Hello John,

A "misleading" psychic makes news because skeptics are anxious to see the idea of precognition or clairvoyance discredited. No one who studies the greater reality suggests that the Psychic Friends Network or astrologers or every one of those who claim to be "psychic" are legitimate. And everyone acknowledges that some readings are inaccurate, just as some medical diagnoses are inaccurate.

Unfortunately, unlike physicians and counselors who must have a set of credentials to become licensed as practitioners, there are no standards for psychics or mediums. As a result, the naive and unscrupulous enter a practice just as the local barbers used to be physicians selling snake oil during the settling of the Old West.

And so we could make a long list of charlatans today. However, that doesn't alter the fact that there are also genuinely talented psychics and mediums, any more than the fact that a man with no background in medicine, posing as a doctor, practices medicine for years before being discovered, discredits the practice of medicine. Or any more than the uninformed counseling done by "spiritual counselors" and clergy discredits the field of clinical counseling.

Even in the field of medicine, everyone knows the general practitioners are very often wrong--we all have personal stories to tell about them. And surgeons operate on the wrong patient or amputate the wrong limb. Hospitals are notorious for dispensing the wrong medicines to patients. There simply are errors.

In counseling, where the practitioners are licensed, studies comparing patients who went through counseling with those who didn't find that the outcomes show no significant difference between the groups: for both, about a third get better, a third stay the same, and a third get worse. In fact, in some studies, more get worse after counseling. But no one would make a list of the cases of the third who got worse as a result of counseling and claim that counseling is voodoo pseudo science.

Mediumship done by those who are effective mediums is remarkably accurate; it startles both those being given a reading and the others assembled. Police departments use psychic detectives because they work; those who are competent have excellent track records and the level of detail they produce could never have come by chance. They solve many cases.

People do a great service in exposing charlatans in counseling, medicine, mediumship, and police psychic work. And there are great inaccuracies in counseling, medicine, mediumship, and police psychic work, so we need to be cautious about work in all of these fields. We need to keep exposing the charlatans and making the work more accurate in these human service areas. However, the fact that there are charlatans and that there are inaccuracies even among the competent practitioners doesn't invalidate counseling, medicine, mediumship, or police psychic work.

Love and peace, Craig