Bulgaria Goes Ahead with Plan for Crack-Down on Miracle Healers

Fortune-teller and miracle healer Totka Totevska from the northern town of Pleven was sentenced in 2010 to three and a half years in jail following complaints by clients. Totevska used to compare herself to world famous prophet Vanga who died in 1996.

Bulgaria's health ministry has finally proceeded with plans to distinguish charlatanism from therapy and translate them into a law.

An ad hoc body, established at the initiative of Health Minister Dessislava Atanasova, has proposed that alternative medical therapy should be practiced only by people who have been educated in this field, while their work – monitored by the health ministry.

"What we are fighting for is a legal framework, which will legalize the status of those healers, who have the necessary skills and training, and wipe out those, who are just pretending to be healers," said Zofia Shcherbak, who is not only member of the commission, but also chair of the alternative medicine practitioners association.

"The new legislation will close up loopholes, which allowed many to get around it and pose as alternative medicine practitioners," she explained in an interview for the national radio.

"Up until now the health ministry was not entitled to intervene and it was left up to the police only to handle such cases."

But experts fear that the legislation wouldn't do much to put an end to the booming business of clairvoyants and miracle healers because too many Bulgarians believe in their services.

Numerous psychic programs of clairvoyants, soothsayers, fortune-tellers and astrologers with special powers have turned into a social phenomenon in Bulgaria.

The business of miracle healers is booming in Bulgaria as never before on the back of the economic crisis, Bulgarians' despair and their predilection for mysticism and superstitions.

These pushy women can be seen standing in front of hospitals, their ads feature in newspapers and on the internet. It is hard to avoid meeting them even in downtown Sofia.

More often than not, following these sessions, the patients end up with double-digit bills, rather than a solution to their problems.

The promise to solve virtually any problem whether it's regarding love, career, finance, stress or illness however have made the miracle healers so popular in Bulgaria that they successfully compete with the medics from the health care sector, left in tatters after the collapse of the communist regime.

According to social analysts the fear of the unknown, the feeling for being helpless when faced with corruption, the insecurity and instability that marked the period of big changes in the country, makes people seek refuge in superstitions.

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