The Role of Faith in Healing
When someone is "cured" of terminal cancer, is this a miracle? When someone comes out of a coma with all faculties intact, despite the dire predictions of physicians, is that a miracle? And what of those who do, indeed, die of their disease, but die in a state of grace?
For that matter, what exactly is a healing miracle? Faith healers talk about miracles all the time. In fact, you could say they're in the business of making miracles. We talk about the miracle of modern medicine, but when it comes right down to it, miracles generally seem to be in short supply in hospitals and doctors' offices. There, the miracles tend toward intervention with medication, machinery or scalpels, removing the source of discomfort and dis-ease, but not necessarily effecting a cure.
The problem with both approaches is that they really can't agree on terms. Faith healers insist on a certain level of, well, faith, and generally have some very specific ideas about the form that faith should take. Physicians, on the other hand, often tend to discount the role of faith in healing. And alternative health practitioners from naturopathic physicians to chiropractors to spiritual counselors tend to fall somewhere in the middle. They know that faith has a role, but they're generally not as dogmatic as the faith healers. The real difference between alternative health and the faith healers and physicians is that the former tend to work on healing the whole person, rather than focusing on "just" the soul or "just" the body.
I see healing as working on the whole person rather than just the symptoms. Curing can come on many levels, but generally works more on the physical level. Healing comes from the Anglo-Saxon "to make whole." Allopathic medicine, faith healing in different traditions, and alternative or complementary medicine are like three points of a triangle, with the person to be healed in the middle.
In his book Coytote Healing, Lewis Mehl-Madrone, an MD who also happens to be a shaman, discusses the concept of miracles from a medical perspective. He uses shamanic techniques in the context of his medical practice, focusing on helping his patients to become whole, even if their disease is not cured.
"While I focus on medical miracles," he writes, "the concepts here are relevant to any miracle. In medicine we don't take notice when patients perform as we expect. We're not surprised when cancer patients die on the schedules predicted by our studies. How much do we 'program' people to have the outcomes we expect by convincing them what to expect. Just as Alcoholics Anonymous says, 'Expect a miracle,' modern medicine says, 'Expect the worst.' Do we get what we expect?" (Mehl-Madrone, Lewis. Coyote Healing 15)
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