DISPENSING TRUTH: Divine Prescriptions to Restore and Maintain Good Health

The establishment of a separate licensing examination for physicians after awarding the M. The practitioners described here by no means exhaust the full range of healers present in early modern society. These other healers are represented, in part, by folk healers, who deployed a wide range of traditional therapies. The use of magical or religious invocations in treating illness, of course, was probably not a rare occurrence at this time.

In addition, the early modern period was populated by a host of itinerant drug peddlers, stonecutters, and sundry charlatans who sold special talents or products in the medical marketplace. By the mid-eighteenth century, and as a result of the dramatic expansion of the press, medical products and services participated in a booming advertising market. The dominant medical thinking of the early modern period saw health as dependent on a particular balance in the body's four humors, known conventionally as blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.

Thus, blood was believed to be hot and wet, yellow bile, hot and dry, and so on. The balance of humors required to maintain health was highly individual, depending on someone's age, sex, local environment, diet, work, lifestyle — in principle, almost anything could influence health. Excessive exercise, for example, could cause the body to heat up, resulting in an excess of blood or yellow bile. Scholars, on the other hand, were thought to suffer from particular diseases resulting from their having too little exercise and too much brainwork.

The prevention of illness and its cure depended in principle on the same idea, whereby the practitioner sought to maintain or restore the proper humoral balance. The application of many treatments, such as the use of bloodletting or emetics agents that cause vomiting , can be understood as working in this way. Over against these doctrines concerning pathology and therapeutics must be set a partially separate set of ideas concerning what we now call physiology, the functions of the living body.

The body's functions were thought to be governed by three principal organs: Although not entirely divorced from the humoral doctrines that molded thinking about health and illness, the theories governing physiology were formulated to answer a distinctive and separate set of questions, such as what breathing does or how the movement of muscles occurs. The source of many of these ideas was a collection of writings attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates c.

Very few of Hippocrates' and Galen's writings were available in Latin translation during the early Middle Ages , but a far richer view of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine started appearing in Latin-speaking Europe at the end of the eleventh century, when translations of Arabic medical writings were made in southern Italy and Spain. These encyclopedic compendia of ancient medicine became the basis for medical teaching in the universities that began appearing at the end of the twelfth century.

By the early sixteenth century, medicine was a widely accepted part of the university curriculum, with the teaching of theory and practice based largely on Hippocratic and Galenic precepts, as interpreted and synthesized by medieval Muslim scholars. A second wave of translations, beginning in the late fourteenth century and inspired by the humanist cultural program for the restoration of classical antiquity, produced a wave of Latin translations from ancient Greek manuscripts, bypassing the mediation and so the humanists claimed the barbarism of earlier Muslim translators and commentators.

The output from all this effort is astonishing: To a surprising extent, these new translations from Greek sources did little to change the curriculum or the dominant medical theories. Yet in one important area, anatomy, the recovery of Galen's writings, especially his On Anatomical Procedures first published in , a guide to dissection, did lead to dramatic changes in medical thinking.

The conduct of dissections as part of the teaching of anatomy was a well-established, if also a sporadic, part of the medical curriculum. Well before , medical scholars had used dissection as a means of engaging in critical dialogue with their ancient and medieval Muslim predecessors, to the extent that these sources were available to them.

The appearance of On Anatomical Procedures in Latin translation, however, gave to humanistically inclined physicians an impeccably ancient source of authority for the practice of dissection, as well as practical tips for doing so. Consequently, anatomy and the practice of dissection acquired a status far exceeding what it had enjoyed before, and knowledge of human anatomical structure became a focal point of research interest.

This burst of activity culminated with the publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica ; On the structure of the human body , by Andreas Vesalius , the most renowned anatomist of the era. Vesalius's richly illustrated text presented itself as an extended critique of Galen's claims about anatomy, offering its readers a far more visually concrete picture of the body than anything previously available. The critique of Galen's anatomical ideas, however, did not translate immediately into a broader abandonment of his physiology, in part because his theories about the body's functions made a great deal of sense in the context of physicians' experiences with the bodies of their patients.

Only in the greatly changed circumstances of the seventeenth century, when a new generation of scholars deployed a new "mechanical" philosophy based on experiment to overthrow the entire edifice of ancient natural philosophy and the kinds of explanations it offered, did physicians shift from engaging in their centuries-long critical dialogue with their ancient sources to thinking about the body's functions in ways that departed significantly from ancient models.

The most important among these later physicians was William Harvey — , a highly skilled anatomist and experimentalist whose carefully designed investigations into the function of the heartbeat, published in as Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus An anatomical essay on the motion of the heart and blood in animals , directly attacked the physiological role assigned to the heart by Galen, suggesting instead that the heart acts as a pump, distributing blood to the body through the arteries and receiving it back again from the veins.

Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones. The Western Medical Tradition B. Lindberg and Robert S. French, Roger, and Andrew Wear, eds. The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London and New York , Health and Healing in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World.

Retrieved December 18, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Religion and medicine are twin traditions of healing. Although they have overlapped for most of their history, in the past three hundred years the two traditions have become separate and have often been in competition with one another. At the close of the twentieth century, serious consideration began to be given to reintegrating religion and medicine.

In this discussion, a review of the historical connection between these two traditions will be offered. Research that has led to a possible rapprochement will be examined as will the implications for practicing clinicians. There is a long historical tradition that connects religion and medicine. The first hospitals in western civilization for care of the sick in the general population, particularly for those unable to pay for their own care, were built by religious groups.

In the fourth century, Basil, the Bishop of Caesarea established one of the earliest hospitals based upon the good Samaritan story in the Bible. This building was resurrected in present-day Turkey among almshouses and leper colonies. For the next thousand years, the church would build and staff most hospitals throughout the western world. Many early physicians, especially those in Europe during the Middle Ages and in the New England colonies of the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were also members of the clergy.

In Europe, licenses to practice medicine were in fact controlled by the church and church-sponsored universities. Similarly, the profession of nursing was to emerge out of the Christian church in the s and s with the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, an order of Catholic sisters devoted to the care of the sick. The Daughters of Charity also established the first nursing profession in the United States in Emmitsville, Maryland , in the early s, modeled after nursing in France.

Florence Nightingale — , after receiving a "calling" from God , would later receive nurses training from the Daughters of Charity and the Protestant deaconesses started up by Lutherans in Germany. After the Crimean War , Nightingale applied what she learned to a secular setting. Interestingly, though, up until the early s, most hospitals in Europe and the United States continued to be staffed by nurses who were primarily from religious orders.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, the profession of medicine began to split away from the church, and the state took over the role of administering licenses to practice medicine. That separation would continue to widen until the early s when it was nearly complete. For the last two hundred years, religion and medicine have been divided into separate healing disciplines, with very little overlap and very little communication between the two. However, since about the mids, especially in the United States, there has been active dialogue about bringing religion and medicine together once again.

This movement has been highly controversial and has met with considerable resistance. A growing volume of research showing a connection between religion and health, however, has been breaking down the resistance. Although the history reviewed above applies primarily to the Christian church, there has been similar interest in health and healing running through nearly all the major world religious traditions, including Judaism , Hinduism , Buddhism , Islam , and Chinese religions. Space does not allow for an adequate discussion of historical connections with medicine for each of these traditions, although resources that do so include Lawrence Sullivan's Healing and Restoring: The recent trend towards integration of religion and medicine has been stirred primarily by medical research demonstrating intimate and often complex relationships between religion and health.

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First, many patients indicate that religious beliefs and practices help them to cope with the stress of medical illness. In some areas of the United States, nearly ninety percent of hospitalized patients report that they use religious beliefs to at least a moderate degree to help them to cope.

Nearly fifty percent of this group indicate that religion is the most important factor that enables them to cope with medical conditions and the stress they cause. Over one hundred studies have now documented the high prevalence of religious coping among persons with a variety of diseases ranging from diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease , cancer, arthritis, and cystic fibrosis , to more general conditions such as chronic pain. There is also research demonstrating that persons who are religious end up coping better with physical health problems and disabling conditions.

Of nearly one hundred studies conducted during the twentieth century on the relationship between religion and emotional well-being happiness, life satisfaction, optimism, and hope , nearly eighty percent find that the religious person experiences significantly greater well-being. This is particularly true when populations of medically ill subjects have been studied. The religious are less likely to become depressed or anxious, and if they do develop these mental conditions, they recover more quickly.

Suicide is less common among the more religious, as is marital dissatisfaction and divorce, and alcohol and drug use. Nearly studies have now examined these associations, with between two-thirds and three-quarters of these finding that the religious person tends to be healthier and better able to cope with illness. Of course, a number of studies also report that religion can be associated with worse mental health, more depression, and greater anxiety.

This is particularly true for practitioners of religions that are repressive, controlling, and do not emphasize caring for self and others in a responsible way. Religion can be used to justify hatred, aggression, prejudice, and social exclusion. It may induce excessive guilt in situations where guilt is not healthy. Religion may also be used to replace professional psychiatric care for serious mental or emotional problems that require medication and biological therapies. In all of these ways, religion may do a disservice to mental health. In most cases, however, the emotional benefits of religious faith tend to outweigh the negative effects.

There is also a growing volume of research suggesting that religious belief and practices are related to healthier lifestyles, better overall physical health, and longer survival. Studies demonstrate stronger immune functioning among religious persons who are older, who are HIV positive or have AIDS , or have breast cancer. Death rates from coronary artery disease are lower among the more religious, even when health behaviors, diet, and social factors are taken into account. The same applies to mortality from all causes. Since , over a dozen careful studies have demonstrated that the religious person lives longer than the person who is less religiously involved.

In these studies, religion is measured by frequency of church attendance, private prayer and scripture study, meditation, and religious coping. Studies have not demonstrated that the broader aspect of religion called spirituality is associated with greater longevity. Spirituality is a broad concept, making it difficult to measure, whereas religious beliefs, practices, and commitment can be more easily assessed and quantified.

Why does religious belief and practice correlate with and predict greater physical health? The answer may lie in the mind-body relationship. There is growing evidence suggesting that emotions influence physiological processes. Psychological stress, anxiety, and depression have been related to impairments in immune functioning, delayed wound healing, and increased risk for cardiovascular morbidity. If religious beliefs and practices reduce emotional stress, counter anxiety, and prevent or facilitate recovery from depression, then religion may help to neutralize the health-impairing effects that these negative emotions have on physical health, and do so through known biological pathways.

Mainstream scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology are beginning to explore these connections more seriously. Since about , people have become increasingly disillusioned with medical care that relies solely on high technology and focuses on the biology of disease, while neglecting the care of the whole person. That disillusionment has caused many patients to express a desire to have their spiritual and emotional needs met, as well as their physical needs.

Between one-third and two-thirds of patients consistently indicate that they wish their physicians to address religious or spiritual needs in addition to medical needs, particularly when they experience serious medical problems or terminal illness. Furthermore, there is research indicating that religious and spiritual beliefs impact medical decision making and may even affect compliance with medical treatment, making it essential for physicians to know about these beliefs.

Some patients may use religion instead of traditional medical care to treat their illnesses. For example, they may decide to pray for their illnesses and stop taking their medications. There is also research showing that certain types of negative religious beliefs may adversely affect physical health and recovery from medical illness. Patients who feel punished or deserted by God, who question God's power and love, or who feel abandoned by their spiritual community, experience greater mortality and worse mental health outcomes. The growing body of research on religion and health suggests at least the following four applications to medical practice in the West.

First, in light of this research, some have argued that physicians should consider taking a spiritual history on patients with serious, terminal, or chronic medical illness. In the United States, only about one in ten physicians consistently addresses spiritual issues by taking a religious history, despite suggestions by a consensus panel of the American College of Physicians and American Society of Internal Medicine that such a history can be obtained by asking a few simple questions.

Such questions include the following:. Taking a spiritual history should be done in addition to not instead of competently and completely addressing the medical issues for which the patient seeks help from the physician. Thus, a spiritual history is most appropriate when there is more time in the schedule, such as during a new patient evaluation or during a hospital admission workup.

Second, if spiritual needs are identified when the spiritual history is taken, then the research suggests that addressing those needs should improve the health and coping capacity of the patient. This can be done in a couple of ways. The patient can be referred to a trained clergyperson or chaplain. Chaplains in the United States are required to undergo extensive training that prepares them to address such issues in the medical setting.

Before a chaplain is certified in the Association of Professional Chaplains, he or she must complete four years of college, three years of divinity school, one to four years of clinical pastoral education, and must take written and oral examinations. Thus, chaplains are skilled professionals with much to offer in this area.

Sometimes, however, patients do not wish to speak with a chaplain or clergyperson. In that case, if the patient already has a trusting relationship with the physician, then the physician may need to be prepared to address such issues, even if this involves only listening and showing respect and concern. Nearly two-thirds of the medical schools in the United States have elective or required courses on religion, spirituality, and medicine.

In these courses, medical students are trained to take a spiritual history and to address spiritual issues in a sensitive and appropriate manner. Third, in addition to taking a spiritual history and, if necessary, addressing spiritual issues, the physician may choose to support healthy religious beliefs or practices that the patient finds helpful in coping with illness. Physicians should not prescribe religion for patients who are not interested in religion. There may be benefits, however, in physicians learning about the religious beliefs and practices of their patients and supporting those beliefs that the patient finds helpful and that do not conflict with medical care.

Even when religious beliefs conflict with medical care, the patient is likely to profit when the physician tries to understand those beliefs and keep open lines of communication about religious issues with the patient. By way of supporting religious practice, some physicians have decided to pray with their patients. This activity is highly controversial in the medical setting. Conditions for its appropriateness include that:. Under such circumstances, it may be helpful for a physician and patient to engage in prayer together, enhancing the doctor-patient relationship by increasing trust.

Finally, the research suggests that new social arrangements for medical care may prove beneficial. For example, physicians might develop a communication network with local clergy, both to facilitate a referral base and to allow physicians to assess the community resources that are available to the patient. Religious communities often already provide volunteers to assist with homemaker services, rides to the doctor, respite for exhausted family members caring for the patient, and emotional support to the patient and the patient's family.

Religious communities may also monitor the patient to ensure that the medical regimen is being followed and that medical problems are detected early and treatment is obtained promptly. Such a system works especially well when volunteers are appropriately trained and coordinated by a parish or congregational nurse — a registered nurse who is a member of and works professionally as a nurse within the congregation. A parish nurse can coordinate health programs within the congregation that involve screening for high blood pressure , diabetes, depression, and other diseases.

A parish nurse can also provide spiritual care, communicate with physicians and nurses within the formal healthcare setting about the health condition of members of the congregation, train and mobilize volunteers within the religious community to meet the needs of sick members, and provide health education to keep healthy members well. Religion and Western medicine are indeed coming closer and closer together. The research suggests that this is a positive trend — good for the health of patients and for the maintenance of the health of the community.

It is also arguably good for the profession of medicine in the West, which is truest to its most basic aims when its practices support the health of the patients in every dimension. Food plays both a causative and curative role in health and disease. Thus, its role in medicine may be as a risk factor for, protector against, or treatment of an illness. While too much food or exposure to certain foods can reduce someone's health, too little food or inadequate amounts of certain foods can be equally damaging. In the years before modern transportation, packaging, and refrigeration, medicine was primarily concerned with food deficiencies and food spoilage.

The focus of medicine was on the identification of critical components of food and common pathogens and on the prevention of nutritional deficiencies and foodborne infections. The role of food in medicine has changed as food production, preservation, and preparation techniques have progressed. Today far more people in developed countries such as the United States suffer from excessive food consumption than from food deficiencies.

In addition, certain components of food have been found to have therapeutic or protective properties when administered in levels greater than generally considered necessary. For instance, large quantities of vitamin A are used to treat acne, therapeutic quantities of vitamin E may be protective against heart disease , and extra fiber appears to reduce the risk of colon cancer. However, the problems of malnutrition or inadequate food intake and foodborne illness have not been eliminated.

Undernutrition continues to plague developing nations, while the prevention and treatment of foodborne illness is a concern for all nations. Food is fundamental to support life. People get energy, water, and all of the building blocks for growth and proper bodily functioning from the foods they eat and the liquids they drink. The components of food necessary to life are termed "nutrients" and the study of the role of food in health is called nutrition. The goal of medicine is to ensure health, and because adequate nutrition is necessary to accomplish this, nutrition is a crucial component of medicine.

Nutritional science combines food science and medical science. Nutrients include protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, thirteen vitamins, seventeen minerals, and more substances that are still being identified. The majority of nutrients essential to health are found in a variety of different foods. No one food is absolutely essential to support life. People with access to adequate amounts of food get all of the nutrients they need by eating a varied diet complete with fruits, vegetables, meat or meat alternatives, dairy foods, and grains.

However, some people are not able to or do not choose to eat the full variety of foods available. These people may require special foods or supplements to meet their nutritional needs. All branches of medicine, from pediatrics to geriatrics and from internal medicine to surgery, study food and its role in health and disease. Nutritional scientists in government, industry, and academia are constantly seeking to understand the role food plays in illness and well-being.

Meanwhile health-care practitioners treat patients with nutritional plans and food supplements. Registered dietitians are health-care specialists who integrate food into medical treatment — this is referred to as medical nutrition therapy. Although the presence of adequate nutrition does not ensure health, it is a significant contributor. The energy contributed by the protein, carbohydrates, and fat in food provides the fuel for every element of body functioning from breathing to thinking to fighting disease to running marathons.

Adequate energy intake is crucial to promote proper growth and development as well as to maintain healthy functioning once one is fully grown. Food also provides the materials necessary to build healthy bone, muscle, skin, hair, etc. For example, bone is a complex matrix of calcium, phosphorus, and collagen fibers. A person's bone strength is directly related to their nutrient intake such that inadequate calcium intake is one of the primary reasons for bone disease such as osteoporosis.

Nutrients are also necessary to support proper chemical and neurological functioning. For example, fat insulates nerve fibers such that they can conduct electrical signals along the length of the body. Meanwhile, those electrical signals are generated via channeling ions such as sodium, potassium, and calcium into and out of the nerve cells. Finally, the neurotransmitters released from the nerve cells are made from amino acids contributed largely from proteins in the diet.

Thus, thinking and feeling are intricately connected to food. Food is generally eaten, or drunk, and swallowed. However, many people cannot obtain adequate nutritional levels by conventional ways of ingesting food. In the past, these people would suffer and die from malnutrition. Modern nutritional medicine offers people several alternatives to conventional chewing and swallowing of food so that those who cannot do so will not die. Liquid solutions have been manufactured by pharmaceutical companies that are easier to digest than solid food and provide percent of nutritional needs. People who can drink but not eat rely on these formulas just as babies who cannot breast feed rely on baby formula to meet their nutritional needs.

People who cannot consume anything orally are fed via a tube inserted into the stomach or intestines. Finally, those whose gastrointestinal tracts cannot absorb even liquids are fed intravenously with solutions that provide percent of human nutritional needs. Food allergies and intolerances are common medical reasons for eliminating specific foods from one's diet.

An allergy is an immune response to proteins in food that the body identifies as foreign. The most common food allergies include those to peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, milk, soy, corn, wheat, and eggs. Most allergies appear in childhood and require complete elimination of the offending food if the symptoms are to be eradicated. Childhood food allergies may persist for a lifetime or may resolve a few years after getting rid of the offending food. Symptoms of allergies may include rashes and other skin irritations, gastrointestinal inflammation and bleeding, and respiratory distress, which may even involve arrest of breathing.

Food intolerances are not allergies but rather uncomfortable reactions to food that are not generally considered life threatening. One well-known example is lactose intolerance. Lactose is the carbohydrate in milk and other dairy products. The body requires a specific enzyme if lactose is to be absorbed.

As people age their bodies may make less of the enzyme necessary to break down lactose and as a result they may experience gastrointestinal distress, including such symptoms as gas or diarrhea, when they consume milk products containing lactose. Most people with lactose intolerance can tolerate dairy products if they accompany their meal with a lactase enzyme pill or if they consume dairy products pretreated with lactase enzyme.

Thus, food technology allows people with intolerances to tolerate the offending foods but avoidance is the only option for people with food allergies. In countries such as the United States where food is abundant, some of the greatest medical risks result from overeating rather than insufficient eating. For example, an excess intake of energy in the form of food leads to an increased risk of obesity. Obesity increases one's risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and obstructive pulmonary disease — among the most common and most deadly diseases today.

Medical practitioners have tried to determine how much food is adequate to support healthy living. People who consume too much food and become obese may seek medical treatment to lose weight and treat diseases resulting from obesity. Treatments may include nutritional therapy, exercise programs, drug therapy, or surgery.

Foodborne illness results from eating contaminated food. Foodborne illness can be caused by parasites, bacteria, viruses, toxins, or other pathogens that are harmful to humans. Food is not the direct cause but rather the carrier of the problematic agent. The effects of foodborne illness can range from flulike symptoms to death depending on the type of pathogen and the amount of exposure.

Foodborne illnesses are generally prevented by appropriate growing, harvesting, packaging, preparation, cooking, and storage of food. However, many countries lack the technology and resources necessary to accomplish this.

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Thus, assuring food safety continues to be an area of international concern. Food is not only necessary to sustain health but it can also help ill people regain health. Although the common advice to "feed a fever" may sound like folklore it is actually based in scientific evidence.

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A rise in body temperature is required in order to fight disease. People with a fever also require extra energy if they are to have adequate energy to maintain their strength while they battle illness. Likewise, the immune system uses a wide range of nutrients to combat intruders. All infectious diseases result in increased need for nutrition to strengthen the immune system as if fights against invading viruses or bacteria.

People who suffer from diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis , and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome AIDS generally require extraordinarily large amounts of nutrients to battle their disease. Likewise, young children who are ill require extra food to ensure that they have adequate nutrition to ensure normal growth and development. Food is crucial in combating both minor and major illnesses.

Many specific nutrients defend against disease. Calcium, a mineral found mainly in dairy products, is critical in the promotion of bone health and protection against osteoporosis. Fluoride, now added as a supplement to most water supplies, is crucial to tooth development. Iron is most commonly found in meats and protects against anemia. Folic acid prevents neural tube defects such as spina bifida in developing fetuses and has recently been found to protect against cardiovascular disease. In fact, almost every vitamin and mineral is known to be critical to one or more life processes. Nutritional specialists and medical practitioners are constantly studying the role each nutrient plays in protecting the body and investigating further possible cures.

See also Dietetics ; Digestion ; Disease: Krause's Food, Nutrition and Diet Therapy. Saunders; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition: Health Letter Associates, Jensen, and Clifford F. Mayo Clinic Diet Manual: A Handbook of Nutrition Practice,.

Applications in Medical Nutrition Therapy. In its broadest sense, medicine denotes ideas relating to diagnoses, causes, and cures of illness, as well as the practice of restoring and maintaining health, and the substances used in the treatment of disease. Medicine is both a domain of knowledge and the application of that knowledge. Medical ideas and practices as well as the social institutions relating to health compose a medical system. Medical systems include ways of classifying disease cancer, a cold, soul loss, and spirit possession , health specialists doctors, herbalists, and shamans , and therapies to end illness pharmaceuticals, meditation, acupuncture, and divination.

Western medicine, or biomedicine, is currently the most widespread medical system, but thousands of others exist throughout the world. Although each tradition is different, diagnosis and treatment often consist of both magical and herbal components. For instance, many societies believe that ill health can be attributed to supernatural forces, which can be meted out by spirits, gods, ancestors, sorcerers, or witches. These forces are capable of causing both the body and the soul to become ill.

To combat disease, patients and healers can also invoke magical substances, rituals, or supernatural beings. Another common method of healing is herbalism, using plants to treat illness. An immense variety of plant species are employed as remedies and include decongestants, pain relievers, and antiseptics. Plants in the Americas have been used to derive important drugs including aspirin, quinine, and novocaine. Although nonbiomedical traditions were once regarded as ineffective and superstitious, they are now acknowledged as providing new sources of medicinal plants as well as information regarding the social lives, environments, and experiences of humans.

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Medical ideas and practices both constitute and are constituted by social and cultural beliefs and concerns. Illness dialogues, diagnoses, and treatments can express ideas regarding religion, morality, power, politics, identity, economics, and gender. Consequently, social scientists are able to examine medical systems and their components as one method of understanding societal norms, attitudes, and practices.

Social science research regarding the conceptions and use of medicine can focus on both local environments and global ones. The purposeful treatment of illness has probably occurred throughout the entire span of human existence. However, without written records, it is impossible to know for certain what the earliest types of medical treatment were. The first written evidence of medical knowledge, including lists of symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, comes from Mesopotamia and Egypt , dating to more than four thousand years ago. In ancient Mesopotamia vegetable and mineral drugs were documented Magner , p.

But it is ancient Egypt that can claim both the first real physician known by name, Imhotep c. The ancient Mesopotamian and the Egyptian medical systems also incorporated magical remedies. These were the first of a number of codified medical traditions that developed around the world. The ancient medical systems of India and China were developed later than those of Mesopotamia and Egypt but they are still practiced today.

In India, Ayurveda the science of life was intended to maintain health, not simply treat disease. Ayurvedic practitioners believe that health is the result of the balance of three doshas elemental manifestations in the physical body that govern body processes. Magner notes that ancient texts list more than one thousand diseases and almost one thousand drugs, and describe advanced surgical procedures including cesarean section, amputation, lithotomy, cauterization, tonsillectomy, and plastic surgery p.

Like Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine also views disease as the result of an imbalance in the body, which is composed of yin and yang elements. Doctors often made diagnoses by studying the pulses of patients and were aware that the heart was responsible for circulating blood long before Europeans were. Chinese medicine employs a variety of treatments including more than five thousand medicinal herbs such as ginseng , acupuncture inserting needles into the body at specific points , and moxibustion applying a burning tinder to the skin.

During the Roman Empire the humoral approach was used by many physicians, including Galen — CE. His writings were used as important medical texts throughout Rome , the Islamic world, and Europe for centuries. Islamic doctors further embraced and modified the Greek tradition and spread it from Spain to India. The medical writings of the doctor and philosopher Ibn Sina Avicenna, — became standard texts throughout the Arab conquests and Medieval Europe. In Europe it was not until the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the Greco-Islamic tradition was fully abandoned.

In William Harvey — challenged the Galenic tradition when he published what was then an unorthodox idea: Almost one hundred years later the Turkish and African practice of purposefully exposing individuals to mild strains of smallpox to achieve inoculation caught the attention of Europeans and Americans, leading to the development of the first vaccine. Nonetheless, it was not until the nineteenth century that advances in chemistry and medical technology led to the discovery of microbial sources of disease and their cures. This allowed researchers to isolate, treat, and create vaccines for diseases such as tuberculosis, tetanus, cholera, and rabies.

The introduction of general anesthesia s and antisepsis s precipitated the growth of surgery and hospitals, but it was not until the twentieth century that significant advances were made. The product of a specific historic and cultural past, bio-medicine is currently used around the globe.

The biomedical system includes professional, scientific, educational, legal, financial, and ethical frameworks. Biomedicine can be characterized by a number of features. One is its almost exclusive use of science and technology to fight disease. Unlike many other traditions, biomedicine views disease as caused by only natural factors.

Supernatural or magical sources of illness or treatments are absent. Most biomedical treatments involve the use of synthesized pharmaceuticals and some require hospitalization. Furthermore, the physical body, not the soul, is considered to be the only locus of illness. Given its early history, biomedical practitioners often have a tendency to look for and find a single cause of an illness such as a microbe and then to treat it with a single cure such as antibiotics.

Deborah Gordon notes that the scientific approach of biomedicine is not only a way to treat illness; it is also a way of conceptualizing the world. The focus of biomedicine is illness and not health, which is often defined as the absence of disease. Critics charge that because biomedicine almost exclusively treats the body and disease, it lacks a holistic approach to well-being that engages with the social individual. Patients who feel that biomedicine is not meeting their needs have a number of other therapeutic options from which to choose.

In developed counties such as the United States , complementary and alternative medicines are widely used. In Eisenberg et al. These therapies, which include herbalism, meditation, yoga, massage, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and chiropractic medicine, are used either in conjunction with, or as a substitute for, biomedical treatment. They are often provided by nonlicensed healers and can incorporate religious or non-Western traditions. Throughout much of the world, the majority of medical consultations are still with traditional healers and not biomedical personnel.

Nevertheless, indigenous and local healing traditions are often used in conjunction with bio-medicine. For instance, in India and China, Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, respectively, continue to play important roles in the public health care systems alongside biomedicine. Magner notes that in the s acupuncture anesthesia was used in 60 percent of all surgeries in China , p. Australian Aboriginal people have the choice of going to a biomedical clinic, using local plants as remedies, or consulting local healers to cure spiritual sickness.

In Africa herbalists and diviners, as well as doctors and nurses, are regularly consulted. Throughout our history, humans have employed a variety of techniques to treat illness, and this process continues today. Results of a Follow-Up National Survey. Journal of the American Medical Association University of California Press. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine. In Biomedicine Examined , ed.

Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon, 19 — Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: A History of Medicine. Medicine is one of the branches of the health sciences. It deals with restoring and maintaining health, but is also used in determining the causes of death. It is a practical science that applies knowledge from biology, chemistry, and physics to treat diseases. Biological knowledge is derived from anatomy, biochemistry, physiology , histology, epidemiology , microbiology, genetics, toxicology , pathology , and many other disciplines.

Biology forms the basis for understanding how the human body works and interacts with its environment. An understanding of chemistry is required to determine the interactions between different drugs, to detect chemicals in the body, and design drugs for treatment. Physics has an impact on understanding how the body works and on understanding how the various instruments and equipment are used in diagnosis and treatment.

The need to understand interactions between all of these areas makes medicine one of the most complex scientific disciplines. In its early days medicine was not based on science. Many aspects of it were considered forms of magic, encompassing everything from disease causes to treatments. This was because the disease process was not understood. There was no knowledge of infectious agents such as bacteria and viruses. Therefore, unless the cause of a disease was obvious and visible, sickness was considered a punishment from gods or an interference of an evil spirit. As a result, some treatments were logical, while others were irrational and often involved magic incantations and spells.

The practice of medicine goes back to at least b. Babylonian medical texts provided the first anatomical descriptions and an early code of conduct for doctors. Their understanding of diseases was very basic; they recognized trauma and food poisoning , but a lot of the illnesses were still a mystery. Despite advances in anatomy and surgery, ancient Egyptians, as the Babylonians before them, still believed in supernatural causes for many illnesses.

The scientific basis of medicine was laid down by Hippocrates , who rejected magical causes of diseases. He believed in medical examination and keeping detailed records of a disease history. His influence on medicine is present even today, in form of the " Hippocratic Oath ," which all new doctors have to take. It sets out ethical guidelines for doctors.

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The importance of clinical examination of the patient was made even more important by Claudius Galen, another Greek physician. He worked extensively on anatomy and experimented with live animals. Great advances in all areas of medicine, especially in epidemiology and hygiene, took place in the middle ages.

Avicenna, a Persian physician, was the first to recognize the contagious nature of tuberculosis. In his many works, he gave important advice to surgeons, especially on cancer treatment and advanced use of oral anesthetics painkillers. Another great advancement of the times was the use of silk thread for stitching wounds, developed by Abul Qasim al-Zahrawi.

A number of scientific discoveries, starting from the late s with the work of E. Flemming and others, established that microbes are the cause of infectious disease; these diseases can be prevented by vaccinations; and there are drugs that can kill the infectious agents microbes. These findings shaped modern western medicine.

Furthermore, discoveries in physics, such as x rays, ultrasounds, magnetic resonance , and lasers, led to the development of equipment that allows quicker and better diagnosis, as well as easier and safer surgical procedures. As a result of these scientific and technological changes, the knowledge that medical students have to acquire is immense.

Therefore, all doctors learn the same basics but later they have to specialize in narrower areas in order to be highly skilled and able to effectively treat all of the diseases of a particular organ or tissue. There are doctors specializing in various areas of medicine, such as emergency medicine, intensive care medicine, internal medicine , pediatrics, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and others.

While obstetrics is a relatively narrow area, dealing with childbirth and female health, surgery or internal medicine is further subdivided into sub specializations. Some of those subspecialties are hematology blood and its diseases , cardiology heart and cardiovascular system , oncology cancer , ophthalmology eyes , orthopedic surgery mostly skeletal system , or neurosurgery brain. Even those Christian writers who believe in faith healing do not all believe that one's faith presently brings about the desired healing.

When you are healed rests entirely on what the sovereign purposes of the Healer are. Doing mental gymnastics to 'hold on to your miracle' will not cause your healing to manifest now. Proponents of faith healing say it may come later, and it may not come in this life. Parts of the four gospels in the New Testament say that Jesus cured physical ailments well outside the capacity of first-century medicine.

One example is the case of "a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was not better but rather grew worse. Be cured from your illness. Jesus endorsed the use of the medical assistance of the time medicines of oil and wine when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan Luke Jesus then told the doubting teacher of the law who had elicited this parable by his self-justifying question, "And who is my neighbor?

The healing in the gospels is referred to as a "sign" [John 6: Some theologians' understanding is that Jesus healed all who were present every single time. Jesus told his followers to heal the sick and stated that signs such as healing are evidence of faith. Jesus also told his followers to "cure sick people, raise up dead persons, make lepers clean, expel demons.

You received free, give free". Jesus sternly ordered many who received healing from him: The apostle Paul believed healing is one of the special gifts of the Holy Spirit , [1 Corinthians In the New Testament Epistle of James , [5: The New Testament says that during Jesus' ministry and after his Resurrection , the apostles healed the sick and cast out demons, made lame men walk, raised the dead and performed other miracles.

Jesus used miracles to convince people that he was inaugurating the Messianic Age. Scholars have described Jesus' miracles as establishing the kingdom during his lifetime. At the beginning of the 20th century, the new Pentecostal movement drew participants from the Holiness movement and other movements in America that already believed in divine healing. By the s, several faith healers drew large crowds and established worldwide followings. The first Pentecostals in the modern sense appeared in Topeka, Kansas , in a Bible school conducted by Charles Fox Parham , a holiness teacher and former Methodist pastor.

Smith Wigglesworth was also a well-known figure in the early part of the 20th century. A former English plumber turned evangelist who lived simply and read nothing but the Bible from the time his wife taught him to read, Wigglesworth traveled around the world preaching about Jesus and performing faith healings. Wigglesworth claimed to raise several people from the dead in Jesus' name in his meetings.

During the s and s, Aimee Semple McPherson was a controversial faith healer of growing popularity during the Great Depression. Branham has been credited as the initiater of the post-World War II healing revivals. Because of this, Branham has been recognized as the "father of modern faith healers.

My parents believed very strongly in medical science and we have a doctor who takes care of our children when they get sick. I cannot heal anyone — God does that. Also in this era, Jack Coe [33] [34] and A. Allen [35] were faith healers who traveled with large tents for large open-air crusades. Oral Roberts's successful use of television as a medium to gain a wider audience led others to follow suit.

His former pilot, Kenneth Copeland , started a healing ministry. Pat Robertson , Benny Hinn , and Peter Popoff became well-known televangelists who claimed to heal the sick. Kuhlman influenced Benny Hinn, who adopted some of her techniques and wrote a book about her. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes two "not mutually exclusive" kinds of healing, [38] I,3 [39] nn2—3 one justified by science and one justified by faith:. In , the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued "Instruction on prayers for healing" with specific norms about prayer meetings for obtaining healing, [38] which presents the Catholic Church's doctrines of sickness and healing.

It accepts "that there may be means of natural healing that have not yet been understood or recognized by science," [39] n6 [b] but it rejects superstitious practices which are neither compatible with Christian teaching nor compatible with scientific evidence. Faith healing is reported by Catholics as the result of intercessory prayer to a saint or to a person with the gift of healing.

Catholic magazine, "Even in this skeptical, postmodern, scientific age—miracles really are possible. According to John Cavadini, when healing is granted, "The miracle is not primarily for the person healed, but for all people, as a sign of God's work in the ultimate healing called 'salvation,' or a sign of the kingdom that is coming. The Catholic Church has a special Congregation dedicated to the careful investigation of the validity of alleged miracles attributed to prospective saints.

Pope Francis tightened the rules on money and miracles in the canonization process. While the popular conception of a miracle can be wide-ranging, the Catholic Church has a specific definition for the kind of miracle formally recognized in a canonization process. According to Catholic Encyclopedia , it is often said that cures at shrines and during Christian pilgrimages are mainly due to psychotherapy — partly to confident trust in Divine providence , and partly to the strong expectancy of cure that comes over suggestible persons at these times and places.

Among the best-known accounts by Catholics of faith healings are those attributed to the miraculous intercession of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary known as Our Lady of Lourdes at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France and the remissions of life-threatening disease claimed by those who have applied for aid to Saint Jude , who is known as the " patron saint of lost causes".

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As of [update] , Catholic medics have asserted that there have been 67 miracles and 7, unexplainable medical cures at Lourdes since Vermeersch identifies ambiguity and equivocal nature of the miraculous cures as a key feature of miraculous events. Christian Science claims that healing is possible through an understanding of the underlying spiritual perfection of God's creation. Christian Scientists believe that healing through prayer is possible insofar as it succeeds in correcting the distortion.

An important point in Christian Science is that effectual prayer and the moral regeneration of one's life go hand-in-hand: The chapter "Prayer" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures gives a full account of healing through prayer, while the testimonies at the end of the book are written by people who believe they have been healed through spiritual understanding gained from reading the book.

Healing is always attributed to be God's power. Latter-day Saints believe that the Priesthood of God, held by prophets such as Moses and worthy disciples of the Savior, was restored via heavenly messengers to the first prophet of this dispensation, Joseph Smith. According to LDS doctrine, even though members may have the restored priesthood authority to heal in the name of Jesus Christ, all efforts should be made to seek the appropriate medical help. Brigham Young stated this effectively, while also noting that the ultimate outcome is still dependent on the will of God.

If we are sick, and ask the Lord to heal us, and to do all for us that is necessary to be done, according to my understanding of the Gospel of salvation, I might as well ask the Lord to cause my wheat and corn to grow, without my plowing the ground and casting in the seed.

It appears consistent to me to apply every remedy that comes within the range of my knowledge, and to ask my Father in Heaven, in the name of Jesus Christ, to sanctify that application to the healing of my body. But suppose we were traveling in the mountains, According to my faith, ask the Lord Almighty to … heal the sick.

This is our privilege, when so situated that we cannot get anything to help ourselves. Then the Lord and his servants can do all. But it is my duty to do, when I have it in my power. We lay hands on the sick and wish them to be healed, and pray the Lord to heal them, but we cannot always say that he will. Konkhogin Haokip has claimed some Muslims believe that the Quran was sent not only as a revelation, but as a medicine, and that they believe the Quran heals any physical and spiritual ailments through such practices as.

Some critics of Scientology have referred to some of its practices as being similar to faith healing, based on claims made by L. Ron Hubbard in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and other writings. Nearly all [a] scientists dismiss faith healing as pseudoscience. Scientists and doctors generally find that faith healing lacks biological plausibility or epistemic warrant, [6]: A review in investigated spiritual healing , therapeutic touch and faith healing.

Of the hundred cases reviewed, none revealed that the healer's intervention alone resulted in any improvement or cure of a measurable organic disability. In addition, at least one study has suggested that adult Christian Scientists, who generally use prayer rather than medical care, have a higher death rate than other people of the same age. The Global Medical Research Institute GMRI was created in to start collecting medical records of patients who claim to have received a supernatural healing miracle as a result of Christian Spiritual Healing practices.

Skeptics of faith healing offer primarily two explanations for anecdotes of cures or improvements, relieving any need to appeal to the supernatural. These patients would have improved just as well even had they done nothing. The second is the placebo effect, through which a person may experience genuine pain relief and other symptomatic alleviation. In this case, the patient genuinely has been helped by the faith healer or faith-based remedy, not through any mysterious or numinous function, but by the power of their own belief that they would be healed. Both cases, however, are strictly limited to the body's natural abilities.

According to the American Cancer Society:. One review published in looked at cases of deaths among children treated by faith healing instead of conventional methods. These researchers estimated that if conventional treatment had been given, the survival rate for most of these children would have been more than 90 percent, with the remainder of the children also having a good chance of survival. A more recent study found that more than children had died of treatable illnesses in the United States over the past thirty years because their parents relied on spiritual healing rather than conventional medical treatment.

The American Medical Association considers that prayer as therapy should not be a medically reimbursable or deductible expense.

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Reliance on faith healing to the exclusion of other forms of treatment can have a public health impact when it reduces or eliminates access to modern medical techniques. Christian theological criticism of faith healing broadly falls into two distinct levels of disagreement. The first is widely termed the "open-but-cautious" view of the miraculous in the church today.

This term is deliberately used by Robert L. Saucy in the book Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? The most common form of abuse is the view that since all illness is directly or indirectly attributable to the devil and his works, and since Christ by his cross has defeated the devil, and by his Spirit has given us the power to overcome him, healing is the inheritance right of all true Christians who call upon the Lord with genuine faith.

The second level of theological disagreement with Christian faith healing goes further. Commonly referred to as cessationism , its adherents either claim that faith healing will not happen today at all, or may happen today, but it would be unusual. Richard Gaffin argues for a form of cessationism in an essay alongside Saucy's in the book Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? In his book Perspectives on Pentecost [89] Gaffin states of healing and related gifts that "the conclusion to be drawn is that as listed in 1 Corinthians 12 vv.

Skeptics of faith healers point to fraudulent practices either in the healings themselves such as plants in the audience with fake illnesses , or concurrent with the healing work supposedly taking place and claim that faith healing is a quack practice in which the "healers" use well known non-supernatural illusions to exploit credulous people in order to obtain their gratitude, confidence and money. Popoff pretended to know private details about participants' lives by receiving radio transmissions from his wife who was off-stage and had gathered information from audience members prior to the show.

Park [78] and doctor and consumer advocate Stephen Barrett [3] have called into question the ethics of some exorbitant fees. There have also been legal controversies. For example, in at a Jack Coe revival service in Miami, Florida , Coe told the parents of a three-year-old boy that he healed their son who had polio. Lewis , Coe was arrested and charged on February 6, with practicing medicine without a license, a felony in the state of Florida.

TV personality Derren Brown produced a show on faith healing entitled "Miracles for sale" which arguably exposed the art of faith healing as a scam. In this show, Derren trained a scuba diver trainer picked from the general public to be a faith healer and took him to Texas to successfully deliver a faith healing session to a congregation.

Except with respect to the withholding of medically indicated treatments from disabled infants with life threatening conditions, case by case determinations concerning the exercise of the authority of this subsection shall be within the sole discretion of the State. Thirty-one states have child-abuse religious exemptions.

Of these, Idaho is the only state accused of having a large number of deaths due to the legislation in recent times. Parents have been convicted of child abuse and felony reckless negligent homicide and found responsible for killing their children when they withheld lifesaving medical care and chose only prayers. Rational Changes in Science: Essays on Scientific Reasoning. Retrieved 18 April Such examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers.

Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse. University Press of America. Faith healing is probably the most dangerous pseudoscience. Encyclopedia of Religious Controversies in the United States: Certain approaches to faith healing are also widely considered to be pseudoscientific, including those of Christian Science, voodoo, and Spiritualism.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It has been suggested that Christian Science practitioner be merged into this article. Discuss Proposed since August For the play by Brian Friel, see Faith Healer. Spirit Spiritualism Spiritualist beliefs Spiritism. Mediumship Faith healing Psychometry Automatic writing. This section uncritically uses texts from within a religion or faith system without referring to secondary sources that critically analyze them. Please help improve this article by adding references to reliable secondary sources , with multiple points of view.

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