13 Facts About Natasha Demkina

Natalya "Natasha" Nikolayevna Demkina 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 diagnoses.

Natasha Demkina is widely known by the childhood variant of her given name, Natasha.

Since 2004 Demkina has been a full-time student of the Semashko State Stomatological University, Moscow.

Since January 2006, Natasha Demkina has worked for the Center of Special Diagnostics of the Natalya Natasha Demkina, whose stated purpose is to diagnose and treat illness in cooperation with "experts possessing unusual abilities, folk healers and professionals of traditional medicine".

Natasha Demkina's story was picked up by a local newspaper in spring 2003 and a local television station followed suit in November that year.

Natasha Demkina is reported to have drawn a picture of what she saw inside a doctor's stomach, marking where he had an ulcer.

Natasha Demkina disagreed with the diagnosis of a cancer patient, saying all she could see was a small cyst.

Natasha Demkina gave a number of demonstrations and her diagnoses were then compared to professional medical diagnosis.

Natasha Demkina 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.

Natasha Demkina argued that Hyman used a Bayes factor that was statistically unjustifiable because it greatly increased the risk of the experiment falsely recording a moderate correlation as being no correlation.

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, and that a high Bayes factor was necessary to compensate for the fact that "Natasha Demkina was not blindly guessing", but instead "had a great number of normal sensory clues that could have helped increase her number of correct matches".

Bayes factors are used to compensate for variables that cannot be calculated through conventional statistics; in this case, the variable created by the visual clues that Natasha Demkina might gather from observing a subject.

Machi arranged for a test to take place in a veterinary clinic, where Natasha Demkina was asked to diagnose an anomaly in a dog.