Healing Vs. Medicine
We see that many ideas that have circulated in the faith community have not always 
been consistent with the Scriptures, and seem to lack balance in the approach to the subject of healing, medicine and health. There is a need for better understanding of these subjects and related biblical principles. Faith is obviously a major factor (Matthew 9:29). Where we place our trust is also a factor (2 Chronicles 16:12). Getting advice from a doctor who is knowledgeable about the human body and disease is not the same as putting blind trust in any medical practitioner—the Bible does say that there is safety in a multitude of counsel (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22).
People who died trusting God, and avoided going to doctors, have been deemed more righteous than some who took advantage of what medical science had to offer to prolong life. On the other hand, in recent years many have ceased looking to God altogether—they simply run to a doctor for treatment.
Should the doctors be our main focus when we are ill? And what about the spread of AIDS, the Ebola virus, “mad cow” disease, and other diseases coming along which doctors cannot cure? If we truly believe Jesus’ own prophecies of end-time disease epidemics, we had better be realistic about where we should put our ultimate trust!
Many are very quick to trust doctors: “Don’t we now have penicillin and other wonderful drugs that can cure almost anything?” No! Scores of top medical doctors and scientists have reported in recent years that new “super germs” are coming along, and that antibiotics and other drugs that have been successfully (in some cases) used in the past are often not effective anymore.
Note carefully these statements from the February 4, 2004, Charlotte Observer: “Antibiotics, the drugs that have saved millions of lives over the last 60 years, are failing their mission, outsmarted by the oldest, most successful life form on the planet: bacteria. The cause is the mishandling of the very antibiotics created to cure infections. Decades of overuse in treating humans and misuse in animal food production have caused mutant bacteria to flourish, creating new generations of super germs impervious to virtually all known antibiotic treatment. In short, our saviours have become our assassins….
‘The bugs are getting better, and we’re running out of drugs,’ says Barry Kreiswirth, a principal investigator at Public Health Research Institute in Newark, NJ, and director of its TB Center. ‘I mean, everything is going in the wrong direction,’ he added. ‘We’re going back to 1944, before penicillin, because we can’t treat these infections…. We’re just creating this monster.’”
Also, think about these powerful statements from Lisa Sanders, M.D., as reported in The New York Times (March 16, 2003): “A decade ago, I stood alongside my 99 fellow freshmen as we were welcomed into the ranks of medicine in a ‘white coat ceremony.’ Here, on our first day of med school, we were presented with the short white coats that proclaimed us part of the mystery and the discipline of medicine. During that ceremony, the dean said something that was repeated throughout my education: half of what we teach you here is wrong—unfortunately, we don’t know which half. At the time it was hard to believe.
Within those walls, in the anatomy lab, in the lecture hall, you feel that you are being shown the secrets of how the body is put together, how it lives, how it works, how it dies. It has the feel of authority and certainty. Like math, it has a feeling of inevitability. But now, as a practicing doctor and teacher of residents, I relive that dean’s aphorism daily. Medicine is, and always has been, an evolving discipline. And this necessarily means that what we know about medicine is constantly changing; that medicine is forever putting forth, and simultaneously upending, assumptions. This is particularly true at this moment. Virtually all of our medical therapeutic options are being questioned, evaluated and re-evaluated by researchers across the globe.” Dr. Sanders admits that some of the top professors in medical school acknowledge that “half” of what they teach may be wrong. So in which “half” are you going to put your faith?
Additionally, note carefully the following facts from the Public Citizen Newsletter of July 2002: 70 percent of doctors treating Medicare patients flunked an exam on their knowledge of prescribing for older adults. The majority of physicians who were asked to take the exam refused, often giving as their reason that they had a “lack of interest in the subject.” A few of patients taking three or more drugs were given drugs with one or more harmful interactions with other drugs.
Every minute, two people are hospitalized for adverse drug reactions (1,500,000 a year) and there is a death every five minutes and 15 seconds (100,000 a year). Every three-and one-quarter minutes, someone suffers drug-induced or drug-worsened memory loss (163,000 a year). It is reversible if you know which drug was the cause.
“Healing vs. medicine” has long been an issue of discussion in the faith community. Doctors and medicine have been attacked as evil, yet the Bible three times records Christ saying that physicians are for the sick (Matthew 9:12; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31), and Luke is called the “beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14). Medicines have been categorized as evil poisons that defile the body, and the use of natural substances as more virtuous. Yet many medicines are derived from plant substances, and their composition is merely more consistent and concentrated. People will go to a dentist, yet reject going to a doctor, even though the dentist may perform some procedures similar to what a doctor might perform.