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Unlikely cure or unhealthy curse?

17 Feb 2022

  • Delving into the beliefs behind faith healing, rituals, and cults
BY Sumudu Chamara Although not very common in Sri Lanka, faith healing attempts that go wrong are not new to Sri Lanka. The newest incident was reported last week, where a 10-year-old male child had died in the Badalgama area, while his parents and grandmother had been attempting to heal the child through faith healing methods without taking him to a qualified medical practitioner. According to the information available, the parents of the child had kept him at home for around a week, and even after the child’s death, they had been praying for three more days, expecting that their prayers would bring the child back to life.  Following the death, the boy’s autopsy had revealed that he had been infected with Covid-19, and that he had been suffering from phlegm blockage and also fever, in addition to Covid-19. Meanwhile, a media report quoting a neighbour stated that the child had been on medication for diabetes, and that the child’s parents had, as per instructions received from a religious group, stopped giving the child medicines. Even though faith healing became a topic of discussion before due to a handful of similar incidents, with this incident, faith healing has again become a matter that the country is discussing. Faith healing There is no information as to when or in which religions or belief systems that the practice of faith healing, or spiritual healing, began. However, the general opinion is that healing is one of the many benefits religions promise their followers, even though it may not be explicitly mentioned in religious teachings. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, faith healing can be referred to as recourse to divine power to cure mental or physical disabilities, either in conjunction with orthodox medical care or in place of it, and often, an intermediary is involved in faith healing, whose intercession may be all important in achieving the desired cure. It also added that sometimes, the faith may reside in a particular place, which then becomes the focus of pilgrimages for the sufferers. With regard to the initial era of faith healing, Encyclopaedia Britannica says: “Faith in the healing power of natural springs is long standing and widespread. In ancient Egypt and Greece, temples erected to the Greek god of medicine Asclepius, were often near such springs, and festivals in his honour have been located as far apart as Ancyra in Asia Minor and Agrigentum in Sicily. The cult was introduced in Rome, Italy, to relieve a plague in 293 Before Christ. In Christianity, faith healing is exemplified especially in the miraculous cures wrought by Jesus (40 healings are recorded) and his Apostles. The early church later sanctioned faith healing through such practices as anointing and the imposition of hands. Faith healing has also been associated with the inter-cessionary miracles of saints. During the 19th and 20th Centuries, faith healing has often motivated pilgrimages and healing services in many Christian denominations. The apparent healing gifts of individuals have also attracted wide attention: methodist pastor and theologian Leslie Weatherhead and spiritualist Harry Edwards in England; the wife of a Methodist minister Elsie Salmo, in South Africa; and a converted Methodist and mass meeting evangelist Oral Roberts, the wife of an Episcopal rector Agnes Sanford, and a clairvoyant with a Presbyterian background Edgar Cayce, in the US). A different approach to the idea of divine healing is represented by the metaphysical healing movement in the US called New Thought. Exponent of the latter, Phineas P. Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy (a former patient of Quimby who founded the Christian Science movement) published numerous tracts exhorting their followers to beliefs that stressed the immanence of God and a link between bodily ills and mistaken convictions. Christian science was unique in its view of sickness as a material state, subject to the transcendental power of the individual’s spiritual being.” Despite being widely practised in almost all parts of the world in diverse contexts, researchers have identified multiple issues with regard to this practice. A 2014 study titled “Ethical issues relating to faith healing practices in South Asia: A medical perspective” authored by Siddharth Sarkar, Sreekanth Sakey, and Shivanand Kattimani of India’s Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research’s Psychiatry Department, faith healing in the South Asian region is associated with multiple health and ethical issues. With regard to the efficacy and potential harms of faith healing, the study said that efficacy is often a matter of debate, as some authorities may consider these practices as useful in reducing the symptoms of distress through the placebo effect (as per “Temple healing: Healing temples may breed superstitions” by S.P. Kalantri), especially for conditions like depression.  Adding that for a placebo effect to work, the individual should believe in the placebo, it further said that the rituals and ceremonies surrounding the faith healing practices provide a persuasive placebo effect, which has been suggested to lead to patient improvement (per “Traditional community resources for mental health: A report of temple healing from India” by R. Raguram, A Venkateswaran, Jayashree Ramakrishna, and Mitchell G. Weiss). “However, from another perspective, the placebo effect is unlikely to work for disorders like cancers, and the use of faith healing practices may do more harm than good,” the study said, noting that some of these faith healing practices are associated with potential harms, and that sometimes, practices which include chaining and involuntary restraint in temples may lead to lacerations, fractures, and wounds.  Quoting “Accidental carbon monoxide poisoning during yagya (sacrificial rite or performance of duty) for faith healing: A case report” by C. Behera, T.M. Millo, A. Jaiswal, and T.D. Dogra, the study report noted that the conduct of ceremonial rituals in closed environments may lead to inadvertent carbon monoxide poisoning. “Involvement in prolonged faith healing treatment for conditions with effective medical treatment delays appropriate care, and can lead to complications due to the illness process. Apart from the above, expensive rituals may drain the financial resources of the treatment seeker,” the study added.  Discussing the ethical issues associated with faith healing, the study pointed out that faith healing practices can be looked at from the lens of general principles of medical ethics, i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-malfeasance, and justice as some of the main issues. With regard to autonomy, it said that although the patients and/or their family members often exercise autonomy in making a decision on whether to seek treatment from faith healers, the procedure of faith healing is quite prescriptive and does not provide a menu of options to choose from, and that coercion might exist in some forms of faith healing practices.  The motivation of faith healers to treat patients, according to the study, probably includes altruism, apart from the potential for monetary gain and the rise in social stature. It added that many patients are benefitted and some do get personalised attention which might be difficult to obtain in the busy emergency setting of public healthcare services in South Asia, and that it has been seen that for certain disorders, patients and their family members are quite satisfied by the treatment offered by the faith healers (as per “Ritual healing and mental health in India” by William Sax). It further noted: “Some faith healers are able to judge what types of problems are unlikely to get better by their treatment, and promptly refer such cases to medical settings to remain in the good grace of the clientele (“Perceptions of traditional healing for mental Illness in rural Gujarat” by Julie Schoonover, S. Lipkin, M. Javid, A. Rosen, M. Solanki, S. Shah, and C.L. Katz).   “However, there are other circumstances where the use of faith healing techniques may have adverse consequences. Subjecting individuals to rigorous rituals like fasting for long durations may be detrimental to patients with diabetes or malnourishment. Similarly, procedures like branding with a hot iron rod may have unintended malefic consequences like wounds. Efficacy of these practices is unproven, and whether such practices constitute a form of treatment at all can be debated.”  From the standpoint of justice, i.e. allocating resources uniformly across all strata, the study said that treatment through faith healers might hold some promise, and that in a context where healthcare services in South Asia are not equitably distributed, faith healers might provide an easy and acceptable alternative provision of healthcare services to the community. “However, at the same time, whether faith healers provide any amount of effective care needs to be considered,” it added. Religion versus cult While many religious leaders and activists in the world have expressed opinions both for and against the idea of trying to cure mental or physical illnesses or deal with demonic possession with various religious practices including prayer, the belief that such practices can cure the people who have not only temporary illnesses but also permanent disabilities, is prevalent among followers of various religions and is often promoted by grassroots-level religious leaders and religious activists.  This, according to sociologists, has caused a division among some religions as far as the idea of using religious practices to cure diseases is concerned, and the groups that openly promote and put into practice such ideas while going beyond discussing them as mere religious teachings are often labelled as religious cults that are separate from the mainstream religion that they represent.  However, examples from several countries and regions, especially the US, India, and parts of the South American continent, show that members who officially represent mainstream religions with no affiliations with such breakaway groups, factions, and movements and also self-proclaimed religious leaders and activists who emerge from within communities which are not from recognised religious bodies, promoting or engaging in faith healing, are not at all uncommon. Yet whether they get called religious cults depends on various factors including the recognition they have gained in their communities, and the literature on such groups show that the second group is more likely to be called a cult than the first one. In the discussion of faith healing, the term religious cult arises quite often. However, defining the two groups is difficult as they share a lot of common characteristics including being based on a set of beliefs, and there are a plethora of definitions of religions and religious cults. In the 1987 book A Theory of Religion by American sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, church, sect, and cult are defined as, a church being a conventional religious organisation, a sect being a deviant religious organisation with traditional beliefs and practices, and a cult being a deviant religious organisation with novel beliefs and practices. Stark and Bainbridge claim that a religion must be based on some “supernatural assumptions” in order to distinguish it from secular thought, and their opinion about the concept of religion involves “systems of general compensation based on supernatural assumptions”. Compensation, according to them, is whatever people regard as rewards, whether or not they are immediately apparent. In the 1993 book Concise Dictionary of Religion, British-Canadian academic Irving Hexham said: “Hundreds of different definitions of religion exist, each reflecting either a scholarly or a dogmatic bias depending on the last resort on the presuppositions of the person making the definition. Religion clearly contains intellectual, ritual, social, and ethical elements, bound together by an explicit or implicit belief in the reality of an unseen world, whether this belief be expressed in super-naturalistic or idealistic terms.” Most of the differences between religions and religious cults are comparative differences. One difference is that a religion is a set of beliefs, ethics, doctrines, and practices, which often defines a relationship between human beings and divinity or similar concepts, while a cult is a group which may or may not be associated with a larger and more accepted religion and is based on doctrines, practices, and beliefs.  Another difference is, religions usually have a longer history and specific information about their origins available, while cults usually have a relatively shorter history, and their origin is not always clear. At the same time, according to sociologists, religions can be identified as belief systems which are organised and established, while cults are relatively less organised and less established. As per many available definitions, religions are known to have more recognition, while cults, regardless of affiliations with religions, have lesser recognition, which results in religions having more followers and stability than cults have. Moreover, despite many similarities, religions are more accepted as belief systems that help followers attain something great, while cults are seen as secret and anti-social belief systems. Although how much religion and culture means to people varies depending on a multitude of factors, most religions are expected to make the followers’ lives more stable and structured, among other things. However, not all practices and beliefs associated with religions and cultures have the same recognition and value as before, as newer knowledge and technology have proven to be more effective than religions in many ways.  However, incidents, such as the recent death of a child, are a reminder that more and new knowledge should reach more people, and that people should not replace knowledge with faith.  


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