The Key to Health

While it is generally believed that the day of the Renaissance man -- the one who could by dint of intelligence and hard effort still encompass all the branches of knowledge adequately -- is gone due to the explosion in knowledge, there needs to be at least a collusion between physician and pastors over the matter of the spirit and body in health and illness. If no one can encompass it individually, then the Church with its gifts should try to do it corporately.

Christianity is the only key to full health and the best key to health even in a limited, physical sense. Medicine needs help of the gospel ministry in accomplishing this. Medicine is under the Gospel. It functions too often as though it were apart or parallel. The pastor and physician are ideally co-laborers, not adversaries. We exist in a hierarchical relationship. The pastor represents to us the overarching Word of God. The physician is under the gospel -- both the natural science aspect and the spiritual aspect. The gospel applies to all of life. Medicine is not excluded. The special problems of the relationship of spirit and body, their sometimes unfathomable blend, require that we work together, both under the Word of God.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Tyranny of the Expert

Christian teaching for the denominator population is a powerful force for health. If Churches were more obedient, it would be an even more powerful force. The medical profession needs the input from the Church to clean up its act, to put its powerful tools into the right perspective, to make sure that our methods are harnessed to the right questions. While science pretends to abhor the method of authority, and tells tales about the bad old days in which medicine kow-towed to authorities who did not do experiments, we still live in an authoritarian system. The authorities tell us not only that the only method of any real use is the "scientific method," they also insist on casting the questions in materialistic terms only, throwing revelational epistemology off the playing field.

They are applying their epistemology where it does not legitimately apply, to normative issues. We have a "tyranny of the expert," who knows much more than we do, yet who does not see that the depth of vision has been gained at the substantial cost of a breadth of vision. The Church can restore the breadth of view to illness and health, can reclaim the validity of the method of revelation, and pitch out the method of natural science from its stolen territory.

Medicine has become somewhat like the man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. There is a need for a generalist -- not speaking here of a medical generalist, which I am, though that is true, -- but of someone who has the whole person in view, -- in the context of the family, church and society, as well as a time span that extends beyond a six year follow-up study. We need someone to have a view all the way to the deathbed and to eternity beyond. Medicine demands now an illegitimate thing of its practitioners -- that we give up our general office of believer and priest in order to become a body mechanic. The body mechanic image is a very dangerous one for medicine.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Testimony from Depression

Given the recent celebrity suicide, it seems appropriate to post a letter Mrs. Terrell received following Dr. Terrell's death:

I just wanted to let you know that Hilton Terrell saved my life.... I had been feeling bad (not sick), and extremely anxious, and it proceeded to get progressively worse over time. I hardly slept or ate and had lost down to approximately 130 pounds. I had no idea what was happening to me, and I felt like I had no control over anything, but I had too much pride to tell anyone what was going on. 

What I did not know was that I was spiraling down into deep depression. I never even knew anything like that was possible. It was worse than any physical pain I had ever endured. I finally broke down and went to see [my pastor]. It was he who recommended that I contact Hilton. 

At that point in time I had not considered suicide, but I had reached the point where I fully understood how someone could do it. I knew that if something could not be done for me I probably would reach the point of considering suicide, or, at the very least, my body would stop functioning due to lack of sleep and food. 

Out of desperation I called Hilton at home on a Saturday to let him know of my situation, and to ask if he could help me. I was wondering how I would survive until whenever he would set the appointment. To my surprise he asked me to come to his office the next day (Sunday). I made it through that Saturday night and drove to [see him] on Sunday hoping and praying for a miracle. 

Hilton spent hours with me and only charged me $25.00 (he told me that was his normal fee). To this day I have known only one other doctor ... that I believe was in the profession for the sole purpose of helping people. 

Hilton stayed there with me until he was sure I had nothing else to say. During our continuous conversation I kept telling him how I felt, what I wanted to happen, what I did not want to happen, what had happened to me, etc. Hilton, in his wisdom, kept asking me, but continuously phrasing it differently, what had I done for others? 

In essence, what Hilton was continuously telling me was that I needed to get my focus off of myself and on to others. He gave me a prescription for some kind of antidepressant, and told me it might take a few days to get into my system. Fortunately for me it allowed me to get a full night's sleep that very first night for the first time in months (I had been sleeping an hour or two each night). 

Hilton told me that he fully believed that there was a physical side to peoples' problems because why else would God have placed things on this earth to be used as medicine. Hilton also told me, though, that he believed that there was a spiritual side to peoples' problems. I learned a lot from him that day. 

I began putting into practice what Hilton taught me, and was able to take myself off of the antidepressant within a couple of months. At that time I still did not feel "normal," but over time, and with practicing what I learned from Hilton, I gradually got better. I have not had any more trouble with depression since. Hilton saved my life, and I will never forget that.

Healthy Work

To be employed is health-promoting. Counseling from Eph. 4:28 ("He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.") will have healing and preventive qualities. We have too much, "I can't work because I'm too sick." We have too little, "You're sick so much because you are not employed."


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

Healthy Marriage

As has long been known, being married is a healthy estate.

Can doctors in today's regime encourage this? Not without strident criticism. Can the Church? Yes. On the grounds of evidence such as these researchers accumulated? No, rather because the Bible commends it as the norm for most people. Yet the general consistency with what biblical counseling might at times recommend is illustrative. In his “catalog of risks,” Bernard Cohen, mentioned earlier, found that poor social connections -- living a relatively isolated life -- ranked fourth among the causes of loss of life expectancy, after smoking, alcoholism, and poverty. He estimated a loss of about 3 years of life expectancy for such persons, exceeding suicide, murder, AIDS, drowning, electrocution, natural hazards such as floods and earthquakes, and many other things that we get all worked up about.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers