Spirituality

South African paediatric surgeon leaves hospital work to offer energy medicine readings

A South African paediatric surgeon who spent nine years operating on children has left that work to open a spiritual healing practice, the Daily Dispatch reports. Dr Yashoda Manickchund, 43, founded Yashoda Yatra in 2025 after stepping away from surgery, and the business now offers energy medicine consultations alongside spiritual guidance, according to the Daily Dispatch.

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From operating rooms to a farm in Gonubie#

Manickchund trained at the University of Cape Town and completed postgraduate work at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, later earning a fellowship of the College of Paediatric Surgeons and a master's in medicine, according to the Daily Dispatch. She joined Doctors Without Borders after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the group's work took her to Pakistan, Libya and Ethiopia before she returned to South Africa and worked as a qualified paediatric surgeon until 2025.

Manickchund told the Daily Dispatch that repeated burnout drove her to reconsider her career, and that she turned inward and followed her intuition to reconnect with what she called her spiritual side. She said time spent in nature was imperative to coming back to herself, and that she grew up with the teachings of Seva, or service to humanity, as a central purpose of life.

Manickchund said she was shocked by some of what she called the powerful and energetic spaces she visited during a recent spiritual trip through communities she had once treated, the Daily Dispatch reports.

What a Yashoda Yatra session involves#

At her Gonubie farm, Manickchund begins consultations with an interview covering a client's physical and emotional wellbeing, then runs a Bio-Well scan in which the client rests their fingertips on a sensor, the Daily Dispatch reports. The device registers an electrical pulse as a glow that a camera captures, and software turns the result into charts Manickchund reads as a measure of the client's energy and emotional state, which she sums up in a written report.

The practice sits within what other outlets have separately examined as a wider conversation about faith and medicine. Fox News reports that physician Marc Siegel's new book, out in November, argues doctors should not separate medical and spiritual explanations for recovery, citing survey data he says shows 70% of physicians believe in God and 55% report witnessing medical miracles in their practice. ProPublica, reporting on a faith-healing sect in Idaho called the Followers of Christ, found that four children in one family died after their parents withheld medical care, deaths an Idaho deputy attorney general described as the result of children being indoctrinated and conditioned.

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