A brief
fad in the early 1980s. Wealthy
suckers who had
cancer would go to the
Phillipines and undergo strange
rites: In a
nod to
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a
mystic would supposedly
plunge his hand into the
mark's
abdomen, then
pull out the cancerous
tumor for all to see. The healed
patient would then travel back home, where they would die a
lingering death, because the
witch doctor had actually just palmed some
giblets and put on a varient of the old
pulling a quarter out of the ear trick.
After a righteously disgusted James Randi exposed this on National Television, the fad died out.