Mediaculture

Little, perhaps, consumes our time, energy and money more than our health. And when we seek it, we often turn to what Raymond Downing calls “biomedicine.” He also names it as a fallen principality or power that can be a servant but wants to be our master.

In his book Death and Life in America: Biblical Healing and Biomedicine (Herald Press, 2008, $15.99), Downing, a medical doctor who has spent all his professional life working in underserved communities, mostly in Africa, challenges what he calls an idolatrous view of biomedicine. He compares biblical healing and biomedicine and shows how in American culture we bend our knee to the latter, not the former.

Downing writes: “We are awed by the power of biomedicine and have delegated to [it] the power to name what is going on. But biomedicine does not really have power over death; its power is only over mechanisms; it is the power of the beast whose fatal wound was healed. This is not a power that frees us; it is a power that enslaves us, that wants to make us all patients.”

He is not saying we don’t need biomedicine (drugs, diagnoses, surgery). After all, he’s a doctor. Like other powers (government, education, transportation, communication and many more), it can be useful, helpful. But, he writes, like other powers, it can demand ultimate allegiance (worship), and that is idolatry. “Whether we use the power of biomedicine or renounce it,” he writes, “we must in both cases deny it the power to name what is going on.”

Jesus, Downing writes, modeled another kind of healing, one that had great power: “He listened to people’s pleas, he spoke to them, he touched them, and he sometimes gave them something from the very essence of himself—his spittle.”

Spittle may seem gross to us, but the point is that Jesus gave himself to others, and that is what we, the church, Jesus’ body on earth, are called to do as well.

Downing mentions a medical school in Rwanda that teaches its students to “love their patients and marry their disease.” Isaiah 53:4 describes the Suffering Servant as bearing our infirmities and carrying our diseases.

This kind of care, Downing says, is mostly absent from biomedicine, which, under the influence of pharmaceutical companies, pushes drugs as a normal solution to most illnesses.

Most of us, I imagine, are not as negative toward biomedicine as Downing. We’ve all been helped by it, and some of us are alive because of treatment we’ve received from this “power.”

And while biomedicine’s bureaucracy is often impersonal, uncaring, even oppressive, many practitioners (doctors and nurses) show empathy and care that is personal and healing beyond the drugs or treatment they offer.

The financial aspect is its own nightmare, particularly for those without adequate insurance.

One of the tasks of healing, but not of biomedicine, Downing says, is to help us learn to suffer. He writes, “Suffering is how we live with affliction, not the affliction itself.”

The church’s task, in part, is to provide a community of support for all who suffer. Downing concurs: “No one needs to carry trouble alone.” Yet in our individualistic culture, many do.

Biomedicine can be helpful, Downing writes, but it is not ultimate or necessary. A better model is hospice, which “encapsulates everything that biomedicine has lost: that life is good, death is normal, people are spiritual beings, and they want help in suffering and relief of symptoms.”

Unfortunately, hospice is usually called in when biomedicine has failed, usually in the last days or weeks of a person’s life. Downing concludes, “All biomedical care should have a hospice attitude.”

And so should we as God’s people, as Jesus’ presence on earth. Just as Jesus gave of himself to bring wholeness to others, so must we give ourselves to one another.