Faith Healer Parents Guilty of Criminal Mistreatment - Daughter Saved

I usually try to write with a bit of humor, but the latest case of faith healing in the news is just disgusting. There's no humor in it.

Timothy and Rebecca Wyland's infant girl was born with a large birthmark near one eye that turned into an abnormal growth of blood vessels. It swelled and grew into a huge hemangioma that covered her eye completely. Without treatment, it was certain that their baby would lose her eye, and she would have been disfigured.

Normal parents, that is to say parents not infected with crazy and immoral religious ideas, would have taken their beautiful little girl to a doctor and had the hemangioma fixed. But the Wylands are members of the Followers of Christ church, a radical sect that believes in faith healing. Their idea of medical treatment is prayer, anointment with oil and laying on of hands. They believe that if you seek medical treatment, you are rejecting faith.

In spite of their daughter's huge hemangioma that continued to grow and produce a nasty discharge, the Wylands chose faith healing over proper medical care. They put their faith in God. (Wasn't that the same God who disfigured their daughter in the first place?)

Luckily, the State of Oregon has a law protecting children from this sort of neglect. A jury took only one hour to

Mozambique "Praying Cures" Study: A Pile of Steaming Dung

Groan. A new "study" is out showing that prayers can heal the sick. The evangelical Christians, Jews and Muslims are going to jump all over this, fling their arms to the sky in victory and say, "See! We told you so! God is at work! We proved all you smarty-pants scientists wrong!"

The problem is, they didn't. This so-called "scientific study" was worse than just flawed science. It wasn't science at all.

Here's the story in a nutshell (read the details here). These "researchers" took 14 hearing-impaired people and 9 vision-impaired people and told them what the experiment was about. They tested the subject's hearing or vision, and then did some intensive praying in close physical proximity with the experimental subject. After the praying, they tested the subjects' hearing or vision again.

Lo and behold, the people had dramatically! Or ... maybe it was a completely bogus experiment?

Let's see if we can count the mistakes in this experiment.

Is it OK for your Doctor to Proselytize?

When is it ok to use business to spread your religion? Is it OK for your butcher to recommend chapters of the Bible? For your mechanic to leave Jehovah's Witness literature around the waiting room and press one into your hands as you leave? Is it OK for your doctor to tell you that accepting Christ as your savior would help you heal?

This is not an academic question to a friend of mine. We were on the topic of religion and my upcoming book, and got to the Proselyzation Meme, which brought forth a story. She faced a series of reconstructive surgeries after an illness, and her HMO offered just one surgeon in that specialty. The good news was that her surgeon was one of the best, and did an excellent job. But ... the surgeon's waiting room was filled with religious books and magazines, she sold childrens' Bible stories in her lobby, and the same literature graced the examining rooms and the doctor's own office. Every time my friend was going through particularly difficult times, the doctor would remind her that Jesus could help, if she'd only let him into her heart.

I don't know about you, but in my book it is unethical for any doctor to mix religion and medicine, especially one in an HMO where the patient is "captive" and can't choose.

A butcher or mechanic? Sure. I can easily take my business elsewhere (or more likely, I'd continue to patronize them and offer them my views!), and as private citizens, they have a right to operate their businesses any way they like. But not doctors. Doctors are supposed to offer tolerance, impartiality, and acceptance of all lifestyles to their patients. When we visit, we have to know that we can talk about anything to our doctor without fear of judgement, condescension or disapproval.

What if, for example, a cheating spouse feared he/she had caught a sexually transmitted disease, and was afraid to ask an overtly proselytizing doctor to be tested, for fear of being judged? The consequences could be fatal to his/her marriage partner.

If Christians, or a member of any other faith, feel that saving my soul is so important that they must share and spread their beliefs, fine, that's their right. But, they shouldn't become doctors if they can't put their proselytizing aside during business hours. Being a doctor implies treating all of your patients impartially, sticking to medicine, and keeping your morals and beliefs to yourself. Opinions and advice should be strictly medical and psychological.

Religious Medicine: Faith-Based Quackery

I live in an insular world, surrounded by scientists, engineers and business people who are, for the most part, non-religious or outright atheists. And since my "day job" is part of the mainstream of modern pharmaceutical research, these same people are by-and-large all well educated in the virtues of modern medicine.

Every now and then, I leave this insular world and meet people from all walks of life, and I'm always startled at the ignorance and outright rejection of modern science. Scientists can be arrogant, dishonest (witness the recent fake scientific journals published by a major science publisher on behalf of paying drug companies), or just plain wrong (e.g. thalidomide). But most of the scientists I know are dedicated and hard working, and genuinely care about helping people, and the science they do is solid, well done, and results in bettering people's lives.

So when a woman I met recently asked me, "What do scientists know?", then went on to say things like schizophrenia is mostly bad nutrition and poor diet, I was appalled. She continued on about a book of herbal remedies that had been passed down to her from her mother and grandmother, some sort of ancient wisdom that science knew nothing about.

Not surprisingly, this same woman was raised in a churchgoing family – I don't remember if it was Lutheran or Catholic, but one of the two. These are religions that, on the one hand, claim that science is the road to knowledge, but on the other hand, that a magical sky-god impregnated a virgin who bore a son, but that son was actually the sky god, who then arranged to have himself tortured to death by being nailed to a cross, where he died, but then came back to life, except that the stories about all of this conflict and you can't even figure out who saw him and when and how long he was alive, and ...

In other words, this woman was taught to deliberately accept hocus-pocus, beliefs that can't be reconciled with reality, and illogic. She was taught this from an early age, and it was reinforced by a culture that ejects non-believers via excommunication and a horrifying promise of burning for all eternity in Hell.

Is it any wonder that this same woman was later able to reject logical, rational science in favor of her great-grandmother's voodoo medicine?

Homeopathy: A Truly Dangerous Religion

Several years ago, a friend's religion killed her. No, she wasn't part of a mass suicide, or burned at the stake, or stoned to death. She was the victim of a deadly combination: breast cancer and the "homeopathy religion."

My friend was young and healthy, and although we were all dismayed to hear of her diagnosis, the cancer was discovered early, giving her a high probability of a successful cure and a long, healthy life.

Sadly, my friend believed in the medical religion called homeopathy. Rather than seeking proper medical treatments that could have (and likely would have) cured her completely, she went to Mexico to a clinic that offered homeopathic treatments. Six months later, quite predictably, she was dead. The homeopathic medicines had absolutely no effect on the cancer. She might as well have stayed home, resigned herself to an early death, and enjoyed a little more time with her husband and two small children.

Why do I call homeopathy a religion? Let's turn the question around and ask, "What is religion?" We'll will discover that homeopathy fits the definition of religion pretty well.

Based on faith. Advocates of homeopathic remedies turn to faith and anecdotes to justify their claims.

Magical forces. A religion claims there are "essences," magical beings (spirits or gods) or other magical forces that can't be measured by science. Homeopathic medicines are said to retain the "essence" of the curative compound, even though there is none of it left in the water.

Anti-science. When science shows that homeopathic remedies are useless, advocates dispute or belittle the scientific studies, or even claim that the scientific method itself is invalid. It's common to hear claims that science is incapable of measuring the spiritual forces that make homeopathy work.

Impossible claims. The fundamental claims of homeopathy violate fundamental rules of chemistry and physics.

Use Anecdotes. Although homeopath advocates deny evidence from large, double-blind scientific studies, they're not adverse to evidence, so long as it's not statistically significant. In other words, they rely on anecdotes (one datum), but reject meaningful statistical samples.

Appeal to desires, not logic. Going hand-in-hand with the anti-science attitudes, homeopathy appeals to what people want to believe, rather than reality. Homeopathy assures people that they can be cured without expensive visits to a doctor, without altering unhealthy lifestyle choices, without painful treatments, and without side effects. It also claims to be able to cure conditions that science-based medicine can't, such as allergies, cancers, arthritis, ageing, impotence, and many others. In fact, perusing a homeopathy web site, it appears that homeopathy can cure everything from broken bones to psychosis.

Unfortunately, the majority of Americans are raised in a religious home, where they are taught from an early age to accept faith, magical forces, impossible miracles, and anecdotal "evidence" without question. These beliefs are directed at Yahweh and Jesus, but more importantly, children are taught to reject the evidence of their senses and the techniques of rational thought.

It's no surprise, then, that this same system of faith-based beliefs is easily transferred to other false claims. Homeopathy isn't very different from any religion.

Tags: homeopathy homeopathic medicine science religion christianity atheism atheism