Friday, March 6, 2009
Natural Healing
Part of living my natural family life is maintaining the scientific position that the body heals itself and medicine should either help or get out of the way. This jibes excellently with the practice of many chiropractors. I am honored to know some great practitioners and have them help my wife be at her peak to birth our kids. I also adhere to the scientific position that our bodies are amazing and we know very little about how they really work.
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2 comments:
"the body heals itself and medicine should either help or get out of the way."
This is an interesting thesis and warrants further clarification, analysis, and justification.
First, by "medicine" do you refer specifically to drugs, or to the general practice of medical care (diagnosis, prevention, and all forms of treatment, e.g. surgery)?
If the human body is capable of self-healing, why the need for the health care system at all? Who needs doctors to diagnose or nurses to treat or pharmacists to do research or even chiropractors to move your spine around if the body can heal itself?
At what point does this scientific position propose that medicine actually gets in the way of the body healing itself? Who makes that decision? If this idea is based on science, then I suggest there would be an objective, empirical, measurable way to determine exactly when medicine of any form is helping the body heal itself or when it is getting in the way.
Or is the argument that, while the body can generaly heal itself, sometimes it can't, at which point we rely on the science of medicine to help it? Which, again, leads to further questions. Who is to determine when the body can heal itself, and when it can't?
Is taking Excedrin for a migraine helping the body heal itself? Or is it just getting in the way of the body doing its natural thing? People come out of migraines all the time without medication, but taking a pain-killer helps to ease the pain.
Some people are able to recover just fine from nasty infections without any kind of treatment. It can often be a small percentage, but it happens. Others die from them. How do you know that giving an antibiotic or an antiviral isn't just going to obstruct the immune system from doing its thing? Do you wait till a person dies of salmonella, strep, plague, MRSA, SARS, or meningitis and then say "guess this was a case where he couldn't do it on his own and we should have tried some pills or at least put him on some oxygen"?
Do you wait to see if the tumor goes away before trying chemo or surgery to remove it? How do you know it won't? Miracles happen -- look at all the saints JPII canonized.
Chiropractic care involves moving around parts of the body that are out of alignment. Is there an expectation that the vertebrae would get back to where they belong on their own?
In that YouTube video linked, the woman was in labor for how long and then it was decided to do an emergency C-section. Even then it was very difficult to get the baby out and there were many complications because the baby was rather stuck in the pelvis.
Praise God the parents listened to their midwives and went to the hospital. And Praise God again they listened to the doctors and went in for the C-Section. If they had been insistent on a natural birth, it seems like both mother and baby would be dead right now. So is this a case "medicine" helping the mother's body heal itself? Or was the body beyond healing and that's why these measures had to be taken? But while they were still at the birth center, they didn't know that there was an alignment problem (which, incidentally, for someone to be pimping chiropracTIC care like this, he should have sent the Mrs. in to get her pelvic alignment checked before getting pregnant and he could have avoided all the complications). So, how did the couple KNOW that it was time to get medicine involved? What if they decided to give it a couple more hours just to be sure the baby didn't find its way into the birth canal?
I'm starting to ramble, so I better stop now. But I am curious to see further explanation of this idea.
Wow. You poked at some excellent points. I shall have to be far more vigorous before I bandy about such terms as scientific. I hope to have a follow up post soon, once my sinuses drain. Yes, I did eventually take medication.
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