Wednesday, August 16, 2006

HEALING: Part 11

.........will find that in all the cases of so-called healers, the only types of healings they ever accomplish are function­al, never organic. They are only dealing with the symptom.

I believe at this point in this thesis is to insert some quotations from a book which has been gleaned from a chapter on Charismatic healers. The author is not a Christian, but is interestingly objective. The book is entitled "Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle", by William Nolen M.D. (New York: Random House, 1974). The excerts are kind of lengthy but I feel very appropriate to quote at this time. He discusses the late Kathryn Kuhlman, who was the most widely proclaimed lady healer of our century. When ever I ever speak against faith healing, always, her reported success will be brought up!

Nolan exclaims: "Finally it was over. There were still long lines of people waiting to get onto the stage and claim their cures, but at five O'clock, with a hymn and final blessing, the show ended. Miss Kuhlman left the stage and the audience left the auditorium."

"Before going back to talk to Miss Kuhlman, I spent a few minutes watching the wheelchair patients leave. All the desperately ill patients who had been in wheelchairs were still in wheelchairs. In fact, the man with the kidney cancer in his spine and hip, the man whom I had helped to the auditorium and who had his borrowed wheelchair brought to the stage and shown to the audience when he had claimed a cure, was now back in the wheelchair. His 'cure', even if only a hysterical one, had been extremely short lived. "As I stood in the corridor watching the hopeless cases leave, seeing the tears of the parents as they pushed their crippled children to the elevators, I wished Miss Kuhlman had been with me. She had complained a couple of times during the service of the 'responsibility, the enormous responsibility', and of how her 'heart aches for those that weren't cured,' but I wondered how often she had really looked at them. I wondered whether she sincerely felt that the joy of those 'cured' of bursitis and arthritis compensated for the anguish of those left with their withered legs, their umbecilic children, their cancers of the liver. "

"I wondered if she really knew what damage she was doing. I couldn't believe that she did. Here are some aspects of the medical healing process about which some of us know nothing and none of us know enough. To start with the body's ability to heal itself; Kathryn Kuhlman often says, 'I don't heal; the Holy Spirit heals through me.' I suspect there are two reasons why Miss Kuhlman continually repeats this statement: first if the patient doesn't improve, the Holy Spirit, not Kathryn Kuhlman gets the blame; second, she hasn't the foggiest notion of what healing is all about and once she puts the responsibility on the shoulders of the Holy Spirit she can answer, if questions about her healing powers, 'I don't know. The Holy Spirit does it all.'

"Let me repeat: A charismatic individual, a healer, ­can sometimes influence a patient and cure symptoms or a functional disease by suggestion. A healer can sometimes influence a patient and cure symptoms or a functional disease by suggestion, with or without a laying on of hands. Physicians- Can do the same thing. These cures are not miraculous; they result from corrections made by the patient in the function of his automatic system. We do not know yet how to control this system, but we are learning. All healers use hypnosis to some extent. ('See-your pain is going away. Isn't that wonderful?)

"Doctors use hypnosis, or suggestion, frequently. When I give a patient a pill or a shot, I make a point of saying, 'This medicine should make you better in twenty-­four or forty-eight hours. This medicine always works very well! I know that in some cases I am going to get better results if I suggest to the patient that the medicine will work than I would if I said, 'Well, I don't know about this medicine---sometimes it works pretty well, sometimes it's not so hot. We'll give it a try and hope for the best. There's alot to the power of positive thinking. Particularly where functional disorders are concerned.

"Hypnotism is not something with which one should trifle. Relieving symptoms can be dangerous. Remember the poor woman whose back pain went away at Kathryn Kuhlman's suggestion, leaving her temporarily free to frolic until her cancerous vertebrae collapsed? Symptoms-pain, nausea, dizziness - may be purely psychological, but they may also be the warning signals of dangerous, possibly life threatening, organic (as opposed to function) diseases. To eliminate a symptom without getting a the cause of that symptom can cause delay in treatment which may be serious or even fatal.

"Now,, finally, in our attempt to understand 'healing', we must deal with organic diseases - diseases that are caused not simply be disfunction of an organ, but by derangement of the structure of an organ or organs.

Infections, heart attacks, gallstones, hernias, slipped discs, cancers of all kinds, broken bones, congenital deformities, lacerations, and multitudes of other diseases and subdivisions of those I have mentioned are included in the organic-disease classification. Some organic diseases are self-limited, i.e., healed by the body itself; the common cold and minor sprains are examples of such ailments. But to cure many organic diseases, the body needs help.

"These are the diseases that healers, even the most charismatic, cannot cure. When they attempt to do so - and they all fall into this trap, since they know and care nothing of the differences between functional and organic diseases, they tread on very dangerous ground.

CONT.>>>>>>>>>>>>

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