The Thinking ‘Kat: Faith Healing
Time to revisit some content from the original Meerkat Musings. Back in 2016 I became involved in a debate on the subject of faith healing. Specifically, the question was around whether or not it was fair to prosecute parents who had turned to faith healing to save their children, especially in light of how many people die every year whilst in the care of medical services.
In the process of the debate, it soon became clear that there are huge problems with equating faith healing with modern medical practices. Let’s take a deeper dive into this.
What is Faith Healing?
Depending on your religious beliefs, faith healing could be regarded as ‘the power of prayer’. In less enlightened times, people turned to their faith in the hopes of curing an illness or healing an injury. There would have occasions – entirely via coincidence – where someone recovered from their injury or illness, and despite a lack of evidence to show the prayer or chant or ritual had any tangible impact, there was now an association, a link to the recovery.
Records from the Medieval period are sketchy as best as to how often faith healing coincided with some ‘miraculous’ recovery, but we can infer from the number of people who frequently died far younger than they do these days that if faith healing was widely used, it widely failed. It took humanity centuries to develop an understanding as to the true cause of disease, and how the human body functions. Intriguingly enough, with this understanding, humans began to live longer, healthier lives, and would survive previously fatal wounds and illnesses.
Resistance to Progress
It will seem bizarre, almost alien, to most of us that there are people out there who will almost exclusively rely upon faith healing in this day and age, yet despite all the advancements of medical technology, there are indeed people out there who exclusively utilise faith healing. I find this very hard to understand, but if an adult makes a conscious choice to do so, that is entirely upon them. I will regard their decision as a foolish one, but it is their decision to make.
Why might someone make such a choice? Much of it stems from ignorance. People will mistakenly-yet-doggedly believe in conspiracies relating to vaccination, science, and medicines. In the Internet Age these conspiracies have proliferated at an alarming rate, reaching every corner of the world. Consequently, people have moved in droves to practice faith healing, among other forms of unproven alternative medical ideas.
If this decision impacted only those who made it for themselves, it would be a tolerable one. Unfortunately, there are plenty of occasions where parents have made decisions on behalf of their children, with disastrous and tragic outcomes.
Despair and Neglect
Mariah Walton was born with a small hole in her heart. This issue could have been dealt with when she was an infant, and even as an older child, it could have been resolved before serious complications impacted Ms Walton’s life. Because she was a child, she was unable to seek out treatment on her own, and relied solely upon her parents to consent to help. Her parents chose to turn to the power of prayer, and did nothing to fix their daughter’s problem. Ms Walton is now an adult who requires an oxygen tank, and is often bedridden.
Hers is sadly not a unique story. From the same article we have Bryan Hoyt. Whilst performing a faith healing ritual with other members of the Followers of Christ cult, a baby died in his arms. He was told this was due to a lack of faith on his part. When Mr Hoyt was a child he broke two bones in his ankle, and his parents, instead of seeking out hospital treatment, tried alternative remedies, such as rubbing olive oil on his ankle. When they persuaded him to try and walk, he would pass out from the pain, and be woken by his step-dad and uncles kicking him, calling him a ‘fag’, and suggesting he wasn’t healing due to a lack of faith.
There are many more stories, and some of them have even worse endings. Hundreds of children have died as a result of going untreated, and it is believed most of them would have lived, had their parents sought conventional medical treatment. One study from the American Cancer Society concluded that of 172 known cases of childhood deaths where faith healing was used instead of medical care, 90 percent of the children would have lived if they had been conventionally treated. The parents of these children often evade prosecution, thanks to entrenched attitudes about religion in certain parts of the world.
It ought to be clear that modern medical science has a proven track record for saving lives, so why is there so much opposition?
The Backlash Against Doctors
No one is perfect. Doctors, nurses, surgeons and pharmacists are human beings, subject to all the flaws and idiosyncrasies that make us human. It is an unfortunate fact that sometimes mistakes are made that can cost lives. It is also an unfortunate fact that sometimes, for whatever reason, a disease or injury proves fatal, even in this day and age. Finally, whilst it is mercifully rare, there are occasions where a medical professional may maliciously seek to harm or kill their patients.
These occasions tend to receive a lot of publicity. Sometimes they make the national news. What needs to be weighed against these moments are all the cases where medical practices succeed. In 2022, 127 million people visited a medical centre in the USA. There were 3.2 million deaths, of which some would have been outside of medical establishments (such as accidents, suicides, homicides). If however we assume all these deaths were of someone under the auspices of US medical care, this means less than 1.9 percent of patients who sought medical treatment died due to a failure of the medical system. This percentage is actually going to be lower, for the aforementioned reasons of impossible-to-survive injuries, illnesses, accidents and so forth.
Despite the obvious, namely that far more people – some 98 percent – are successfully treated by their doctor for their ailment, there are people who prefer to focus on the negative, at the complete expense of the facts. Facts can be awkward. They can imped a narrative. In those circumstances, facts are manipulated and distorted to suit dishonest agendas and irrational positions.
Obviously any death due to an error or accident is a tragic moment, and there should always be an investigation into the cause. This happens, and doctors face malpractice suits, on a routine basis, yet for all the scrutiny placed upon medical professionals, faith healers can, in certain parts of the world, be overlooked, even protected.
When the Law Fails
When President Richard Nixon signed into law the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974, the aim was to combat child abuse. Two of Nixon’s advisors, John Ehrlichman and J R Haldeman, were both Christian Scientists, and they were successfully able to add a law that stated those who believed in the power of prayer as a form of cure would be exempt from prosecution. In order to access funds from CAPTA, states had to pass similar measures. Some states still have these measures on their books, even though this protection has since been repealed on a federal level. Consequently, there are pockets of the USA where parents and faith healers cannot be legally pursued for neglect that leads to the serious harm or even deaths of children.
What can be Done?
Education is the single best means to combat ignorance. Parents – especially new parents – need to be educated, virtually from the moment of birth, that there are many simple and effective means of handling various medical issues that may affect an infant. For all the fear-mongering around vaccines and medication, they are far, far better than the alternative. We should as a society stop listening to armchair activists on social media, and pay more attention to those who have spent years or even decades practicing and studying medicine.
That’s my two cents on the subject.
UPDATE: 5th December 2024
My friend Bruce Gerencser has written a post on this subject, which lampoons the attitudes of fundamentalist Christians and their errant belief that faith healing is somehow a viable alternative to conventional, proven medical assistance. It is an excellent read.
