Prairie View

Monday, December 28, 2009

A False Dichotomy Examined

This is in response to the second comment on an earlier post: Healthcare Reform Essay.

Can you show me statistics or other information on infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. in Bible times, compared to our times? I’m not convinced that your assumption is correct–that it was much worse then than it is now.

My impression is that the people in Bible times, early on at least, had very long life spans, and the record tells us that the Hebrew women in Egypt were so lively that the midwives couldn't get to them in time to assist with their births. These facts don’t suggest an ailing population. I concluded that in Bible times, “physical healers were needed, but wellness aids in the Bible did not require expensive potions concocted in chemical laboratories.” You seem to be saying that Bible-times people were NOT well off under these conditions.

In defense of your statement saying that my conclusions are “vastly untrue in the absolute/ historical sense” you could have cited the many sick people in Jesus’ time. Multitudes of people needed healing, and Jesus healed them. We have no details on many of them, and only sketchy details on others. We know about the lunatic, the palsied, the leper, the hemorrhaging woman, for example, in the sketchy-details category.

Under current medical practice, some of these conditions would, in fact, be addressed with pharmaceuticals or surgery, and a “cure” could be claimed. But mental illness, cerebral palsy or epilepsy, and leprosy continue to be challenging to treat, even with all that we know. In some ways, people are still in much the same kinds of difficulty as people were then, if these conditions are present. People in this condition could still justifiably feel that their only hope of complete healing resides in a miracle from Jesus. Even people who have access to all that modern medicine offers have come to this conclusion. Medical practice then and medical practice now seem to have similar outcomes in these difficult-to-treat cases: people with these conditions experience on–going health challenges. In these cases, Bible-times treatment methods may not, in fact, have been much inferior to ours. If theirs had no deleterious side effects (unlike chemical pharmaceuticals, which always do), perhaps in some ways theirs were better.

There was, indeed, a time between now and then (during the Middle Ages, for example) when life expectancy was much shorter, and infant mortality was higher. During this time it’s likely that Jewish dietary and hygiene laws were not being followed, and modern treatment methods certainly had not been developed. Under the feudal system, many people lived in extreme poverty and did not eat well by anyone’s definition. Mass starvation occurred sometimes. “Treatments” like bloodletting and using leaches to draw out “bad blood” may have arisen during this time, and continued through the time America’s West was settled. The role of bacteria in disease was not known until long after the Middle Ages, beginning in the 1680's with Van Leeuwenhoek, and continuing with Lister and Pasteur into the mid-late 1800's.. Herbs were still probably used to address what ailed people throughout this time, although their mechanism was apparently not well understood. Not much has changed in this regard. With only a few exceptions, modern science has largely disregarded this treatment approach rather than investigating it thoroughly. As you probably know, it’s illegal right now in America to claim that any of them have any efficacy in treating, curing, or mitigating any disease.

I’ve been reading over my essay and your comments, and I don’t see that I proposed in the essay that people in Bible times WERE BETTER OFF without “expensive chemical potions concocted in laboratories.” What I did imply was that they are not present in the Biblical record, and it is wrong to suppose that they should be considered the foundation of good health and medical practice now. Good nutrition makes more sense as a foundation for good health. This is probably where your “false dichotomy” “separate issue” assertion comes from. My sense is that the “chemicals versus foods dichotomy” is only marginally present in my essay, if it is present at all. Your extrapolation of my position did not adequately take into account the other factors I mentioned as being present in the Bible-times health picture: hygiene laws, Jesus’ healing of people, prayer, anointing with oil, practicing physicians, the use of herbs, the use of wine, moderation, and proscribing gluttony.

I’m glad to know you basically agreed with my essay, and I thank you for writing, especially because you probably knew I would write back publicly. Other people probably wouldn’t believe that we’ve never argued at a family event, but it’s true. We really don’t argue much, do we? We just disagree vigorously sometimes in writing, in public.

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