Discussion: Medicine
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Prayer, prescriptions, and pastoral care can all be useful tools in providing quality care. However, as Safer (2019) points out, overprescribing is a problem in health care. The pharmaceutical industry benefits from increased prescriptions, but there is little indication that long-term prescriptions of certain drugs have any increased benefit for patients (Safer, 2019). On the other hand, there are many benefits to prayer and pastoral care in medicine: as alternative treatments that are part of holistic medicine, prayer and pastoral care can be used to good effect on the mind and the body (Green, 2018). Oral Roberts University of Medicine, for example, believes in a philosophy of prayer and medicine (Crouch, Jr., 2019). Pastoral care recognizes that patients have spiritual needs just as much as they have physical needs. Prayer and pastoral care, therefore, should be part of any quality care approach, but especially holistic approaches in medicine.
Prescriptions become somewhat the norm or go-to approach in health care in the 20th century and into the 21stbut the opioid epidemic caused people to rethink this approach to medicine. Pharmaceuticals, it seemed, might not always be the best answer to a health problem. Researchers, scholars, doctors, nurses, psychologists, and teachers began identifying the benefits of prayer and pastoral care in medicine, showing that patient health and wellness can be enhanced through spiritual components of care provision.
The benefits derived from prayer and pastoral care can actually be more positive, satisfying, and effective than those allegedly derived from prescriptions. Prescriptions might address symptoms and physical issues, but prayer and pastoral care go deeper into the human soul and help the patient to deal with problems or issues that seem to be beyond the reach of physical medicine (Crouch, Jr., 2019). Prayer and pastoral care can bring joy to the patients life, peace, and healing at the spiritual level. In cases where patients are struggling with issues like addiction, depression, pain, or isolation, prayer and pastoral care can make all the difference between a patients improvement and a patients regression....
…least healthy countries on the planet: obesity is a bigger problem than COVID ever was or will be, and yet one cannot find any authority caring more about it than about wearing masks and social distancing. How would more socialized medicine fix any of this? The answer is that it would not. It would merely increase the amount of regulation that already exists, reduce the remaining choices that people still have in terms of where they can go for health care, and put additional strain on tax payers.Scripture reminds us that a joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones (Proverbs 17:22). More socialized medicine would only help to further crush the spirit of people in this country; and one need only look around to see how thoroughly crushed it already ismental health declines, depression rising, drug addiction, obesity, poor community health. The government needs to get out of health carenot get further into it. People need joyful heartsnot over-anxious minds fretting over tests and screenings that benefit…
References
Crouch Jr, J. R. (2019). Healing through Prayer and Medicine: How Oral Roberts’
Healing Vision Was—and Continues to Be—Fulfilled. Spiritus: ORU Journal of Theology, 4(2), 4.
Green, C. A. (2018). Complimentary care: when our patients request to pray. Journal of
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