Oct 08 2009
Including Voodoo in Medicine
Good news for you voodoo lovers. A professional push has been made to incorporate voodoo into medicine. The bad news: If you are a hardcore voodoo fan, the form of voodoo being incorporated is a sort of homeopathic religiosity. It has been watered down so far people don’t detect it as voodoo voodoo. So no, there won’t be any drum-beat dancing or casting of spells or the sacrificing of small animals at a patient’s bedside. Instead, this is the “progress in medicine” touted by a science news release, New guidelines for incorporating spirituality in end-of-life care -
Guidelines derived from a recent Consensus Conference, including recommendations on the role of healthcare providers in the assurance of quality spiritual care to patients in a palliative care setting, are published in a comprehensive report in Journal of Palliative Medicine.
Quality spiritual care. How benign. How mildly ridiculous. How culturally correct yet thoroughly unscientific.
What? Spirituality is not voodoo, some may argue. True enough. But they are distant cousins. Kissing cousins even. In the least, voodoo is a form of spirituality. I wonder how the Consensus Conference specifically proposes incorporating spirituality into palliative care, which is part of good medicine. It if is truly medicine, it should be science-based. Is spirituality in any way science-based?
Because none of the supernatural elements of spirituality can be included in science-based medicine — they are “not of this world” — just what aspects of spirituality could be included without putting feathers in the hair of doctors and nurses (so to speak)? Yet what is spirituality without supernatural forces and or destinations for one’s supernatural soul?
Sure, talk about belief systems, for those are thoughts and thoughts are the results of brain processes, real world events. Talk about community, about ritual even, for these things can be studied and reasonably included in science-based medicine.
The editor-in-chief of Journal of Palliative Medicine, Charles F. von Gunten, says -
“Of the physical, emotional, practical, and spiritual dimensions of hospice and palliative medicine, spirituality has been least well addressed. This report aims to improve that situation.”
Less well addressed. Why not address it by studying it first? Why address it by making guidelines for inserting it into medicine?
My recommendation is that all things spiritual be kept out of the hands and hair of medical professionals. Instead, allow the para-professionals of the healing arts, the modern-day voodoo experts (priests, rabbis), to enter medical facilities and care for the other-worldly needs of those patients who believe in another world and request assistance getting there. Seriously.
The report concludes that “spiritual care is a fundamental component of quality palliative care.” And so they seek to ensure it’s place in this arena of medicine. But is spiritual care fundamental? That strikes me as an assumption akin to the claim that religion is fundamental to morality and good citizenry (it isn’t); and thus we should include religion in public schools.
Be ware of assumptions. Even those that come across as warm and fuzzy, humanistic initiatives.
[...] First, Techskeptic and Andrew Bernardin presented a report for the Healthcare Subcommittee. Problem areas identified were the conflation of health care systems with health care technology, and the inclusion of voodoo in medicine. [...]