How to talk to you doctor about God.... really?!

Category: Health • Woo
Posted on: September 11, 2008 3:57 PM, by Steve Higgins

Let me first start by saying that if your doctor tells you that praying is your last hope of your loved ones survival GET A NEW DOCTOR. Now that I've said that let me show you part of this ridiculous article from CNN's medical correspondent, who is clearly in the wrong specialty of journalism (don't they have a religion or faith section?!)

Christopher was just a few days old and had a rare blood infection and fungal meningitis, a brain infection.

"I could tell in their eyes they had no hope for my son," Gorman said. "They told me to prepare for his death. They told me he might not make it through the night."

Gorman never believed the doctors. In fact, she did something she thinks annoyed these men and women of science: She prayed. She prayed all the time.

"They made me feel ridiculous for praying so much and so hard and leaving it up to God," said Gorman, who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "But I told them my son not surviving was not an option."

When he was a month old, Christopher left the hospital. He's been healthy ever since, she says. He turns 3 next month.

"It was a miracle," she said. "There are just things doctors can't explain. Doctors are not in control of everything. There's stuff that happens every day that they can't explain."

A new study finds that many Americans have that same kind of faith. In the study, 57 percent of randomly surveyed adults said God's intervention could save a deathly ill family member even if physicians said treatment would be futile.

However, just under 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a helpless outcome.

The study was published last month in Archives of Surgery and is one of many to show a "faith gap" between doctors and patients.

I get a little confused by studies like this. They are always made out in the press to sound like they are actually showing a relationship between praying and miracle healing or whatever. But all that they show is that a small number of people have ridiculous beliefs about medical miracles at the hand of God. A more informative study would be to correlate these people's beliefs and their reasoning ability as well as some measure of how good doctors are that believe that miracles could cure their patients. I don't think I want my doctor praying for my dying father when instead he could be working to actually save his life.

I'm also a little confused on the reporting. If you ARE going to report something like this you might want to at least write something to the effect that miracles=woo and that a single case does not science make.

Ohh.. well what are you going to do.