If you pay for prayer, you pay too much
Wednesday, November 4 2009
Kairol has done an excellent job hosting Patients for A Moment at Everything Changes. I see some familiar names and a few new ones, which is great. I plan to spend a few free minutes later on perusing the submissions.
For those of us still suffering from Pinkness envy, Slate has an Explainer on how to get our pet causes declared National Months, Weeks, or Days. I am looking forward to National Patient Blogger Awareness Fortnight, which should start any day now.
Via Movin’ Meat and Kevin, MD, comes this LA Times article about funding for “prayer healing”. Apparently the Christian Scientists want their prayer healers to be reimbursed as if they were real doctors, and they somehow convinced a few legislators to slip a provision to that effect into the Senate’s version of the health reform bill.
I won’t spend too much time denigrating Christian Scientist beliefs – I leave that to Mark Twain – but I knew a kid in high school who was a Christian Scientist. The kid had extreme ADHD, but his parents refused to treat him with actual medicine. So the kid was a total jerk, disruptive, mean, utterly obnoxious, and apparently nobody could do anything about it because those were his beliefs. I’m all for faith, but if your beliefs can’t help you be any less than a complete asshole, it’s time for some soul searching.
I am a practicing Christian, and I do think prayer is important and helpful. But it’s not a substitute for medicine. I worry that my fellow faithful often get confused on this point, with the result of much avoidable suffering.
For example, I had a church friend in college who struggled with depression, to the point he drove his car off an embankment and nearly killed himself. He had somehow come to believe that God would cure him of his depression, if only he was a good enough Christian, if only he prayed enough. On the one hand, sure – that’s one way to read the Bible. But on the other hand, nowhere does it say “thou shalt not take your meds”.
God knows what diseases there are, and what medicines are available; if the point were unmitigated suffering, you would have gotten something untreatable. But you didn’t, and the fact that you take your meds doesn’t make you any less faithful or God any less powerful. If you brush twice a day, does it mean you don’t trust God to save your teeth? Is wearing a seatbelt a sin?
It’s bad enough that they hold out prayer as a panacea, but even more galling is that Christian Scientists ask to be paid for their prayer ‘treatments’ – by the government. This proposal strikes me as less about helping people than a way for the Church of Christ, Scientist to enrich itself at taxpayer expense – and once that happens, you know the Scientologists will want billing codes for auditing, and all manner of quacks, hacks, and wacks will be right behind them.
Point being, I join the chorus of people who think this proposal is a bad idea. I hope it gets stripped out in the conference between Senate and House versions of the bill.
And meanwhile, if you feel like you need a prayer, let me know; I’ll do it, and I won’t expect to get paid.
Perhaps a second cousin to your post..Just got a patient with a GI bleed who is a Jehovah witness and a full code..quite a conundrum. Enjoy your blog.