Religious Experience and Health...

[Stan]

Does anyone else find it puzzling that when some people have a religious experience they tend to tie it in with alternative medicine?

Not always even good alternative medicine. Just anti-medicine... particularly if they were brought up and Adventist and are making their way home...

Please do not get me wrong, I am in favor of healthier food and lifestyles..

Thoughts?

[gina i]

I've never heard of this.. Can you give an example?

[GreatLakesGramma]

Stan, this situation is not unique to the Adventist church, though it is probably more common, as there is a significant health emphasis in the Adventist church, and it IS an emphasis on lifestyle and natural remedies rather than on using drugs to treat the results of our own self-destructive habits.

Personally, I was not raised Adventist. I joined the church at the age of 21, while I was in college. But I was a health nut long before I ever heard the word "Adventist". I didn't turn to alternative medicine as a religious or spiritual thing at all. I gradually gravitated to alternative medicine because conventional medicine failed me again and again. Doctors gave me drugs to treat symptoms, rarely bothering to look more than supericially if at all, for the root causes of my problems. So my pain/illness/whatever was relieved temporarily, but the problem continued to grow because the cause was still there. This has not been the case in every instance in which I've sought medical treatment, but in anything chronic, it has been true just about every time.

My mother, who has never been open to anything but drug-based medicine, has finally become willing to try alternatives, because over the past several months, she has been in and out of the hospital and emergency room, with repeated life-threatening reactions to drugs she has been using to prevent rejection of a cornea transplant, and to toxins and allergens in her environment. She has been using neutriceuticals and a rotation diet plan, prescribed by my health care provider, an Adventist nurse practitioner, who used to work at a lifestyle center. The improvement in Mom's health has been drastic and rapid. She is sold on it now. She is even eating vegan. (And she is not Adventist, never has been vegetarian or even kosher.)