Friday, 03 July 2009
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Skipping medicine for faith healing?
I was reading an article online today from Athens Banner-Herald about court cases against parents whose children have died because the children wouldn’t get taken to the doctors. The parent’s belief in prayer and faith healing was what kept them from going to get the medical attention needed in the cases. Here are some of the highlights from the article “Courts face new challenges in faith healing cases: using prayer instead of medicine” written by Rose French.
“Existing laws have gradually accounted for more well-known and established faiths, such as Pentecostalism, Christian Science and Jehovah's Witnesses.
But recent cases in the news have judges and child care advocates dealing with parents who claim adherence to lesser-known faiths, such as the Minnesota family following an Internet-based group's American Indian beliefs, and an independent Oregon church that has been investigated in the past for the deaths of members' sick children.
Legal and religious scholars say it's becoming more difficult for courts to decide when to honor the religious beliefs of parents and when to order conventional medical treatment for extremely sick children…The manslaughter trial of an Oregon couple who claim they were following their religious beliefs in the 2008 pneumonia death of their 1-year-old daughter began Monday. A state medical examiner has said she could have been treated with antibiotics…In Tennessee, Jacqueline Crank and her minister Ariel Sherman face child neglect charges in the death of her 15-year-old daughter, Jessica, who died in 2002 with a basketball-sized tumor on her shoulder. Prosecutors say based on Sherman's advice, the girl's mother relied on prayer instead of medicine…Believers in faith healing point to a Biblical verse in the Epistle of James, which describes how church elders should be called in to pray over the sick. There's no mention of doctors, and literalists interpret it to mean medical treatment should be eschewed over prayer.”
Do you rely solely on prayer for healing when it comes to medical issues?
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Comments (4)
I am a pharmacy student on rotation this month. There's a patient in the adult pharmacy who has been on life support for almost 2 years now. The family gathers around him daily to pray for hours over him. They lift him up in prayer 3-4 times a day and continue to tell the hospital administrator that they need him to be kept alive so they can pray for him and God will heal him.
This situation breaks my heart, but at the same time I am so confused by it. I've heard of refusing any sort of medical attention or medicine and relying on prayer. But this is a first for me. Honestly, being in the medical field, I wonder about its conflict with my faith daily. But with the medications this man is on, if we were to discontinue the life support that is causing him to breathe he would most likely pass away within the hour.
What do you think? Its not exactly the same, but its a twist on your post.
@cara_ruth@xanga - I think overall situations like this are confusing. I know of people who will say 'you aren't practicing your faith" if you don't believe that God can heal you. I personally think praying for healing and seeking medical attention go hand in hand. God gave us doctors for a reason. With the situation you mentioned, its hard to really say. Several years ago, a family friend's wife was put onto life support. We visited the hospital and prayed with our friend for his wife to get better. Sadly, she passed away a days after when our friend decided to take her off life support. I'm not really sure what I would do if it was someone from my family. I would want to believe that God would heal him/her, but also I would want to be able to say, "Okay, God his life is in your hands and he is with you now."
I agree with everything you said. Obviously I practice medicine and, like I said, every now and then I sit in class and wonder why I am studying to be a pharmacist. I wonder why we have decided to come up with all of these rules about the human body that God made for us and what we can do to make it "better". If God made it to do this, it should stay in His hands, right? At the same time I know God gave me a brain that can learn what I am learning and a heart for helping people through medicine, so I definitely believe that they go hand in hand. Even when we do everything by the books, patients pass away and some make amazing recoveries. The way I see it, God is going to do what He wants to do with us and nothing we can do, even medicine, is going to change that.
With the patient I spoke about earlier, if his family has been given heavy hearts to pray constantly over him... then maybe that is God's persuasion. You never know, and I guess I shouldn't be the one to judge.
I believe every situation is different. If there were rules for everything I would see it as putting God in a box and giving Him rules too. He makes himself known so often by making exceptions to the rules, right?
Thanks for making me think :)
All the accounts of healing, if one will actually read the Bible, show that the person or persons prayed for are healed immediately or within an hour! In cases where God did no miracle, it is written that physicians attended to the sick person to administer whatever soothing they could. Now Jacqueline Crank did not read her bible, and Sherman only reads it to extract enough words to make it sound like he is quoting it, If some attorney and judge would actually read this book, they would see that faith healing can be regulated. and furthermore, the whole commune lied under oath, jackie and ariel are married according to cult guidelines. They had their entwinement ceremony and call it being entwined (married) back right after Jackie's husband, Jessica's father died mysteriously one night in the commune house.