THE BIBLICAL GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

by DR. NEIL T. ANDERSON, DR. MICHAEL JACOBSON

Overview

Do you need help evaluating all the confusing medical, herbal and alternative therapies out there? This resource helps you decide among holistic treatments through a biblically based, medically authoritative lens.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014659413
Publisher:	Bridgetree, Inc
Publication date:	06/20/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	439,539
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

When I (Neil) was pastoring a church, I recall how excited I was to hear that a neighboring medical school was going to start a new program that would graduate family practitioners. The goal was to become more wholistic, with the new curriculum addressing nutritional as well as spiritual and psychological needs. My enthusiasm was quickly dampened, however, when I discovered that the spirituality being taught did not represent orthodox Christianity. Without divine revelation, the spiritual input took on the early forms of what we now understand to be New Age. Big names in medicine like Elizabeth KublerRoss and Jonas Salk soon found themselves taken in by the occult.

Christians should have been the ones promoting wholistic medicine, but instead it was the spirituality of New Age practitioners that stole the day. By the mid 1980s, many would have considered you a New Ager if you espoused wholistic health. Since that time, the interest in spirituality as a component of medicine has grown considerably. According to the George Washington University Institute of Spirituality and Health, the number of medical schools offering courses on spirituality and medicine has gone from 3 in 1992 to 72 in the year 2001.1 But what is the nature of the spirituality that is being taught? Are all religions essentially the same, and can any spiritual leader contribute to our understanding of who God is? The exposure of spirituality in medicine is about as valid as the Christian community saying that any medicine will do.

On the positive side, various studies have shown that prayer and meditation contribute to the healing process and promote better physical, mental and emotional health. Couple that with the fact that many people in hospitals and clinics are sick for psychosomatic reasons. Surely this argues the need for wholistic health, but has this renewed interest created another monster? To what degree has Western medicine been affected by New Age and Eastern philosophies? And how has this affected Christians? The invasion of these unbiblical medical philosophies and practices into the Church may be the biggest threat to our spirituality in the twenty-first century. We routinely come across Christians who have subjected themselves to pseudomedical practices that leave them in spiritual bondage.