Top Posts of 2014

In case you missed them, here are the top 5 posts of 2014:

1) How a Christian doctor treated one patient's depression: Testimony from Depression

2) Do people have A "Right" to Health Care?

3) The idea of physical agency for medical complaints has pushed the spirit of mankind out of its proper claim: Germ Theory and the Spirit

4) We carry the germs of deadly spiritual ideas from a misbegotten medical orthodoxy... and bring those wrong ideas into our examination rooms: Connecting Physicians and Pastors

5) What is a Free Economy?

Seized Authority

[T]o read the New Testament letters is to read about the same common concerns that psychologists are charged with handling. God, however, charged the Church with these problems. Secular psychology initially was seizing authority from the Church. Now the evangelical church is actively foisting off these "psychological" problems onto psychology, having accepted the whole renaming bit that comes with the false dichotomy of mind-spirit. The Church is abdicating its responsibility.


Excerpt from a private letter

How the Government Killed the Medical Profession

Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.

-- An excerpt from "How the Government Killed the Medical Profession" by Jeffrey A. Singer, an article Dr. Terrell would have liked.

Read the rest of the article here.

Original Sin

We are condemned not merely because of our sins but positionally, from conception, we are in sin, until we accept Christ. (Gen. 8:21, Psalm 51:5, 14:1-3). There is a universal moral law that reveals our sin state even if we have never heard the Gospel. True, it may be twisted and blunted and obscured in a few (usually weird and backward) societies, but it is there.


Excerpt from a private letter

Long-view Optimism

[T]hough the battles I am involved in are going the wrong way, the essential victory to secure the war has already been won. Short-view pessimism, long-view optimism.


An excerpt from a private letter

The Privilege of Self-Medication

We are set to think of self-medication as bad, because we see so many problems with it. We should pause and consider a couple of other things, however.

First, the bad outcomes we see do not necessarily mean that the privilege of self-medication should be restricted. To restrict that privilege means that we think of ourselves as more than advisers and assistants. It means that we think of ourselves as controlling authorities. Where in Scripture has God authorized us as having any controlling authority over our patients?

Second, we have no good denominator for the dangers of self-medication. That is, we see those who have problems, but we are not nearly as aware of those who do not have problems. Every treatment has a certain failure rate. That is, we have a numerator of failures sitting over a denominator of all treatments. Unless we know the denominator we cannot know the fraction. If we do not know the fraction, we cannot know the rate. If we do not know failure rates, complication rates, and success rates, we are presumptuous to deny people by law the ability to decide for themselves.

We tend in medicine to practice on the numerator kind of information. We make decisions based on partial information. Patients need to be able to "vote with their feet." It is a check on us "experts." We, too, have fallen natures, with pride and desires for power and money. We want to have our way.


Excerpt from "Pharmacy and Medical Interventions"

Extending Life Expectancy?

I don’t think it’s been shown that the medical profession has had anything positive to do with extended life expectancies in the United States. It’s a definitional matter. It’s an epistemological matter -- how do you know what you know. You start with presuppositions about your view of a human being: a human being is a person conceived. The medical profession, alone, is accountable for a decrease in average life expectancy. From around fifty years around the turn of the century in this country, to around forty-five years today -- probably having passed through a time of greater life expectancy in the mid-forties to early sixties, after which abortion became commonplace. Definitional issues aside, for those people who were allowed to make it to birth, there has been a very substantial increase in life expectancy, which might in part be due to some of the things we do in medicine. It was just done at too high a cost, as we took the resources of those who were not allowed to live and diverted them into many things, one of which was vast medical establishment that now exists.


Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Terrell