João Teixeira de Faria, known as "John of God", is a dangerous fraud, a man who preys on the suffering and the needy in the most reprehensible way imaginable and exploits their illnesses for his own personal gain.

He draws the ill from all corners of the world through word of mouth and through his own self-aggrandizing, does nothing to help them (besides the effects of the placebo effect), wastes their time, money and resources and puts their health and life in even greater jeopardy.

While Brazil has many alleged faith healers and psychic surgeons, many of the ill who seek out his "help" are Western tourists drawn to him through word of mouth and his advertising of himself on the Internet. This blog is aimed at them, in the hopes of dissuading them from wasting precious time and money on a pilgrimage to Brazil.

My name is Agatha and I'm an American skeptic and researcher.

I am a research assistant on the website StopSylvia.com, devoted to examining the claims of psychic Sylvia Browne, and was inspired by those efforts to start my own skeptical blog.

I first heard of John of God about three years ago, when a family friend travelled to Brazil with her mother and a friend to be cured by him.

She had a condition that could have been easily corrected through surgery but instead chose to see "faith healers". Although she long claimed that John of God had healed her illness, it later proved to had actually rapidly spread due to her delay of proper treatment.

A few months after returning from Brazil and after seeing other faith healers and pursuing other methods of "alternative medicine", my family friend had to have surgery for her condition, which was successful.

Thankfully, she ended up only losing the cost of travelling to Brazil and is doing perfectly fine today. Others, I suspect, were not so lucky.

This incident, however, angered me very much and made me wish it was possible to warn people like my family friend, enspecially when I learned that yet another of my acquaintances had journeyed to see John of God with his wife.

I read as much as I could about John and found an alarming paucity of skeptical information about him, besides James Randi's thorough debunking of his methods. What few articles I found about John in the mainstream American, British and Australian press were mostly favorable- or at least failed to trully investigate his claims.

Months and years passed by and I was involved in several other long-term skeptical projects but never forgot what had happened and John always remained in the back of my mind. I flirted with the idea of starting a blog or a website several times but never went through with my plans. I failed to take initiative in any serious way, like many people with a desire to do something but no visible channel for their energy often do.

Finally, I decided I had to spread the word and inform the public about this charlatan the same way I and many others had helped debunk Sylvia Browne and the time for that was now.

My warmest thanks to my inspiration, the wonderful Mr. Robert Lancaster of StopSylvia.com.

Thank you for showing me the way.