This was on TV last week, and we recorded it, and I've just walked out of it.
Alternative Health: Healing
I think it makes me angry.
To me, it's obvious, that there are great number of low-level chronic conditions that are an interplay between mind and body. They mentioned eczema. I suffered it as a child; in theory I still do. At about age ten, my GP flippantly remarked it could be exacerbated by Manchester United losing, then checked he'd got the right team. But his flippancy aside, he was observing, even back in the Seventies, that psychology has a major influence over chronic conditions.
Some of us remember Pat "One in a million" Seed, who was supposed to have terminal cancer and die, but through sheer will-power and a determination to raise £1million, lived well beyond her prognosis, until her husband was killed in a freak methane gas explosion. Soon after, she died.
This programme started with footage of some dreadful hysteria-raising preacher who got people to walk out of their wheelchairs by saying "Hallelujah" a few times at a football stadium.
A couple of years ago my aunt had a hip replacement and said her recovery was down to religion or Holy Water or some such, to which my mother, really quite religiously obsessed herself, questioned "Wasn't it down to the NHS and advances in medical science?".
I'm not knocking any individual's personal religious beliefs. A great many of my best friends are people who are seriously spiritual Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Jews or whatever. I don't think there is one reader of this blog who knows what my spiritual beliefs are.
I find it extraordinarily arrogant that anyone can say with absolute certainty, that there is not a Higher Power out there, be it the literal God or Allah or G-d of the ancient scriptures, or a more difficult to define Mother Nature-type figure. I think that religion, more so than politics, or music, or even football, is an area where it is wise to accept the private beliefs of others without question and with tolerance.
What I find problematic is where people use their religious beliefs, whether of an old-fashioned centuries old world religion, or whether of a 21st Century New Age type, to oppress or brainwash others. From the few minutes I watched of this programme, until I walked out in disgust, I was appalled at how these evangelical preachers prey upon the poor, stupid and vulnerable, ultimately by taking far too much of their money. "Mind over matter" is an ancient proverb. If you believe you will be healed, you will be.
I knew a guy; when I first met him he had no hair. I didn't realise I had not seen him for some months; when I did, he had hair. He had cancer. He was not a spiritual person in any conventional sense, but he believed in humanity and he believed in the world. He seized each morning as a thing of beauty and lived each day as if it was his last. I don't know if he danced, because I wasn't watching. I don't know of he loved, but even though we were only neighbours, he obviously made an impact on my life, because I'm writing about him fifteen years later.
It makes me angry to see a GP in a polka dot bow tie (as an aside, what is that about) expressing his incredulity at faith healing. If he had been doing his job rather than accepting the payola of the drugs companies, he would have known that psoriasis, along with moderate depression and a host of other conditions, is far better healed by treating the patient holistically as a person rather than as a mere receptacle for prescription drugs. And that's what the faith healers do.
We were in conversation with someone a few weeks ago. (Actually, their friends, whilst tipsy, expressed they were never happier than when discussing their ailments; in J and me they found captive audience). The woman had been in a car crash forty years ago; as age crept up on her, she found greater problems with her musceo-skeletal system, until she found a sports therapist who was a qualified nurse and physiotherapist with a psychology degree. Within weeks, she had seen a marked improvement in the condition that had troubled her since university.
I find it frustrating that people are so busy filling their time with reality TV shows and Heat! magazine, they don't spare the time to find out about themselves. By not knowing about themselves, by being free-choosing agents of brainwashing by the forces of capitalism, they lack they intellectual rigour to recognise when they are the unwitting victims of brainwashing by the forces of Organised Religion.
I always try and distinguish between Organised Religion and personal spiritual belief. OR is a political party, the biggest, most totalitarian, the most oppressive , the most destructive and murderous force in the world, now and throughout history. Personal spiritual belief is what keeps one sane, what keeps one human, as long as it is accompanied by intellectual discovery and personal soul searching, rather than unquestioningly accepting the teachings of the vested interest as a lazy add-on to Reality Celebrity TV and vacuous conspicuous consumption.
One day, I expect, I shall wake up a Buddhist. It seems to make sense. But my intellect fights against being told a set of rules, when God, or g-d, or Allah, or Mother Nature, has given me the capacity to work things out for myself. For me, it would be the worst sin of all to ignore what my mind, unbidden, is telling me is right. And wrong.
