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Once, my grandmother got second degree burns cooking in her kitchen. Her pale skin turned a violent red and began blistering and bubbling after hot oil attacked her.
Despite such circumstances, going to a hospital was my family’s last thought. They lived in a poverty stricken farm community in the deep south, and so medical care was not even on their radar.
Instead, they drove my grandmother down the street to a self-proclaimed “faith healer” named Mr. Bryd. He took her into a back room, read Christian scripture over her, and my grandmother came out healed.
Everyone who witnessed her recovery didn’t see it as a miraculous miracle, but rather God fulfilling a promise. My family believed their reward for faith was this healing.
“They don’t know me like God– they can’t help me.”
This sentiment dominates countless spiritual and religious communities. It’s a line of thinking about hospitals, clinics, and healthcare systems that keeps modern health and healing at arms length. With this ideology continuing to run rampant in these spaces, popular discourse surrounding religious refusals and other outreach ethics have become more prominent.
Medical institutions struggle to give proper care to the religious, just as the religious struggle to find healing outside of their own systems. Even if my grandmother could have had access to a hospital in her time of need, she wouldn’t have gone. That combination of being unable and unwilling leaves many religious individuals especially vulnerable.
This begs the question: What could serve as the olive branch to draw in the hard-to-reach?
“So, who heals– science or spirit?”
The tension between science and faith isn’t new. For centuries, individuals, groups, and entire nations have wrestled with the question of which approach serves human well-being best. This ancient battle between two perspectives still lingers in our modern systems today.
In many cases, faith is seen not as a complement to care, but as a hindrance– a thing that interferes with treatment, care, and compliance. From the medical perspective, the motto of “Do no harm”, treat, and repeat is important ethically, but can quickly become a robotic fashion.
Humans are social creatures made up of empathy, understanding, and care. Still, helping people often appears as becoming mechanical, and this is the problem that people of faith propose.
“What religious people think this way?”
According to the Pew Research Center, religious people from a variety of different traditions all statistically have higher levels of inner peace, happiness, and civic duty. They also tend to be more reliant on sacred intervention, rituals, and community support. Data suggest the spiritual healing they are seeking is in fact reaping healing benefits.
Some of these traditions have direct textual teachings that speak on spiritual healing:
“Within the Water – Soma thus hath told me – dwell all balms that heal, And Agni, he who blesseth all. The water holds all medicines” — The Rgveda (1.23.20)
“Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up” — The Bible (James 5:14-15)
“And when I am ill, it is [God] who cures me” — The Qu’ran (Surah Ash-Shu’ara 26:80)
“I am the Lord, your healer” — The Torah (Exodus 15:26)
The excerpts exhibit these foundations of faith. There is so much divine trust in higher authority, that man and man-made medicine struggle to measure up. This reliance and mindset is very similar to how medical professionals perceive their life-saving crafts as well.
But what if the approach doesn’t need to be so either-or?
“How do we combine these perspectives?”
In recent decades, through either newly emerging medical humanities fields or chaplaincy programs, we’ve seen this idea begin to root itself. More and more hospitals and clinics are being trained to handle faith more carefully and have begun implementing resources to honor patient’s beliefs.
Organizations like Henry Ford Health System, St. Luke’s University, and UPMC are some examples of institutions that have begun to partner with churches, mosques, and temples. Similarly, medical outreach programs have begun to bring important screenings and mental health care to the sacred spaces directly.
Though these may appear to be small steps, if hospitals, clinics, and other medical settings continue to utilize this kind of approach, the gap between robotic and faithful will begin to shift smaller and smaller.
Maybe then we can meet somewhere in the middle, where healing can begin.
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