In one of my less pleasant dreams, a right-wing militia group was executing doctors and nurses.
I didn’t have to ask why. Even in my dream state I knew that some of the fiercest Marxists in America are nurses and other medical personnel. I’ve known a rather large number of nurses socially, and I’ve heard them discuss the things that drive them. They worship mainstream medical science. Not the genuine scientific research, but the kind of medicine steered by Big Pharma. They become invested with an elitist sense that they have a God-given mandate to tell you how to live.
These are the kind of people who will lie to your face, as if they accept your decision, and then will call Child Welfare to take away all your kids because you don’t feed them right, or something equally petty. I don’t hate nurses; I will never trust them. If there is any single professional group that is wholly owned and marching to the orders of Big Pharma, it is nurses.
While doctors can be just as bad, of those I’ve encountered, a significant portion are quite patient-centered. If you do your homework, they are relaxed about you ignoring their advice. God has been good in putting me in the hands of a VA Primary Care physician who understands my choices and doesn’t deal with me in dismissive arrogance. I’ve encountered plenty of bad doctors at VA medical facilities, but this is one of the good ones.
This brings us back to the business of living a heart-led life, a life of conviction. Americans are taught to think in terms of instrumentality and effectiveness. That can be valid until you bump up against a sense of conviction. Our culture tries to bury that kind of thing. It’s hard sitting here in the middle of the US and striving to awaken the long lost intellectual tradition of letting the heart’s moral wisdom lead. It’s hard for me to even describe how folks in the Ancient Near East (ANE) never even questioned such a thing. For them, the heart must lead or you aren’t actually alive.
It’s not that they weren’t aware of concrete material logic, but that it was discounted as the means to ultimate truth. Having a clear and precise understanding of the facts was never enough. There was still the question of moral importance. They were convinced that nothing was properly viewed only on one level. If you weren’t in touch with the moral realm of Creation, you didn’t know anything anyway.
I don’t really care about living long. I suspect I will, but that’s hardly the issue. What matters is that I live fully. I work at fitness because that’s how I get in touch with Creation, and through that, with my God. When I work out, I pray and command my body to conform to my faith. I have every reason to believe my body will respond. I’m watching it happen. It’s not psychosomatic; it’s a genuine heart-led communion designed into us.
Act on your convictions. Seize faith and forge ahead with persistence to see the glory of the Lord in your life. It is the nature of faith to persist beyond human life.
In my experience with medical professionals, I’ve learned that I have to be a little bit of a doctor myself. I have to do my own research to find out what kinds of treatments and surgeries are available for specific problems, and then I need to tell the doctor exactly what I want in detail. If I don’t do this, then they will do what they feel is best, which is usually just following their routine of doing what is most convenient and most profitable for themselves.
In addition to the pharmaceutical prescriptions mentioned in the OP, another noteworthy example of this phenomena is doctors’ unspoken preference for cesarean deliveries. It’s much easier and more profitable for them to commence a surgery in which they can control the timetable, rather than to wait around for several hours, monitoring the mother’s nether regions, and enduring her discomfiture. But the consequences of this decision to the mother are immense. After a natural delivery, a woman can be back to her normal life within two weeks, whereas a cesarean will leave her in pain (i.e. more medication) and out of commission for several months. (Those first few months with a newborn are busy!) It also creates serious complications for future pregnancies, and it leaves hideous scars. These are all things that will negatively and permanently affect her life and health.
Another example: I needed to have surgery on a ruptured disc a few years ago. I had to specifically ask for a microendoscopic discectomy — a modern procedure I heard about from a friend, which the doctor never told me about. Then I had to find another doctor who had the equipment and skills needed for this type of surgery. After this surgery, I was able to return to a normal life after 4 days, but if I had had the other, more common type of surgery, I would have been bed ridden for a couple weeks, and unable to work for several months, and this may have cost me my job.
Speaking of ancient logic, I watched the Bible Projects vid on the heart. Their first assertion was “the ancient Israelites had no concept of the brain”. This is typically western and completely false. They fought hand to hand and knew from the stone age that a blow to the head either killed or rendered a person unconscious, changed a person’s behavior and were acquainted enough with the brain to perform trepanning. All western thinking on this ignores the obvious, trepanning used to release pressure from a head injury. It was performed as religious rite precisely because they viewed reality from two levels, as you put it in the sixth paragraph. Western Civilization can only view this practice as superstition because they deny the two realms. Every aspect of WC fails entirely due to this single materialistic view of everything. There is no amount of scientific, technical and economic progress that can overcome this fundamental flaw in WC. It is the seed of it’s own destruction.