Not too long ago, the television program 20/20 featured a story about a family (Christian Scientists, I believe), who practiced faith healing. According to their belief, God is the Great Physician and modern medical treatments are unnecessary and go against God’s plan. This particular family was notable because the parents had been arrested when their young son died after they had refused antibiotics for him. The doctors said that the antibiotics, commonly accepted treatment for his infection, would have saved his life. The parents were acquitted. Then, their 16-year-old daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. The parents gave her the choice to pursue modern medical treatment, meaning insulin injections, or to use faith healing alone. They said she was old enough to make her own decision about this important issue. The young girl chose to undergo an anointing ceremony, in which she gave herself up to God. She was saying, “God, you decide. If it’s my time to die, so be it. If you want me to live, let me know and I will be healed.” Shortly afterward, the girl died in a diabetic coma, a quick and painless death.
After the death of their second child the parents were arrested again and were in prison at the time of the television interview. The 13 other children in the family believed that their parents had done the right thing and believed that their sister was with God. They missed her and wished her well.
This show was very stimulating to me because I live with a man whose life has been shaped by his decision to allow medical science to manage his diabetes. He has not been healed and daily injections of insulin have not given him health, but they have prolonged his existence in this particular physical body. I have wondered what his life would be like if he had made a similar decision to this young girl; to give himself to God and let universal law guide his existence. Would he have experienced a sudden, miraculous healing? Or would he, like her, have died? Would the entity that is now named John Clark be already incarned in a different physical body, perhaps one that is healthy?
I have also wondered how far medical science will go to prolong existence in the physical and how far we as a people will go in manipulating the physical existence before we truly understand what causes life and death. The parents whose two children died were arrested and finally imprisoned for, in essence, murdering their children because they “refused medical treatment.” Why is choosing to let life take its natural course considered a refusal? Recently the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners advanced medical treatments (including surgeries and drugs) was considered “cruel and unusual punishment,” so taxpayers are paying millions of dollars to extend the physical existence of criminals.
I have asked myself, if John refuses a kidney transplant, would this be considered suicide? At this point in our history, no. But fifty years ago, it would not have been considered murder to refuse insulin, either. Are we moving toward a future in which people have no voice in how their bodies are treated? If someone gets cancer and they don’t want radiation or chemotherapy or if the parents of a child with cancer “refuse” these treatments, will they be arrested, too? In a country which was founded on principles of freedom, how have we come to deny people the freedom to choose whether or not to go to a doctor? How do we determine which treatments are optional and which are necessary?
The truth is, no medical treatment is necessary. Medicine can be used with wisdom to bring about balance. When a person wants to be healed, when they are open to receive, when they are willing to be self reflective and willing to change, medicine can temporarily bring about a balance that can aid a person to heal. Without wisdom and without considering the spirit in dwelling the body, all medicine becomes destructive in the long run because the soul in the body becomes more and more removed from the original cause of the disease.
We have complicated our lives by secularizing our medicine. Healing used to be the domain of the shamans, the priests, the most spiritual people in society. Jesus spread his ministry through his healing miracles. Heal -- hallowed -- holy -- whole -- all relate to the state of being in alignment with God. One dictionary defines healing as “restoring to original purity.” How can we heal if we leave the spirit out of medicine?
In this society, we have come to use the words “health care” as a euphemism for “health insurance.” Health insurance is a business. It is money used to pay for various treatments. Some of these treatments are health care, and some are not. For example, health insurance might pay for a psychiatrist who prescribes anti-depressant drugs and might not pay for a counselor who provides spiritual and emotional counseling. Which is really caring for the depressed person -- the drug or the counselor? Some psychiatrists these days still do counsel but many do not even see patients. They just prescribe drugs which treat the brain and the nervous system, not the soul or the spirit.
...Why have we as a people accepted this kind of condition in the name of “health care”? Perhaps we have collectively become lazy. It requires time, effort, and attention to listen to someone and to care for them. We have become afraid to listen, afraid to touch, afraid to reveal ourselves. Many parents no longer spend time with their children but plop them in front of a television set. Teachers are prohibited by law from touching their students, lest they be accused of sexual harassment or beating. Doctors have not made house calls for years, and the medical insurance we euphemistically call “health care” will pay for a very limited number of visits for nurses to care for people in their homes. I have spoken with nurses who are leaving the profession because they can no longer care for people the way they want to. They are required (by insurance, especially government Medicare) to spend a limited amount of time in their patients’ homes and to limit the number of times they can visit the same home. Drug companies are big business and the American Medical Association is a very powerful organization. People who become doctors because they want to help people learn about the physical body but nothing about the spirit. It is no wonder doctors resort to drugs to manage illness rather than to heal. How can you heal someone when he or she is a number, a physical body, or an insurance claim?
My first introduction to this reality was years ago, before I became a student in the School of Metaphysics. I had graduated from University of Michigan and was working for the summer at University of Michigan hospital, a very renowned institution with a reputation for being one of the best in the world. My job was to serve meals to patients in the Clinical Research Unit, a small division of the hospital devoted to researching treatments for diseases with no known cure. At the time there were patients hospitalized for sickle cell anemia, gout, and other disorders whose names I no longer recall. The unique feature of this unit was that the patients who came for treatment and research were “regulars,” that is, they visited the hospital periodically on a regular basis to participate in the research projects. Thus, the doctors had the opportunity to get to know them and form relationships with them. I was struck by the coldness of many of the doctors, particularly when I heard them refer to the patients not by name, but by their disease and room number! They would say, for example, “Bring me the chart of the sickle cell in Room 127.” These were people, with thoughts, and feelings, and names, and lives, and the doctors identified them by their disease.
I learned through observation that this was one way the doctors tried to distance themselves from their own helplessness or from becoming too emotionally involved with these patients who came back visit after visit, still with no cure for their disease. Yet, it struck me even then, without the metaphysical knowledge I have now, that this uncaring attitude did not contribute to healing these people. In fact, the doctors’ point of focus was not the people themselves, but their disease. It was the disease they were studying. This is not to condemn doctors; their education teaches them to treat disease, not to promote health. Some years ago I interviewed Dr. Bernie Siegel for Thresholds Quarterly. This man, a long-time surgeon, had discovered that the way he was the most effective in helping his patients was listening to them. All of the surgeries, chemotherapies, drugs and other treatments were secondary to the healing power of listening and love. He was very angry that he had never learned anything like this in medical school. He said that the nurses learned far more about caring for people than the doctors did. So his mission now is to educate people, including doctors, about the healing power of love.
We have many technological advances and increasingly more ways we can manipulate energy physically. We can do more and more experiments in laboratories with animals, divorced from people and their thoughts, their dreams, and their hopes. As we do this kind of physical research, we can develop more and more drugs, more and more machines, more and more tests, more and more physical treatments. Should we just because we can?
Some medical doctors try to address these difficult questions. One of John’s eye doctors, when faced with the question “Should we do eye surgery?” said to John, “I’ve taken the Hippocratic oath and the first principle is Do no harm. So as long as you have some sight left in that eye I recommend you leave well enough alone and not go through the risks of surgery.” I respected him for that, and for the humbleness to admit that a surgical procedure which involves cutting into the delicate eye is causing harm. The first eye surgery John had had resulted in complications which left him blind in one eye; although he only had partial sight in the other eye the surgery could potentially render him completely blind. The wisdom of that doctor is, unfortunately, rare these days.
Sometimes it seems that the more we “progress” with our physical research, the more we regress in understanding life. To experiment with our creative power is progress; to forget why we have this creative power leads us down destructive paths. Our creative power was given to us by our Creator and its purposeful use is for us to become more like the Creator. In order to heal and to understand what will aid healing, we must understand how to become more like the Creator who endowed us with this great power.
To heal is to return to our original state of purity, to know our true nature as a spiritual being, and to live with goodness, love, generosity, kindness, truth, equanimity -- all of the attributes that contribute to wholeness, growth, and productivity. When a person is sick, it is not just because their physical cells have gone awry or because there is some chemical imbalance in the brain. The out-of-control cells or imbalanced chemicals are a reaction to something out of balance in the soul and spirit. In order for the drugs and surgeries to work there must also be an accompanying change in the thinking and awareness of the person whose body is being treated. Otherwise, the physical changes are only temporary and the body develops more symptoms. Or the cancer recurs or the person gets into another “accident.” Why? Because the disease or disorder is an outward manifestation of a spirit that is out of harmony with Universal Law.
The most effective healing prayers are those in which people pray for understanding, not just for the body to be healed. When there is understanding, there is change. There is movement toward balance with God, with the universe, with law. When there is change or repentance, permanent healing can occur. Medical doctors are now publishing results of prayer that accompanies medical procedures, and admit that people get better faster and heal more completely when they pray or when other people pray for them.
With this knowledge, it can help people to make wiser choices about health care. They can pray about the choices before them to determine what is true care. Just because we have the means to do brain surgery or organ transplants, does this mean we must do them? Because we have synthesized insulin do we have to administer it? Now that dialysis machines can function as an artificial kidney, must a person with kidney failure become dependent on a machine to keep them alive? Is it always helpful to a soul to keep the physical body going or might it be better in some cases to let the soul be free of its entrapment to know its spiritual origin? Many doctors and many people believe that death means failure; that they have failed if a patient dies. And yet, everything that lives is in a process of change. Death is a change, a transformation. In the Bible, it says
“To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted...”
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).
Prayer, meditation, and aligning our consciousness with God will help us to know when that time comes. Our progress in understanding spiritual matters must match our developments in science if we are to truly heal.
