Health: Whose Business is it?

The Health section in New York Times ran a chilling article recently, Doctors' Lucrative Industry Ties. It told a chilling tale about an orthopedic surgeon in New Jersey. He had been paid almost $1 million ($940,857 to be exact) by a medical technology company to promote its products from 2009-2011. The article went on to report that, "Over a two-and-a-half-year period, device and drug companies shelled out over $76 million just to physicians licensed in Massachusetts, according to a study published online this month in The New England Journal of Medicine. That amount does not include outlays of less than $50, which are exempt from disclosure.

Stories like this are accumulating, eroding public trust in our health care system, and causing some to ask, whose business is our health? Industrialized medicine has made some great advances and makes health care available on a large scale. But it's helpful to think of ourselves as more than consumers of health care products and services.

What if we made health our own business by taking much greater control of  it ourselves and searching for health proactively?

A recent CBS News video, "How to Get Control of Your Health", features Dr. Travis Stork, author of  "The Doctor is In". Dr. Stork encourages readers to become "the CEO of your own health". What an incredibly liberating concept! It frees us from a passive health management model and empowers us to take proactive charge of our own health and look for new...or maybe not so new...ways of staying healthy.

Author and researcher, George Barna, reminds us that Luke, the author of the 3rd Gospel in The Bible, was a physician as well as a disciple. In Barna's words, "Luke’s narrative contains 26 different passages describing how Jesus responded to people’s physical and medical needs. The book shows that Jesus healed hundreds of people. But it also gives us some consistent patterns from Jesus’ ministry to the poor and suffering people He encountered that we might use as principles to guide our personal responses to today’s health care challenges.

 Barna lists 7 "Noteworthy perspectives that underlie Jesus’ health care strategy." Here they are in abbreviated form. Click the link above for the full version.

1. Jesus healed people because He believed that good health matters. 

2. Jesus invested Himself in their healing because He loved and cared for people. 

3. Jesus healed everyone who presented a medical need because He saw no reason to screen some out as unqualified. 

4. Jesus healed every kind of illness He encountered. 

5. Jesus pursued them because He saw Himself as a servant. 

6. Jesus allowed them to disrupt His schedule because He realized that people’s pain and suffering was their top focus in life. 

7. Jesus expected His closest followers to heal others. 

Health care from a spiritual perspective may not seem like a viable option to some, but research shows that an overwhelming number of us believe in the power of prayer. A Fox News poll released in September, 2011 showed that "77 percent of voters believe prayers can help someone heal from an injury or illness."

For those people, and maybe for some of the 3% who were "unsure" according to the Fox poll, the study of religion and its history of healing might be something to look into. Christianity is not, of course, the only religion whose adherents believe in the healthy effect of prayer. But Christianity's central figure was indeed an amazing healer who encouraged others to heal as well, promising them that they would do even greater healing work than he was doing.

For an in-depth look at what makes Christian healing timeless and powerful, Mary Baker Eddy's textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, is a helpful guide. 

There are lots of ways to maintain and restore health that don't involve drugs or expensive medical interventions. Exploring them and learning to make our own choices is one way of taking active control of our own health. We can determine what works best for us and explore new ways of thinking about health and healing. Can we become the "CEO of our own health"? Who better? Then health becomes our own business, not somebody else's.