The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Here's another current article that Dr. Terrell would have loved:

The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease


"Saturated fat does not cause heart disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter."

Read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article here.

Unhealthy Day Care

[T]he widespread use of group day care facilities needs to be challenged. While it seems reasonable that a family may delegate at times portions of its child care duties to others, the family retains the responsibility for what occurs. Day care just cannot be as healthy as a biblical family. A toddler enrolled in day care can expect to be bitten by another child within an average of 73 days. While siblings within homes also bite one another, the toddler at home is not going to be surrounded by 20 other toddlers who are in the prime "biting age." One mother just cannot give birth to that many children in a short period of time. It requires collecting them from many households.

The risk of infectious disease in day care is two to four times greater than for children cared for at home. This includes gastrointestinal infections, which are also carried to other family members at home. Otitis media also is increased in day care children.

You would expect such information would impel reasonable people toward a view that small children, if possible, are better cared for in homes than in group day care, and that policies to support that end would be the best ones. Instead, as example of the narrow way medicine has of conceiving of problems and their solutions, listen to the "answer" of the researchers of a major review of illness and day care, persons at the Bush Institute for Child and Family Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "... government intervention is justified when a market fails to measure adequately the true costs or benefits of a given market transaction. ... It seems reasonable ... to recommend specific regulatory provisions ... regulations requiring parents to demonstrate that they have been following a schedule of health visits for their child, (such as that recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.)"

That government policies encouraging two-parent wage earner families built into the tax structure and otherwise is the problem is not even considered. That changing policies to reduce the demand for group day care is a better approach is ignored.


Excerpts from Physician and Pastor: Co-Laborers

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...