Tag Archives: Common Sense

Not all “advancements” in commercialized medicine are improvements

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A discussion on Facebook reminded me of how easy it is to smugly view previous generations as “ignorant” or even “stupid”, without realizing how little of their practical knowledge and skills we possess. We are often far more reliant on others to do for us what previous generations did for themselves.

The field of medicine has made enormous strides. But it has also become commercialized, and too many people have become overly reliant on pharmaceutical remedies.

I grew up before medical insurance in a family that had to consider every expenditure carefully. I was blessed with a Daddy who had been a medic in the Korean war, and I was thankful he was able to “fix” my broken nose, help me avoid stitches several times (except for one dramatic injury) and, along with my mother, nurse me through various illnesses and injuries. He also knew his limits and knew when a call to the doctor or an ER visit was necessary.

At age 18, I was diagnosed with a mild case of a serious, usually progressive, neuromuscular disease. (God later healed me during pregnancy, but that’s a story for another time.) While at UCLA, I read everything in the BioMed library related to my disease and watched/listened to every lecture, symposium, and presentation available in the library. I was so up on the latest research that, moments before I had my wisdom teeth extracted at the dental school, one of the professors asked me to explain my condition and its implications to a group of dental students.

It never dawned on me to consider investigating “alternative” treatments.

Then an interesting thing began happening. I’d get sick with something and go to a clinic or doctor — including the top specialists at UCLA — and we would end up having conversation after conversation along these lines:

Doctor: Normally I would prescribe x or y, but those are contra-indicated for you, and there is no safe or effective alternative.

Me: [alarmed, frightened face]

Doctor: Don’t worry. [recommends some home remedy or describes how this sickness was treated before current pharmaceuticals were developed]

Me: Seriously? Just go home and do that? Does it even work??!!

Doctor: The old remedies and treatments don’t lose their effectiveness simply because we have discovered new ones.

Me: Oh.

One doctor, offended at my youthful arrogance: Doctors knew what they were doing long before you were even born, and what I’m recommending has worked for centuries.

———————-

“Yeah, but we know better now!” people protest. They act as if everyone used to die of every childhood disease pre-vaccine. They can’t imagine a world before pharmacies in supermarkets and on multiple street corners, before medical insurance, before medical imaging and lab tests…

I’m thankful for many of the advancements in medicine. I have benefited greatly. But I’m not thankful for big corporate medicine, or for how many of us have been turned into helpless consumers of medical services. I’m not thankful for the opioid epidemic, the over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, the obesity epidemic, etc., etc.

Oh, and the “home remedies” those doctors suggested to me back in the day? They worked wonderfully… and without side effects.

[Previously posted on Facebook]

Navigating health care and “clinics” in the time of pandemic

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Note: since I live in the United States, this post is more applicable to our health care system.

During this difficult time, a lot of businesses are being asked or ordered to shut down, and some — understandably fearing financial ruin — are coming up with creative ways to claim they are “essential businesses”. One especially egregious tactic I recently discovered is businesses claiming to be “health clinics”.

What can we do to keep ourselves safe and avoid “health clinics” that might put us and others at risk? Even more importantly, how do we make difficult health care decisions during this time?

Here’s what I’m asking before I venture into any hospital, doctor’s office, or “health clinic”:

1. Are they a legit health care facility? If so, they will be following CDC guidelines as briefly summed up here:

Public Health Reminder

Healthcare facilities and clinicians should prioritize urgent and emergency visits and procedures now and for the coming several weeks. The following actions can preserve staff, personal protective equipment, and patient care supplies; ensure staff and patient safety; and expand available hospital capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic:

  • Delay all elective ambulatory provider visits
  • Reschedule elective and non-urgent admissions
  • Delay inpatient and outpatient elective surgical and procedural cases
  • Postpone routine dental and eyecare visits

2. Is this a life or death emergency? Would it be dangerous for me to move the injured or critically ill person? If so, I’m going to call 911.

3. Is time not of the essence? Am I unsure whether or not this warrants an ER visit? Then I’m calling the primary care physician for advice.

4. Is this ongoing treatment truly necessary? Unless told otherwise by their physician, no one should stop chemo, kidney dialysis, etc. Thankfully, neither my loved ones nor I need life-sustaining treatments at this point, nor are we fighting acute, life-threatening diseases. And the latter is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

5. If my health condition needs attention but is not an emergency or crisis, and I don’t require life-sustaining treatment, do I really need to risk myself and others by being seen in person? More and more doctors’ offices and legit health clinics are doing phone consultations or practicing telemedicine.

6. Will I be using time and resources better spent on those whose need for care is more crucial? I don’t want to be the cause of one less patient being seen or one less set of available protective gear unless I really, really need medical attention.

If the “health clinic” is legit, they won’t even want to see me for anything that is routine, elective, or non-urgent. But what if they aren’t following the CDC guidelines? I can only draw one of three conclusions:

  1. The people running that “health clinic” are woefully ignorant and have not even bothered to educate themselves about how to best protect their patients during this crisis. In that case, I have zero confidence in their ability to meet any of my health care needs, let alone protect me from disease or harm, and will not seek out their services now or in the future. 
  2. The people running the “health clinic” are familiar with the guidelines and educated enough to comprehend why they are necessary, but are callously choosing to ignore them, not caring who their actions put at risk. Frankly I cannot imagine anyone in the health care field being so despicable.
  3. They are actually another business entity only pretending to be a “health clinic” in order to stay open. Anyone willing to risk my community in such a deceptive way — and potentially not only my life and health but that of my loved ones — is someone I will avoid and encourage others to do the same.

 

Addendum, from the California Coronavirus (COVID-19) Response website:

Health care and helping sick relatives

What if I need to visit a health care provider?

If you are feeling sick with flu-like symptoms, please first call your doctor, a nurse hotline, or an urgent care center. 

If you need to go to the hospital, call ahead so they can prepare for your arrival. If you need to call 911, tell the 911 operator the exact symptoms you are experiencing so the ambulance provider can prepare to treat you safely.

What about routine, elective or non-urgent medical appointments?

Non-essential medical care like eye exams, teeth cleaning, and elective procedures must/should be cancelled or rescheduled. If possible, health care visits should be done remotely.

Contact your health care provider to see what services they are providing.

May I still go out to get my prescriptions?

Yes. You may leave their homes to obtain prescriptions or get cannabis from a licensed cannabis retailer.

Can I leave home to care for my elderly parents or friends who require assistance to care for themselves? Or a friend or family member who has disabilities?

Yes. Be sure that you protect them and yourself by following social distancing guidelines such as washing hands before and after, using hand sanitizer, maintaining at least six feet of distance when possible, and coughing or sneezing into your elbow or a tissue and then washing your hands. If you have early signs of a cold, please stay away from your older loved ones.

Can I visit loved ones in the hospital, nursing home, skilled nursing facility, or other residential care facility?

Generally no. There are limited exceptions, such as if you are going to the hospital with a minor who is under 18 or someone who is developmentally disabled and needs assistance. For most other situations, the order prohibits non-necessary visitation to these kinds of facilities except at the end-of-life. This is difficult, but necessary to protect hospital staff and other patients.

 

 

Repentance 

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How do we know if someone is truly repentant? How do we know if we are? In light of some of my recent posts, I’ve been asking myself those questions, and doing some careful thinking and self-examination.

These are a few of my thoughts.

While researching the topic of repentance, I found this helpful quote from Church Discipline by Jonathan Leeman:

“A few verses before Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 18 about church discipline, he provides us with help for determining whether an individual is characteristically repentant: Would the person be willing to cut off a hand or tear out an eye rather than repeat the sin (Matt. 18:8-9)? That is to say, is he or she willing to do whatever it takes to fight against the sin? Repenting people, typically, are zealous about casting off their sin. That’s what God’s Spirit does inside of them. When this happens, one can expect to see a willingness to accept outside counsel. A willingness to inconvenience their schedules. A willingness to confess embarrassing things. A willingness to make financial sacrifices or lose friends or end relationships.” (p. 72)

I like the phrase describing repentant people as “zealous about casting off their sin”. Many of us already know this, whether through study, personal experience, or instinct. For example, something just doesn’t sit right with us about a supposedly repentant adulterer who still wants to keep his mistress on as his secretary and travel with her on business. We wonder how repentant someone is if they refuse to adjust their lives in any meaningful sort of way,  refuse to avoid further opportunity for sin, but expect us to take them at their word. (“I couldn’t resist my secretary before, but now I can. Trust me.”)

Some time back, I read the testimony of a marriage that healed after the wife’s affair. Her repentance came in stages; it was fully a year before she was willing to break off all contact with her affair partner. Needless to say, that year was agony for her husband, and painful evidence that she had not yet fully repented of her selfishness and lack of love. Her husband said he finally knew she was committed to faithfulness when she not only refused any further contact with the affair partner, but decided — unasked — to give up her professional career. She said she had destroyed her husband’s ability to trust her and didn’t want him to worry whenever she spent extended time with clients. That was her equivalent of cutting off her hand or gouging out her eye.

When we repent over sin, it’s rarely just the glaringly obvious sin that requires our repentance. If I lose my temper and yell harshly at my husband, the yelling may be just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to complex sins like adultery, there are a myriad of sinful actions, thoughts, and attitudes that lead up to the final deeds — and that’s why we should not be so quick to restore someone who is only repentant over acts of intercourse, rather than over the whole stinking rotten web of selfishness, deceit, and unholiness that brought him or her to that point. A wise Biblical counselor will work with the Holy Spirit, rather than abort the process. Covering up sin is never grace.

I’ve noticed, in myself, that I’m not truly repentant until I see the ugliness of my sin and am willing to take full responsibility for it. As long as I am attempting to minimize (“Well, at least I didn’t…”) or excuse (“Yeah, but…”) or explain (“You see, the reason…”) or garner sympathy (“I was in a bad place, and now I feel terrible!”) or demand anything (“You need to trust/forgive me!”) I am not truly repentant. As long as I am lacking in empathy for those I have offended and hurt (“What’s the big deal? Why can’t they get over it already?”) I am only repentant up to a point.

Again, a wise Biblical counselor will know these things, and — when necessary — will call the sinner out, restoring him gently in love or with a firm rebuke, whichever is most appropriate. That will, of course, require the counselor to possess compassion and tenderness along with wisdom and discernment. Unfortunately, at the risk of sounding sexist, I have to point out that male leaders often have a difficult time identifying with women in general, as well as with anyone they consider “weak”. I think that is the reason for the phenomena that distresses and confounds so many of us — that pastors far more readily sympathize with predators, pedophiles, and sex offenders than with those who have been wounded and violated.

Behind a lot of sin, but sexual sin in particular, is a sense of entitlement. The sinner thinks: I am entitled to sexual gratification…I am entitled to more than I am getting from my spouse…I am entitled to happiness…I am entitled to do whatever I want with that child…I am entitled to control others…she owes me…he has no right to refuse me…I am entitled to use others…I am entitled to take what I want…That sense of entitlement outweighs everything else until selfishness runs rampant. We don’t want to admit that when we sin. We don’t want to tell the horrible truth: “I did it because I wanted to and, at that moment, I cared more about myself than anyone else. I am without excuse.”

Even as I write those words, I am searching for loopholes in my mind: Come on, that doesn’t apply to every sin...when I was being a prodigal in my 20’s, I was reacting to trauma and pain…which is an explanation, but not an excuse. I chose how to react, sometimes in healthy ways and sometimes in unhealthy ways. No one dragged me kicking and screaming out of the church and forced me to be a prodigal. No one kept me from Jesus but myself.

We all sin out of our brokenness. What that means is that we need healing as well as forgiveness.

And now for a hypothetical situation…

Let’s say that there is a young man who sexually abused multiple children in two different churches (at least that we know of). He has repented, been convicted, and served time. He has also sought professional help, because he realizes that pedophilia, contrary to what some would claim, is not merely a sexual quirk or preference that can be replaced with another. (“Hey, I like blondes but I supposed I could learn to like brunettes.” “I prefer dudes but maybe I can try real hard to like girls.” “Well, I’m into two-year-olds but that’s probably only because I’ve never met an adult woman I liked!”) However, let’s assume that our hypothetical sex offender has gone through deep inner healing, and that the very thought of sexually abusing a child is now abhorrent to him.

A nice elder from his church decides to set him up with a young woman. “That’s very nice of you,” says the repentant young ex-pedophile, “but there is no way that I could ever marry. You see, because of the very serious nature of the crimes I committed, I am not allowed to be around children except under the supervision of a court-appointed, trained chaperone. I could never be alone with my own children. There is a very real possibility I wouldn’t be allowed to live in my own home with my own family. At best, my wife would have to become my trained chaperone, and would have to supervise me around the children, keeping us in her sight at all times. She could never leave them alone with me. She could never even go to the bathroom or take a shower by herself when I’m in the home. We could never have a normal family life. How could I possibly be so selfish as to inflict that on any wife or child?”

That would be true repentance.

A wise, compassionate pastor, noticing its absence, would say, “I cannot in good conscience stand by and allow you to sentence anyone to grow up in such dysfunction, or to place any woman in the awkward, stressful position of having to chaperone her own husband. What sort of husband or father could you possibly be, even if you could guarantee that you no longer pose a danger to children? No one is entitled to a wife and family, especially if they cannot properly fulfill the roles of husband and father. You lost the privilege of marriage when you committed your heinous crimes against innocent children. I’m disappointed that you would, once again, be willing to place others at risk because of your own selfishness and sense of entitlement.”

That would be common sense…and compassion.

The open letter I wish Douglas Wilson had written

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Pastors are not infallible. None of us are. Sometimes we want to believe so desperately that someone has repented and changed, that he or she is trustworthy, and that the past is in the past, that we throw caution to the wind…only to have our trust betrayed. “But they promised…!” 

Humility enables us to admit that we were duped, overly trusting, naive, mistaken, whatever. Pride blinds us and makes us prone to repeat our mistakes.

First some background: Doug Wilson’s Failure to Safeguard Children

And now the open letter that I wish Douglas Wilson had written, instead of the numerous blog entires he has been churning out of late:

In light of the recent court proceedings involving Steven Sitler, and the resultant coverage of those proceedings in the media, I believe that it is necessary for me to make a public statement taking full responsibility for my actions in this matter. Rather than get bogged down in details that are readily available elsewhere on the internet, I would like to confess the following.

I made several grave errors in judgment. As Mike Sloan and Beth Hart have stated, “Offenders are masters of deception and manipulation, often saying what people want to hear so that they attract attention and compassion toward themselves and away from their victims.” I was deceived. But it’s worse than that: my pride prevented me from listening to the warnings and advice of others with more knowledge and expertise.

Furthermore, I misapplied the Scriptures that state it is better to marry than burn, and that each man should have his own wife because of the temptation to sexual immorality. Obviously Steven Sitler is not dealing with garden-variety sexual temptation. His desire to abuse, molest, and harm children will not be fulfilled or healed by the love of a good woman, and it was naive of me to think so.

I believe in the power of the gospel to transform lives; however, it was both naive and prideful of me to think that I could judge whether or not Steven Sitler’s repentance was genuine. Anyone can appear godly and contrite in half a dozen meetings in his pastor’s office — especially when the pastor is, like me, unqualified and untrained in counseling sex offenders — and the fact that he was willing to read some books means little. Furthermore, if he was truly repentant, he would understand and accept that he can never have a close relationship with any child, and certainly cannot be in an authority position over one. Thus, a Biblical marriage — one that is open to life — would be out of the question for him.

If I had to do it over again, I would have advised the elder in my church to give up on his misguided matchmaking efforts. I would have advised against marriage for Steven Sitler, and quoted Matthew 18:6 to him at every opportunity. It would be far better for a serial pedophile to have a great millstone around his neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea than for him to have the opportunity to harm and damage any more children. If we would not allow him to babysit children in our church nursery, certainly we cannot encourage him to have children of his own. It was wrong of me to perform that marriage ceremony.

I wish to repent publicly of my pride, arrogance, and lack of compassion.

Furthermore, I wish to repent of erroneous statements I have made regarding the very nature of marriage itself. Years ago, I foolishly wrote, “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants.” What a mischaracterization of the beauty and tenderness God intends for the sexual relationship! What an offensive way to describe the act that God designed to be an expression and means of intimacy, unity, and fruitfulness! 

In addition, I maligned many good, decent, loving men by claiming, “Men dream of being rapists.” I should have stated that only ungodly, immoral, depraved men would dream of such a thing, and that men with these desires need to repent immediately — and women need to protect themselves from these men until they demonstrate lasting fruit of repentance. Counseling by someone far more qualified than I am would probably be in order as well.

I deeply regret that much harm that has been caused by my pride, foolishness, poor judgment, and grave error. I pray that those I have harmed and offended would find it in their hearts to forgive me. I am grief-stricken over how I have contributed to the sufferings of even just one innocent child. May God have mercy on us all.

Of course what Douglas Wilson has really written is nothing like this.