Born in Saransk, Russia in 1987 Natasha Demkina (Natalya Nikolayevna Demkina) at the age of ten developed a strange vision. She could see inside a human body. This happened after Natasha was operated for her appendix.
“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.
Born in Saransk, Russia in 1987 Natasha Demkina (Natalya Nikolayevna Demkina) at the age of ten developed a strange vision. She could see inside a human body. This happened after Natasha was operated for her appendix. “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 this Natasha’s story started spreading in the neighborhood. People began gathering outside her house to figure out their sicknesses. On hearing her stories, doctors in her hometown decided to put her to test. Natasha was taken to a local children hospital where she correctly diagnosed the children. She used pictures to show the doctors. She showed one of the doctors a picture of his stomach with something in it. That was his ulcer.
Using her vision she also corrected a wrong diagnosis made by the doctors about a lady who was said to be suffering from cancer. Natasha examined her and said that it was just a small cyst and not cancer. After several examinations it was revealed that the woman indeed did not have cancer.
Stories of Natasha reached UK through the newspaper, The Sun. In 2004 Natasha was brought to UK to test her vision. Natasha could locate the injuries of a person who had a car accident a year before. In England she also examined a resident doctor Chris Steele of This Morning TV show. She correctly told him about the operations he had undergone and then told him that he was suffering from gall stones, kidney stones, enlarged pancreas and enlarged liver. Immediately the doctor went for a scan to find that all the diagnosis made by Natasha were accurate. He found that he had a tumor in his intestines, but was not life threatening.
The Discovery Channel then decided to test her in New York. There were seven patients and Natasha had to diagnose any five. Natasha could diagnose only four and was told that she had failed the test. This experiment remains a controversy till date. Later she was tested by Professor Yoshio Machi from the Department of Electronics at Tokyo Denki University. After setting a few ground rules for the tests Natasha was successful in passing. She could locate a prosthetic knee and discovered that a woman was pregnant.
Later Natasha also started charging patients for diagnosis. Since January 2006, Demkina is working 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. Natasha Demkina still remains a controversial subject.
Probably because she's only 17, she only enters the adult world and doesn't
understand why people do not trust each other in the world of adults. She wants
people to accept her and that's probably the reason why she wants serious medics
to confirm that she does have it, her gift is real.
It's a 12-hour train ride to Moscow, followed by an 11-hour flight, before
Natasha will arrive in New York to begin her ordeal.
Oh look, mom, it's beautiful. This is what I'm talking about.
How do you feel about the tests you've got to do in the next few days?
To be honest, I'm not thinking about it. I've put it at the back of my mind. Now
I'm full of emotions. I will try. I hope everything will be okay. At least I do
want to do my best. Look how beautiful. Fantastic.
PSYCOP has been testing individuals like Natasha, who claim special powers, for
over 30 years. They believe false claims are dangerous and see their work as a
public service. Their opponents say PSYCOP's fellows are not objective, but
have a hard bias against the psychic. To Natasha's credit, she has engaged with
the skeptics. She hasn't gone for the soft option of going to the believers.
She's come along to the scientists, to the critics, and say, okay, you design the
test, I'll take part in that test, we'll see what happens. Experimental
psychologists Richard Wiseman and Ray Hyman have set up two sessions for
Natasha during her stay. This first one allows her to work on her own terms
using her usual methods. The scientists will observe her success rate. To me the
big questions are what's going through her head and what's going through the
head of her clients. Does she really see something? Or does she believe she sees
something? Is she confused? It's fascinating. Natasha is to see six
patients who've told the scientists their conditions. How closely will
Natasha match these? The first patient is a fellow Russian. So from the start I
apologize, but I don't know medical terminology yet. Natasha quickly focuses
on the patient's heart. Secondly, if you look at the heart as a muscular organ,
there are certain disturbances. Arrhythmia, which means disturbance of the heart
beat cycle. Especially the left ventricle is beating slower than the right. The
patient's problem is shortness of breath and weak heart muscles. He'd had an ECG
which had detected arrhythmia. Basically she pinpointed an issue that's present
while eliminating the ones that were iffy. No, it's unbelievable. Magic. It's true.
Unbelievable. Natasha's next patient had come for persistent pins and needles.
Natasha mentions problems with his circulation. Circulation? Blood circulation, yes.
To do the massage of this neck area to help blood circulation. Okay. The
difficulty of testing Natasha is that she's getting a lot of feedback and she's
throwing out a lot of different things, which makes life complicated. It means
that the more you say, the more things can be likely to be a hit.
In this area near the ribs, this liver. I just had high enzymes. My doctor said my enzyme
level was very high. He said it might be due to my cholesterol being high, but he
wanted to get the enzyme level down in my liver. She talked about the liver.
I just had a cholesterol problem where my liver was I guess a little fatty due
to cholesterol. She nailed that. I'm just coming off a cold. She had mentioned my
right lung was a little maybe inflamed or whatever. I guess maybe that was the
chest call that I just had. So I was I was really surprised and happy with the
results. I was hoping to be healthier though. This is an impossible thing to
pin down where she operates because she looks at a patient and says you have
something wrong with your lung and that's true. The patient owes us a medical
record that shows it. That's a tremendous hit. If she says you have something wrong
with your lung and a patient denies it, she still has the oath. She says well
oftentimes I find things that the medical profession has missed. My lower
back on the right side. Or she says it's a condition that's coming, you wait and
see. It's very hard for her to be really wrong. One of the patients has suffered
from a gynecological condition called endometriosis and is worried that it's
returned. Doctors cannot confirm this without further surgery. So she's asked
Natasha to look at her pelvic area but hasn't explained why.
Though they can also be benign, ovarian cysts are one symptom of endometriosis.
One thing that bothered me about Natasha was that she was telling them about
things they had wrong, they didn't realize had wrong with themselves.
I'll just try to sort it out as soon as possible. That's frightening you know you're
putting some stress on people and you get him to worry about things and worry
itself can be, can begin creating problems. She seemed to find things that
I just was not aware of and I just had a cat scan on my liver and not the same as
what she said so I'm a little you know doubtful, let me put it that way.
Yeah, she's as sweet as could be though, just adorable. Amazing and disconcerting, yeah.
I came because I have very frequent migraines almost every day and she picked
up on that right away. She was right on, I thought it was amazing.
How much of what she mentioned do you think was accurate, was on target?
Well she said that, she didn't actually mention the word migraine but she said
that I have a problem, a vascular problem and that I tend to get headaches in the
front of my head and my forehead. Also she talked about the thyroid and my
doctor tested the thyroid back in December because he thought there might
be a problem and the test came up negative but she said that it was
impaired and that the function was impaired somehow so I think I'll ask my
doctor about it again. Five out of six of these health-conscious New Yorkers are
impressed by Natasha's diagnoses. This seems a clear success but the
skeptics have another explanation. What's interesting is before we asked them to
have the reading I asked them to tell me what the problem was and people
described different ailments. During the reading Natasha only mentioned the right
ailment to one of those people so the others were sitting there. Natasha didn't
mention what was wrong with them but still most of them were very impressed.
I suspect that what's going on is psychological and has a psychological
explanation. Despite Natasha's success with today's patients the scientists
remain unconvinced. Tomorrow she's agreed to submit to an experiment specially
designed to rule out any ambiguity. It will be the toughest test Natasha has
ever faced.
It's the day of the experiment set up to see whether Natasha can demonstrate her
claims of x-ray vision under test conditions. I think when it comes to
Natasha we don't know exactly what's going on. I mean it could be that she's
got great imagery skills, she can look at somebody and create images inside her
head and then convince herself that they're coming from the outside world.
The other possibility is that she's simply lying to us. She's simply
pretending that yes indeed she can look inside somebody else's body and the
third possibility is that she's actually psychic, that she really is doing what
she claims to be able to do. I think at the moment we don't know which of those
is actually the case. A big part of the test is ruling out the possibility of
fraud and so you have to say to the claimant look you know it's not that I
think that you will cheat, it's just we have to rule out that possibility and
some people can find that very offensive.
Having now seen Natasha at work the sceptical scientists suspect that she
gets her information not from an x-ray type vision but from what patients say
and how they react to her. So today the scientists will not allow Natasha to
interact with the subjects at all. The way a patient moves could reveal what
is wrong with them so today Natasha will only be allowed to see the subjects when
still. The scientists also claim that even if a subject is trying to remain
impassive they are likely to reveal their thoughts by unconscious signals. So
today the subjects will be blinded by glasses that stop them being aware of
when Natasha is looking directly at them. Most importantly they suspect that
Natasha throws out lots of suggestions to maximize her chances of a hit. This
time she will be allowed to diagnose only one condition per patient. The test
is designed to eliminate lots of the problems which may lead us to think
that Natasha is psychic and that's not the case. It involves seven people each
of which have a different medical problem and seven diagnoses and all she
has to do is match one of the diagnoses to one of the people and then we know
from the mathematics the situation how well she's performed.
Everything will be fine and we'll be happy ever after.
The testers want as few people as possible in the test room to minimize
the possibility of cheating or controls being breached. At the last moment to
Natasha's distress they decide to exclude her.
