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Healer or Hoax? | Charlie Goldsmith put to the test

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An Australian TV investigation set out to find whether a man who claims to heal with his mind is the real deal.

For three months, Seven Network’s Sunday Night followed Charlie Goldsmith, an Australian entrepreneur known to his followers simply as “The Healer,” as he worked with patients suffering from conditions that conventional medicine had struggled to fix. Reporter Angela Cox and producer Karen Willing built the investigation around a simple test: put Goldsmith’s claims in front of medical skeptics and chronically ill patients, then film what actually happens. Goldsmith says he never touches his patients and never charges them a cent, describing what he feels during a session as subtle “magnetic pulses” that he directs toward pain and infection.

• Hayley Cafarella, a wheelchair-bound patient with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) who is regularly hospitalized for ketamine infusions, reported pain relief after a 45-minute non-touch session that she compared to her ketamine treatments.
• Anthony Vohland, who came in with severe stabbing pain on his left side, was able to immediately bend over and touch his toes after being treated.
• Linda Hayhurst, an osteoarthritis patient with chronic back and joint pain, climbed a flight of stairs completely pain-free and broke down in tears; a second CRPS patient, Jada Burns, reported partial relief, including the disappearance of unmentioned hip pain even as her general body pain persisted.

Three Months Under the Skeptics’ Microscope

Sunday Night didn’t just film Goldsmith working his usual crowd of believers. The production brought in two doctors specifically to keep him honest: GP and outspoken skeptic Dr. Justin Coleman, and Gold Coast GP Dr. Karen Coates. Coleman went into the investigation deeming the entire premise scientifically implausible — there is no accepted medical mechanism by which unfocused mental intention, delivered without physical contact, could reduce pain or clear an infection. That skepticism is exactly why the network wanted him there, watching every session unfold in real time rather than relying on Goldsmith’s own account of his results.

The Non-Touch Sessions and Their Results

The cases filmed for the special were not minor complaints. Hayley Cafarella’s CRPS is severe enough that she relies on a wheelchair and regular ketamine infusions just to manage her pain. After 45 minutes with Goldsmith, working without any physical contact, she described relief on par with what those infusions give her. Anthony Vohland’s stabbing left-side pain had limited his mobility to the point that bending over was out of the question — until, immediately following his session, he was touching his toes.

Eleven-year-old Chloe Troughton, who lives with juvenile arthritis, reported dramatic relief from her symptoms after being treated. Linda Hayhurst’s moment was the most visibly emotional of the special: after years of chronic back and joint pain from osteoarthritis, she climbed a flight of stairs without pain for what she said was the first time in a long time, and the release of that moment brought her to tears on camera.

After 45 minutes of non-touch energy work, Hayley Cafarella said the relief matched what she gets from a ketamine infusion.

Not every result was clean. Jada Burns, another CRPS patient, told the crew her overall body pain hadn’t gone away — but she was startled to realize the pain in her hip, which she hadn’t even mentioned to Goldsmith beforehand, had vanished.

The Skeptics Push Back

Dr. Coleman and Dr. Coates didn’t walk away converted. Their read on the footage lines up with the standard medical explanation for this kind of rapid, dramatic symptom relief: the placebo effect, amplified by expectation, attention, and the emotional weight of finally being taken seriously by someone offering hope. There is no peer-reviewed mechanism, they maintained, for “magnetic pulses” directed by intention to alter pain signaling or joint inflammation. That skepticism sits at the center of the piece’s framing — readers interested in how mainstream outlets have covered fringe medical claims can find more in InfoSearched’s Health News coverage, and the broader pattern of TV newsmagazines chasing viral claims shows up regularly across InfoSearched’s Trending TV archive.

What the doctors couldn’t fully explain away was the speed and consistency of what they witnessed on camera — patients who’d exhausted conventional options moving, bending, and climbing stairs within minutes of a session that involved no medication, no needles, and no physical contact at all.

Goldsmith has never asked anyone to take his word for it over a doctor’s, and he still doesn’t charge for sessions — which is part of why Sunday Night kept circling back to him instead of the dozens of other self-described energy healers working the same circuit. Whether that’s because there’s something to the magnetic pulses or because a wheelchair-bound CRPS patient will take any 45 minutes of relief she can get, the special leaves for the viewer to decide.