Trial highlights collision of faith and modern medicine

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-Leukemia strikes a 7-year-old Oregon boy. His parents treat him with prayer instead of medicine. The boy dies. Some accuse the parents of ignorance and abuse, writing them off as backward believers in hocus-pocus. The Linn County district attorney accused Loyd and Christina Hays of something worse: manslaughter and criminally […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Leukemia strikes a 7-year-old Oregon boy. His parents treat him with prayer instead of medicine. The boy dies.

Some accuse the parents of ignorance and abuse, writing them off as backward believers in hocus-pocus. The Linn County district attorney accused Loyd and Christina Hays of something worse: manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.


A circuit court jury deliberated 10 hours last Friday before agreeing Monday (April 22) to convict Loyd Hays of criminally negligent homicide. His wife was acquitted of all charges.

The case highlights a collision of faiths, pitting society’s trust in medicine vs. the belief, held by a surprising number of Americans, that God can and does heal.

An ABC News-Gallup Poll conducted in December showed that four out of five respondents believe prayer can cure disease. Nearly half said they had been healed by prayer.

What’s more, research is finding a strong inexplicable link between religion and health. Also in December, Harvard University sponsored an unprecedented conference attended by 900 physicians, clergy and academics to discuss the evidence.

One of the presenters was Dr. Dale A. Matthews of Georgetown University in Washington. He reviewed 212 studies in medical and psychiatric journals. Three quarters of them found that religious commitment had a positive effect on health.

Some studies looked at church attendance. For example, of 91,909 individuals surveyed in Maryland, those who went to church at least once a week had 50 percent fewer deaths from coronary artery disease, 56 percent fewer deaths from emphysema and 74 percent fewer deaths from cirrhosis.

Others looked at prayer. A study of 393 patients in a coronary care unit in a San Francisco hospital compared recovery rates of patients who were being prayed for, without their knowledge, with patients who received no prayers. The results? The 192 patients who were prayed for had significantly less heart failure, pneumonia and need for antibiotics.


In a yet-to-be-published study, the Oregon Health Division and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 129 cases in Oregon and Southwest Washington state of meningococcal disease, which strikes quickly and can kill within a day. They compared those cases against 274 people who were healthy.

A surprise finding was that people who attended church were one-fifth as likely to get the disease as those who didn’t go to church.

“It’s impossible for us to say whether it is some association with other healthy behavior, divine intervention or what,” said Paul Cieslak, manager of the acute and communicable disease program at the Oregon Health Division. “The data tell us there is an association, but they don’t tell us why.”

In the Linn County case, the parents relied totally on divine intervention. When their son, Anthony, died, they said it was God’s will. That is what the family’s church, the Church of the First Born, a loose-knit denomination of about 100 congregations across the country, teaches.

Christian Science, a larger denomination, teaches that mixing religious beliefs with medical treatment is counterproductive to healing. It has 2,400 churches.

“We have been doing this for 130 years with consistent results,” said Mark Campbell, the church’s Oregon spokesman.


Campbell has three children, ages 16, 17 and 20, and none has ever seen a doctor, he said.

When his daughter was 2, she fell on her face with a Popsicle stick in her mouth. When Campbell pulled the stick out from the back of her throat, it was covered with blood.

He called a Christian Science practitioner, who administered prayer according to the “Science and Health” textbook written by Mary Baker Eddy, the church’s founder. The accident happened at 3:30 p.m., and by 5:30 p.m. the girl was eating dinner as if nothing had happened, Campbell said.

“A lot of times, spiritual healing is judged by its failures and not its successes, where medicine is judged by its successes and not its failures. It ought not to be that way,” he said.

Rita Swan disagrees. In 1987, as a Christian Scientist, she lost her 16-month-old son to meningitis. She now opposes her former church while heading Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, an Iowa-based organization that tries to prevent what it calls child abuse and neglect on religious grounds.

Swan’s group has counted more than 200 cases since 1975 in which children died after medical care was withheld on religious grounds.


“If the Christian Science Church wants to have a health care practice, they ought to get it licensed and submit their data to the scientific community so we can evaluate their success,” Swan said.

“Everyone should have the right to pray. But with children, (parents) should not have the right to deprive them of all the resources of medical science.”

More and more, so-called New Thought religions are incorporating ancient Eastern philosophies of healing with Western concepts.

The work of doctor-authors Bernie Siegel and Deepak Chopra emphasizes that the mind or spirit cannot be separated from body. They focus, too, on quality of life vs. quantity.

The Rev. Victoria Etchemendy, minister of the Unity World Healing Center in Lake Oswego, Ore., finds people want a combination of spiritual and medical healing methods.

“We look to modern medical methods today to be like a god, to have all the answers-and they don’t,” said Etchemendy, whose husband died of brain cancer.


“People are looking for methods that are less invasive, and some of those methods are ancient and have gotten results that sometimes modern medicine doesn’t. What I hear experts saying is the combination-not one or the other.”

MJP END O’KEEFE-MITCHELL

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