I do a fair amount of healing magick and, if I do say so myself, I'm pretty good at it. I recently wrote about my latest success in that area, which is turning out to be one of the most effective healings I've ever done. So I know that spiritual methods can work to heal physical ailments, but when those methods are treated as a replacement for conventional medicine you can wind up with a life-threatening situation very quickly. Yesterday an Oregon couple who believed in the power of faith healing was convicted of felony criminal mistreatment for refusing to provide their young daughter with medical care.Timothy and Rebecca Wyland's daughter Alayna, born in December 2009, developed an abnormal growth of blood vessels that covered her left eye and threatened her vision. Now 1 1/2 years old, she has improved under state-ordered medical care. She remains in state custody but lives with her parents.
The Wylands belong to the Followers of Christ, an Oregon City congregation that relies on faith healing. Rather than taking their daughter to a doctor, they relied on prayer, anointing with oil and laying on of hands.
The couple testified during a juvenile court custody hearing last July that they wouldn't have willingly taken Alayna to a doctor because it would violate their religious beliefs. Jurors heard a recording of that hearing.
This kind of either/or irrationality has to end. If you believe in spiritual healing, that's cool. Use it. But if there's ever a time to apply the strategic sorcery method - that is, making sure you take every possible mundane step in addition to doing the spiritual work - healing your children is it. Taking mundane steps doesn't render spiritual methods useless. Rather, doing so means that you're committed to achieving success by improving the odds as much as you can.
The things medicine is good at, it's really good at. Penicillin is awesome. So are surgeries. As energy / magickal healers, we should focus on places where medicine does poorly - nerve injuries, cartilage, etc. Or complimenting surgery, helping patients recover. Then people will have a real reason to see us. Replicating problems that medicine has already solved is a fool's errand.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that somewhere deep in these people's minds lies the fear of having their entire religious foundation upset if they admit to "needing" modern medicine, as if doing so would invalidate everything they've accomplished so far (and I'm perfectly open to the idea that they may really heal people and aren't just crackpots).
ReplyDeleteStill, to lie to yourself about your daughter's worsening condition and watch her suffer is sickening.
A lot of the skepticism about conventional medicine in these groups dates back to the founding of Christian Science, which was during a period in which medical science was still doing a lot of fumbling around trying to cure what we consider simple ailments to cure today. When the first Christian Science church was founded in 1879 there were no antibiotics and primitive anesthetics, and many patent medicience were simply preparations of psychoactive drugs like cocaine and opium. Medical science has moved on, but faith healing churches have not.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, as a parent I can't imagine letting one of my kids go on suffering from an illness without trying every possible remedy to make them better.