Clinton, there's loads of evidence that belief works, if not the actual doo-dads.

See The National Cancer Institute's page on Laetril. Apparently, it may work a little. The main anti-cancer ingredient seems to be cyanide, which is anti-people too. Here's the main page on complementary/alternative treatment. No faith healing mentioned though.

Here's the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

I don't believe in miraculous cures. It doesn't mean they can't happen, but then some folks have them without doing anything special. I DO believe the mind can help a great deal. We know we can slow down or speed up our heartbeat and change our blood pressure. If we look at all the physical problems that can result from mental stress, we ought to be able to produce beneficial results as well. I've heard of meditation and visualization used as part of standard therapies for various things.

Doctors are a lot less dismissive of various alternative treatments these days. One doctor I had (the one who suggested taking Feverfew for migraines) said basically, if it does no harm (financially, physically or mentally), why not consider it? Some things have never been tested and you have to figure out if they sound reasonable. Some things have been tested and the results aren't well-known or easy to find. I think most treatments, faith-healing (and there never will be an effective study on that) or otherwise, that cost a bundle have a built-in fraud alert system.

People who simply believe they're doing something effective often get results. See this page on the Placebo Effect. From that page:

"Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchiodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000)."