The Health of the Family Structure

We [should] consider the power for health that intact families which have biblical authority structures possess. "Children in single-parent families are 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to suffer health problems." Pastoral counselors who work to sustain marriages are also very powerfully engaged in the physical health of the household. You are strengthening a locus of government which is far more powerful to maintain health than is medical care. Would we in medicine not dream to be able to reduce health problems by 20% to 40%? ...

Pastoral counseling which points out the family's primary responsibility to care for its own has health power.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

A Fraction of the Picture

The prior probabilities of disease profoundly influence the decisions of the practitioner in making diagnostic decisions. Generalists look at subspecialists and are tempted to conclude that they are always seeking zebras. Subspecialists are tempted to look back at generalists and conclude that they are always missing things. Our denominator populations are different. Our error rates are not necessarily different…

Rather than pursue medical internecine warfare, consider that we in medicine as a whole have been turning to the entire population and telling it how it ought to function for health. The estimates of patient self-selection prior to seeking medical attention is probably an underestimation of the self-selection that takes place before any of us in medicine see the patient. Other studies estimate that physicians see patients in only 6% of all episodes of illness. Not only are we prone to be mechanistically disease-oriented, we see only a fraction of the whole picture!


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Spiritually Sick

We collect and categorize physical ailments, using the medical model. Our field is differentiated largely by disease microorganisms (infectious disease), organs (cardiology), tissues (neurology), age groups (geriatrics), physiological events (obstetrics), and procedures (coronary artery bypass teams).

The whole of medicine is now categorized by reference to these physical features. Imagine a hospital in which the ill were categorized according to spiritual features. There might be a wing in which covetousness was the underlying spiritual feature by which a person came to illness, a ward for idol-worshippers, isolation rooms for those in whom stealing was the spiritual genesis of their problem, whole hospitals for the sexually immoral.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Ignoring Denominator Populations

Today, physicians initially learn about sickness from the sickest of the sick… “Tertiary care” hospitals collect the rarest of the rare. We have “zebra farms.”… Hospitals are remarkably efficient for displaying diseases in several stages of development or varying manifestations as well as for studying their response to treatments. On one ward may be collected all manner of cancer or infection or genetic diseases. The benefits we have enjoyed in medical understanding from such collections is not to be underestimated. However, along the way, these collections have helped us to ignore the denominator populations from which they were drawn, as well as the possibility of taxonomies based upon other features than bodily diseases.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

No Need for Mammograms?

As noted earlier, Dr. Terrell was not a fan of mammograms. More evidence is coming out that he was right. See this article from today's Wall Street Journal.

"A large study published Tuesday adds to the growing body of research concluding that screening mammograms save relatively few lives from breast cancer while discovering many cancers that wouldn’t have caused problems if left alone." Read more...