the south.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm from NC and I had it done to me at about the same age when I burned my arm on a stove and heard about it a ton of times. Nothing more mystical about it than mom kissing it better... or dad yelling "Boy hush that fuss up! Ain't nothing broke and you ain't bleeding!"
 
Fire Is Our Friend

Motion said:
It's possible that's the case. All I can say is that it really did work on me. Some may say it was the power of suggestion but being 4 or 5 I really didn't know ahead of time what the lady was going to do so I didn't know what to expect. After she rubbed my hand and said her words my hand stopped burning.

Is anyone from the south(I'am from Georgia). From what I've read this seems to be better known of in the south.
Click to expand...

I've heard of this before it happened to trapped miners all the time in the old days. They would talk and talk until their lanterns went out because of the lack of oxygen. ;)

Seriously though there is a reason 5 year old kids make poor witnesses in court. I still have a nephew that thinks my quarter from behind the ear trick is magic. If this was an actual power people had (the power to remove pain) I don't think you'd have a very hard time researching it. What is more likely that old lady was passing up a lucrative and personally rewarding opportunity to heal the injured full time or a little kid overreacted to a burn and the application of a kindly old lady cool skin "magically" stopped the pain? How many times had you been burned before this instance of the unexplained? How many other people did this lady help? I don't know about you but at the age of 5 I had a hard time understanding some cartoons weren't "real".
 
^

This has been done on adults to.

My point about me being a kid when this happen was that I wasn't old enough to know what this lady was going to do. Before this was done on me I had never even heard of it.
 
Motion said:
^

This has been done on adults to.

My point about me being a kid when this happen was that I wasn't old enough to know what this lady was going to do. Before this was done on me I had never even heard of it.
Click to expand...

Because you were so young there is even more reason that it was the placebo effect. As a young child you just knew that this adult was trying to help you. I'm guessing that it was a 1st degree burn, not a 2nd or 3rd. If you could find someone that could magically heal a 2nd or 3rd degree burn, that would be worth a cool $1m.
 
This boy has a caul on his head

Motion said:
This has been done on adults to.
Click to expand...

Where are your sources? Do they use this magic in hospital burn wards or is it just practiced by readers of the Farmers Almanac and other "sons of the soil"?

Motion said:
My point about me being a kid when this happen was that I wasn't old enough to know what this lady was going to do. Before this was done on me I had never even heard of it.
Click to expand...

My point about being a little kid is they aren't paragon's of logical thinking, memory or common sense. You can't ever remember exactly when it happened. You didn't think the old lady was going to hurt you or you wouldn't have let her touch you. I know you want this to be true but your only evidence is a faded childhood memory so I doubt you're going to find skeptics to support your assumption that this lady had powers without real evidence. The only thing a search of "talking out fire" brings up is a bunch of unsubstantiated BS. So to answer your OP yes I am now familiar with talking out fire and in my opinion it is absolute woo.
 
The idea of this is certainly still current in my part of the world: I've mentioned on here before that a few years ago when my daughter burned her hand the nurse at the emergency unit suggested in all seriousness that we call a folk healer who had the power to remove burning at a distance by the power of words. There was also a documentary on Swiss TV a few years back where the head of the burns unit at a hospital somewhere in French-speaking Switzerland (can't remember where and don't want to defame someone by guessing) claimed to have been given this power by another healer; she then stated that she'd never used it, which struck me as a little bizarre because surely if your job is to treat burns victims then logically you'd use any method you had that worked.

Flo, if you're out there - does this ring any bells with you?
 
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