For those who think medical diagnosis are good and ensure health, here’s an article filled with thought-provoking ideas to ponder. As the authors point out, all the diagnosing going on in our medically entrenched society is not healthy. It can have exactly the opposite effect intended, that of promoting disease and making it more likely to happen to the very person hoping to avoid it.
The authors wrote:
“For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
“You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.”
Heres the link:
“What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses”
Here’s a summary paragraph from the report:
“As more of us are being told we are sick, fewer of us are being told we are well. People need to think hard about the benefits and risks of increased diagnosis: the fundamental question they face is whether or not to become a patient. And doctors need to remember the value of reassuring people that they are not sick. Perhaps someone should start monitoring a new health metric: the proportion of the population not requiring medical care. And the National Institutes of Health could propose a new goal for medical researchers: reduce the need for medical services, not increase it.
Mary Baker Eddy has this all figured out over 100 years ago. She wrote in Science and Health,
“A physical diagnosis of disease — since mortal mind must be the cause of disease — tends to induce disease.”
Evan as a health care professional I have become intrigued by Christian Science. I went into nursing because I want to help people get better and return to there natural state. What I found instead so much of what we do is teach people how to manage their chronic illnesses. People have sometimes a whole page of diagnosis for all their perceived aliments followed of course by a new diagnosis of anxiety. Medications are given and than more medications to contract their side effects. People are not healed despite all the improvements in modern medicine. It has been my experience that my patients tend to become their diagnosis. I so agree with the statement that disease-tends to induce disease. The scary thing is many people are given diagnosis and medications just to secure billing rights for their visits.
Reading Science and Health is giving me some new ideas on how to truly stay healthy and to help others in a way that is more permanent and effective. I am just beginning to explore this religion and recently got help from a practitioner and had a very long standing health issue healed after many years of suffering and without the surgery my physician said is necessary. There are answers real answers but you wont find them in the current health care system.
My grandmother was a medical nurse and loved Christian Science. She herself wouldn’t take so much as an aspirin as she said every drug had side effects. When I see loved ones taking more and more drugs to combat the original drug’s side effects, it points out to me the whole mixed bag of material medicine. I appreciate the efforts of well meaning doctors to alleviate suffering, but I am seeing more and more that the only reliable system is purely spiritual. I read recently in an article in the Christian Science periodicals (can’t remember if the Sentinel or the Journal) that the problem isn’t physical at all, it’s always mental, and the only true healing is spiritual. That truly makes sense to me. Thank you, anonymous writer, for your many fine points, and welcome to the precious world of being a student of Christian Science.
I totally agree with anonymous above and thank you Evan for posting this important article.
Excellent article and comments. A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an article about how pediatricians and pharmaceutical companies share the blame for alarming parents about a child’s fever, making them think it is life-threatening when, to material sense, fever shows the human immune system is trying to heal the body. So parents take their children to hospital emergency rooms, exposing them to all kinds of potential harm, not to mention costing us all a fortune.
Thank you to everyone above! Love your thoughts, ideas and observations. Very helpful, and ring true. Keep them coming…