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{{short description|Russian woman|bot=PearBOT 5}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2024}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Natasha Demkina
| native_name = Ната́лья Никола́евна Де́мкина
| image =
| alt =
| caption =
| birth_name = Natalya Nikolayevna Demkina
| birth_date = {{birth year and age|1987}}
| birth_place = [[Saransk]], [[Mordovia]], Russia, USSR
| death_date =
| death_place =
| nationality = Russian
| other_names =
| occupation = Alleged medical marvel
| years_active =
| known_for =
| notable_works =
}}
'''Natalya''' "'''Natasha'''" '''Nikolayevna Demkina''' ({{langx|ru|Ната́лья Никола́евна Де́мкина}}; born 1987) is a Russian woman who claims to possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical [[diagnosis|diagnoses]]. Since the age of ten, she has performed readings in Russia. She is widely known by the [[Eastern Slavic naming customs#Diminutive forms|childhood variant]] of her given name, ''Natasha''.
In 2004 she appeared on television shows in the [[United Kingdom]], on the [[Discovery Channel]] and in Japan. Since 2004 Demkina has been a full-time student of the [[Semashko State Stomatological University]], [[Moscow]]. Since January 2006, Demkina has worked 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".<ref name="NDWeb1">{{cite web|title=Special Diagnostic Center of Natalya Demkina |url=http://demkina.ru/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071224182520/http://www.demkina.ru/ |archive-date=24 December 2007 |url-status=dead }}</ref> Many experts are skeptical of her claims.
== History ==
According to her mother, Tatyana Vladimovna, Demkina was a fast learner, but was otherwise a normal child until she was ten years old, at which time her ability began to manifest itself.<ref name="Discovery" />
:"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<ref name="Guardian">''[[The Guardian]]'', 25 September 2004, [https://www.theguardian.com/medicine/story/0,11381,1312544,00.html "Visionary or fortune teller? Why scientists find diagnoses of 'x-ray' girl hard to stomach"]</ref>
After describing her mother's internal organs to her, Demkina's story began to spread by word of mouth among the local population and people began gathering outside her door seeking medical consultations. Her story was picked up by a local newspaper in spring 2003 and a local television station followed suit in November that year. This led to interest from a British tabloid newspaper which invited her to give demonstrations in London, as well as further invitations from groups in New York and Tokyo.<ref name="NDWeb1" /><ref name="Discovery" />
=== Russia ===
After stories about Demkina had begun to spread, doctors at a children's hospital in her home town asked her to perform a number of tasks to see if her abilities were genuine. Demkina is reported to have drawn a picture of what she saw inside a doctor's stomach, marking where he had an [[Peptic ulcer disease|ulcer]]. She also disagreed with the diagnosis of a cancer patient, saying all she could see was a small [[cyst]].<ref name="NDWeb1" /><ref name="Discovery" />
===
In January 2004, British tabloid newspaper ''[[The Sun (United Kingdom)|The Sun]]'' brought Demkina to England. She gave a number of demonstrations and her diagnoses were then compared to professional medical diagnosis. A Discovery Channel documentary on Demkina mentions reports of Demkina having successfully identified all the [[bone fracture|fractures]] and [[Implant (medicine)|metal pins]] in a woman who had recently been a victim in a car crash. ''[[The Guardian]]'' reported that she impressed the host of daytime television program [[This Morning (TV series)|''This Morning'']] by spotting that she had a sore ankle during an interview.<ref name ="Guardian" /><ref name ="skolnick" />
Initially, Demkina's demonstrations were well received. However, after she had left the United Kingdom, it emerged that she had made errors among her diagnoses. In one incident she told television-physician [[Chris Steele (doctor)|Chris Steele]] that he was suffering from a number of medical conditions, including [[kidney stones]], an ailment of the [[gall bladder]], and an enlarged [[liver]] and [[pancreas]]. Later medical evaluation determined that he was in good health and was not suffering from any of the ailments she had identified.<ref name="NDWeb1" /><ref name="Discovery" /><ref name="Guardian" />
=== New York City ===
In May 2004 she was brought to [[New York City]] by the [[Discovery Channel]] to appear on a documentary titled ''The Girl with X-Ray Eyes'',<ref name="Discovery">The Discovery Channel, 2004, [http://discoverychannel.co.in/human_files/girl_with_xray_eyes/index.shtml discoverychannel.co.in]; ''The Girl with X-Ray Eyes'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20060505051445/http://discoverychannel.co.in/human_files/girl_with_xray_eyes/index.shtml (Wayback Machine)]</ref> and to be tested by skeptical researchers from the [[Committee for Skeptical Inquiry]] (CSI) under partially controlled conditions.
As a demonstration for the documentary, Demkina was shown wearing her vision-hat and giving diagnoses to people who had previously given descriptions of their specific medical conditions
Then CSI researchers [[Ray Hyman]],
=== Demkina's criticism ===
After completing experiments in New York, Demkina made several complaints in regard to the conditions under which they were conducted, and about the way in which she and her diagnoses were treated. She argued that she had required more time to see a metal plate in one subject's skull, that surgical scars interfered with her ability to see the resected [[esophagus]] in another, and that she had been presented with two study subjects who had undergone abdominal procedure, but that she had only one abdominal condition on her list of potential diagnoses, leaving her confused as to which one matched the listed condition.
Later, she also complained that she could not see that one volunteer had had their appendix removed because she said appendixes sometimes grow back. She said she was not able to compare her own diagnosis to an independent medical diagnosis after key experiments had been conducted, preventing her from being able to see if she was diagnosing genuine conditions that were unknown to those conducting the experiments, and which were thus being listed against her in the overall results despite them being valid (due to this complaint, all volunteers in subsequent experiments, in Tokyo, were required to bring medical certificates with them before diagnosis).
In response to these complaints, the research team stated that Demkina should have been able to find the plate without extrasensory abilities, because its outline could be seen beneath the subject's scalp, and questioned why the presence of scar tissue in a subject's throat had not alerted her to them having an esophagal condition. Additionally, they noted that it remains clinically impossible for an appendix to spontaneously regrow.<ref name="NDWeb1" /><ref name="Discovery" /><ref name="skolnick" />
==== Brian Josephson's criticism ====
In a self-published commentary regarding the New York testing performed by the [[Committee for Skeptical Inquiry|Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal]] (CSICOP) and CSMMH, Nobel prize winning physicist and parapsychology supporter [[Brian Josephson]] criticized the test and evaluation methods used by Hyman and questioned the researchers' motives, leveling the accusation that the experiment had the appearance of being "some kind of plot to discredit the teenage claimed psychic".
Stating that the results should have been deemed "inconclusive", Josephson argued the odds of Demkina achieving four matches out of seven by chance alone were 1 in 50, or 2% – making her success rate a statistically significant result. He also argued that Hyman used a [[Bayesian inference|Bayes factor]] that was statistically unjustifiable because it greatly increased the risk of the experiment falsely recording a moderate correlation as being no correlation.<ref name="josephson">
{{cite web |last = Josephson |first = Brian |author-link = Brian Josephson |title = Scientists' unethical use of media for propaganda purposes |url = http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/%7Ebdj10/propaganda/ |access-date=2006-08-31 }}</ref><ref name="thes">{{cite web |url=http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/%7Ebdj10/propaganda/THES1.html |title=Scientists fail to see eye to eye over girl's 'X-ray vision' |author-link=Phil Baty |publisher=[[Times Higher Education Supplement]] |date=2004-12-10 }}</ref>
Hyman responded that the high benchmark used in the testing was necessary due to the higher levels of statistical significance which he says is necessary when testing paranormal claims,<ref name="hyman" /><ref name="hyman2">
{{cite web |last = Hyman |first = Ray |author-link = Ray Hyman |title = Statistics and the Test of Natasha |date =2005-06-07 |publisher = CSICOP |url=http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/statistics_and_the_test_of_natasha/ |access-date=2010-02-05}}</ref> and that a high Bayes factor was necessary to compensate for the fact that "Demkina was not blindly guessing", but instead "had a great number of [[Cold reading|normal sensory clues]] that could have helped increase her number of correct matches".<ref>Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH), [https://web.archive.org/web/20050204152650/http://www.csmmh.org/demkina/answerstocritics.html "Answer to Critics"]</ref>
Bayes factors are used to compensate for variables that cannot be calculated through conventional statistics;<ref name="bayesian">[[Mathworld]] [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BayesianAnalysis.html Bayesian Analysis]</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.abelard.org/briefings/bayes.htm#testing_for_rare_conditions |title = Cause, Chance and Bayesian Statistics: A Briefing Document |access-date =2006-09-11 }}</ref> in this case, the variable created by the visual clues that Demkina might gather from observing a subject.<ref name="hyman2" /> The Bayes factors used by Hyman were calculated by professors [[Persi Diaconis]] and [[Susan P. Holmes|Susan Holmes]] of the Department of Statistics at [[Stanford University]].<ref name="hyman2" /><ref name="hyman-stat-response">{{cite web |last=Hyman |first=Ray |author-link=Ray Hyman |title=Statistics of the Natasha test: response to concerns and questions |publisher=Skeptical Inquirer |year=2005 |url=http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_5_29/ai_n15622949 |access-date=2007-02-02}}</ref>
===
After visiting New York, Demkina traveled to [[Tokyo Denki University|Tokyo Electrical University]] (東京電機大学) in Japan, at the invitation of Professor [[Yoshio Machi]], who studies claims of unusual human abilities.<ref name="NDWeb1" />
According to accounts on her personal website, after her experiences in London and New York, Demkina set several conditions for the tests, including that the subjects bring with them a medical certificate stating their health status, and that the diagnosis be restricted to a single specific part of the body – the head, the torso, or extremities – which she was to be informed of in advance.<ref name="NDWeb1" />
Demkina's website claims that she was able to see that one of the subjects had a [[Prosthesis|prosthetic]] knee, and that another had asymmetrically placed internal organs. She also claims to have detected the early stages of pregnancy in a female subject, and an undulating [[spinal curvature]] in another subject.<ref name="NDWeb1" />
Machi also arranged for a test to take place in a veterinary clinic, where Demkina was asked to diagnose an anomaly in a dog. Natasha claims to have correctly identified that the dog had an artificial device in its back right leg after being specifically directed to look at the animal's paws.<ref name="NDWeb1" />
The Tokyo test was reviewed by three Japanese experts: the occult critic Hajime Yuumu, the psychologist Hiroyuki Ishii, and the [[Tondemo-bon]] Society skeptic Hiroshi Yamamoto. The results of Dr. Machi's tests and a panel discussion by the three critics aired on [[Fuji Television]] on 12 May 2005. It is noted that Demkina refused to participate in any test where the patients stood behind a cloth screen, despite the cloth being see-through with x-rays in the same way skin is.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~hirorin/xlaygirl.htm |archive-date=2006-05-07 |title=２００５年５月１２日 奇跡体験アンビリバボー |website=h5.dion.ne.jp |language=ja |access-date=2017-05-09|url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060507152400/http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~hirorin/xlaygirl.htm}}</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
== External links ==
* [http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/483/ The Girl With X-Ray Eyes] at [[Museum of Hoaxes]]
* [http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=45357 The Girl with "X-Ray" Vision] at [[James Randi
* [http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Demkinafile/ The Demkina File] at the website of the Association for Skeptical Investigations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Demkina, Natasha}}
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