Spiritual healing: Religion and science not always at odds, author discovers

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This article was published 17/04/2015 (3290 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mainstream Christianity teaches people both to pray for the sick and to work to help others. It’s sometimes put this way: “Pray as if no one can help and work as if God will do nothing.”

But fringes teach that using science and medicine may indicate a lack of faith. When believers rely exclusively on prayer, in spite of available medical treatments, tragedy can occur.

Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, Dr. Paul A. Offit is a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bad Faith is Offit’s eighth solo book; he has collaborated on others as well. Titles such as Autism’s False Prophets, Breaking the Antibiotic Habit, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, and Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All give a good idea of his stance on the effectiveness of scientific medical practices when properly used.

Bad Faith focuses on the collision of religion and science, which can have disastrous results. And while Offit set out to chronicle the dangers of religion, he found himself “largely embracing religious teachings.”

“The hero of this book isn’t science, or medicine, or doctors,” he insists, “it’s religion.”

In spite of occasional “destructive cults,” Offit argues convincingly that the teachings of most religions support medical prevention and treatment.

Bad Faith begins with the heart-wrenching story of Doug and Rita Swan, Christian Scientists whose objections to most modern medicine nearly left Rita dead from an ovarian cyst, and resulted in the death of their son Matthew from a treatable fever.

The brief history of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, and the hidebound insistence of their “practitioners,” who pray for the sick to be able to overcome the “unreality” of their symptoms without medical intervention, provides context for the Swan’s story.

Years later, Rita Swan would become a tireless advocate for laws requiring treatment of children, even against the wishes of their parents.

Offit obviously agrees with such government intervention. Bad Faith bolsters his position with stories about faith healers who condemn the “faithless,” cult leaders who kill their adherents, exorcism instead of treatment of mental illness and the occasional necessity to choose between the life of the mother and the death of both mother and child.

An account of a year-long outbreak of measles in Philadelphia in the early 1990s, eventually leading to court-ordered treatment, illustrates how refusal of vaccination, coupled with lack of treatment of fever and dehydration, led to an unusual numbers of children’s deaths.

Offit provides some background for obedience to religious authority, discussing the famous Milgram experiment where people were convinced to continue administering what they thought was a painful, dangerous shock to experimental subjects.

He sometimes overstates or oversimplifies — connecting, for instance, the deadly effects of a violently physical “exorcism” of an autistic boy by a fringe Protestant preacher to a Roman Catholic conference on exorcism.

Discussing faith healers, he asserts that Pat Robertson “was considered a viable candidate for president in the mid-1980s.” Again, “Like all faith healers, the Peculiar People rejected modern medicine.”

In fact, some people who believe in the efficacy of faith also embrace medical treatment.

The final chapters, discussing the role of law in parental decisions about their children, reintroduces Rita Swan and her work to save others the fate of her son. Her nobility and commitment are laudable. Still, sometimes laws instituted because of difficult and extreme cases can have unintended consequences.

The evil of faith gone wrong is hard to fathom. The importance of balance and moderation, even in religious fervour, is the focus of this eye-opening book.

 

Bill Rambo teaches at the Laureate Academy in St. Norbert. His father and late grandfather were medical missionaries in Africa and India who used modern medicine to serve the people they prayed for.