Let's imagine that one morning you wake up and discover that you have healing superpowers. What you do next depends on what you want to accomplish, doesn't it?
What would you do? Let's examine a few scenarios.
I Want To Heal As Many Sick People As Possible
Let's imagine that you are an altruist and your only concern is to use your new healing superpowers to help as many people as possible. What would you do?
Well, your very first step would be to go to a hospital, because that is where the sick people are. Not only are there sick people there, but there are also doctors and medical supplies, and facilities that will allow relevant experts to immediately validate the results of your healing superpowers.
They would use professionals wielding the latest diagnostic tools to properly diagnose patients both before and after you use your healing superpowers, thus verifying that your healing superpowers are real and effective.
Word would spread like wildfire all around the globe that there was someone with healing superpowers at a particular hospital. More experts would come. More tests. More verification that your healing superpowers are real.
While all this is going on, other experts would show up and try to figure out the best way to prioritize the use of your superpowers to benefit the most people. After all, you want priority to go to those who are about to die, and can't be helped by modern medicine but can be helped by your healing superpowers. Perhaps more priority needs to go to children.
This is the part you would need help with the most: figuring out the priorities of who gets healed first, and figuring out either how to get you to the sick people or get the sick people to you.
I Want To Make As Much Money As Possible
Now let's consider what you do if you were completely selfish instead of selfless. You wake up one morning with healing superpowers, and now you want to leverage those superpowers to get yourself as much wealth and/or political power as possible. What would you do?
Your very first step would still be to go straight to a hospital. You would do this because that is where the experts are who can verify that your healing powers are in fact real, and there are plenty of sick people there who can be used to demonstrate your superpowers to the experts.
Once your healing superpowers are verified and reported to the world, the news will spread like wildfire. People will show up who want to help you prioritize who to heal. If you then announce that you want to charge large amounts of money for your services, overnight you will have a lot of wealthy people with various health problems seeking your services. From there it is just a matter of figuring out the optimal amount of money to charge to make the most money. Once you are famous, it should be trivial to find business experts who are willing to help you figure such things out.
Again, what you lack are certain kinds of experts, which you attract by becoming famous for having healing superpowers, and you get that fame from getting immediate verification of your powers, which you can get from a hospital.
I Want To Convert People To My Religion
Let us imagine that neither saving lives nor making money is important to you. What you crave more than anything else is the feeling of validation you get from having more people agree with you.
Your very first step would still be to go straight to a hospital so that your healing superpowers can be verified. Once again, you will quickly become famous. If you then hold a press conference and announce "I am a follower of Cletus, the God of Newts, and I invite people to join my religion. My healing powers are proof that Cletus is real," then right away, millions will join your religion. It doesn't really matter that there is a non-sequitur fallacy in your argument and that you haven't actually made a logical connection between your healing superpowers and the existence of Cletus the Newt God, millions will see it as proof and join your religion. No matter how many people were worshiping Cletus the Newt God before, the number worshiping him after your announcement will be much larger. If you continue to travel the world healing people and mention Cletus the Newt God every time you do, then over time, even more people will join your religion.
I Want Something Else
For every other motive, it is much the same, unless your goal is to avoid becoming famous for being the person with healing superpowers. In that case, you should not go to any hospital. In fact, you should avoid any use of your healing superpowers at all unless it is under circumstances in which you are certain that no one will notice that miraculous healing has taken place because if even one person finds out, you're going to become famous.
Even if your goal is to become a super-secret agent who is the ultimate combat medic working on secret special forces missions, eventually word is going to get out about what you can do, which means fame, which means the kinds of scenarios discussed above in previous sections.
This means that no matter what you want, you are better off if you get to a hospital quickly upon learning that you have healing superpowers.
Faith Healers
All of this brings us back to the thing that prompted this blog post: faith healers.
None of those faith healers are behaving like someone with real healing superpowers would behave, but all of them are behaving in ways that someone with fake healing powers would behave.
Faith healers claim that the reason they do their healing in a church instead of a hospital is that they want to spread their faith. This was already covered in the third section above. If their goal was to convert as many people as possible to their particular religion and they had real healing superpowers, step one is still to go to the place where your healing superpowers can be confirmed.
Instead, all faith healers stay in church, where they have control over the environment. That control is very much needed if they don't actually have healing superpowers, but need to convince others that they have healing superpowers. In this case, verification is the absolute last thing they want because verification would prove them to be frauds.
Healing in a church is exactly what one would do if one wanted to make money from having healing superpowers without actually having healing superpowers.