Healing

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Healing

Healing includes diagnosis of illness and various methods of curing. Human health is in a state of constant fluctuation and change. Any particular change is construed as follows: If waxing toward life, it is wellness; if waning toward death, it is illness. Healing is the negotiation between these two states. It attempts to increase life and wellness, but it is not always successful.

Issues of health and healing constitute a significant measure of the reality of everyday human existence. For humans to live, they must defend against illness and have strategies for responding to illness when it occurs; or the inverse—they must promote wellness as protection against the onset of illness. In almost all cultures, and throughout human history, healing has been inextricably related to religious concerns, themes, and practices. Whether part-time or full-time professionals, healers in most societies are religious specialists of some kind. Since health maintenance is a phenomenon that has religious dimensions, it represents a focal point for various beliefs, mores, practices, rituals, and observances. Examples include laying on hands, healing prayers, blessings, exorcisms, and purification practices. Many religions attempt to explain the causes and origins of illness. Some of these theories include spirit and demon possession, human Witchcraft, infractions of morality, or ritual offenses.

One reason why healing and religion have always had a historical relationship is that in dealing with illness they must also face the issues of suffering, pain, angst, and dying. Religion addresses these issues through establishing meaning, interpretation, and practices that are responses to suffering and death. Religious interpretive systems attempt to reduce the anxiety and fear associated with illness. In this context, illness has often been associated with sin. Religious healing attempts to accomplish curing through ritual, practice, and faith. Although modern empirical medicine can promote wellness and combat bodily pain and suffering, it does not always address the accompanying existential crises of human mortality.

Americans inherit a largely Judeo-Christian world-view, although indigenous and minority peoples have contributed significantly to contemporary health practices. The large influx into the United States of Asian peoples and ideas in the late twentieth century has also affected religious views and responses to health issues. Christian history is replete with images of healing as religious practice. As depicted in the Christian New Testament, Jesus is explicitly represented as a faith healer. One of his disciples, Luke, is identified as a doctor. A significant portion of the gospels' accounts record stories of healing.

American Christianity includes the practices of praying over the sick, laying on hands, and anointing with oil. These practices are rooted in the rituals of early Christians. These practices are also considered to convey forgiveness of sins, suggesting that sinfulness is connected with illness. Roman Catholics have maintained several rituals of healing and expiation of sin throughout their history, the rite of unction being one such expression of healing power through ritual. Early Protestants rejected formal rituals of healing, preferring informal practices such as praying and reading the Bible in times of sickness.

With the shift in recent decades of members away from mainline churches toward Evangelical and fundamentalist churches, several healing practices have gained increasing popularity: laying on hands and anointing with oil, as well as others. These "faith healing" practices occur throughout evangelicalism but are especially concentrated in Pentecostal and nondenominational charismatic churches. "Faith healing" is a term that generally refers to Christian practices of healing conceived as mediated through God's intervention, or through the power of the Holy Spirit. Faith healing practices include touching and laying on hands but also gesturing and other dramatic movements. With the growth of television evangelism, traditional "hands-on" healing is being supplemented by believers touching their televisions to receive healing. In some cases healing is received through television simply by viewing the ministry or by praying and reading the Bible while watching. Healing and evangelical TV ministries are a multimillion-dollar phenomenon in the United States today.

Another dimension of faith healing is represented by such groups as Christian Science. Christian Science is a movement, started in the nineteenth century, that rejects empirical medicine in favor of faith. This, and other such groups, do connect illness with sin. Christian Scientists conceive of empirical medicine as a challenge to God's authority and as a lack of faith. Jehovah's Witnesses do not adopt all the practices of other churches of this type but do reject the use of blood transfusions. Although some of the evangelical churches share similar attitudes, there is not as much consensus over whether faith replaces modern medicine or is a supplement to it.

Among some faith healing ministries, adherents accept and use modern medicine. Like more mainline denominations, many evangelicals do not see faith healing as a replacement for modern medicine, but instead accommodate their religious practices with visits to medical practitioners. No Christian institutions view empirical medicine as a substitute for faith, prayer, and miraculous healing. Often modern medicine is understood as an instrument of God's healing work, as exemplified in prayer meetings at hospitals to guide the hands of a surgeon.

Religious healing has ethnic dimensions as well. Many minority groups have members who are suspicious of modern medicine. Reasons for this suspicion include a general distrust of majority culture institutions and practices and their eroding effects on ethnic traditions. Healing has a strong traditional place in the religious beliefs and practices of most Native Americans. Practitioners of Vodun (Voodoo) and Santería also figure among those who rely on religious approaches to illness.

A recent trend in religion and healing is the popularity of herbal and alternative medicine. Alternative medicine includes a host of practices with religious or pseudo-religious affiliations. Alternative medicine with religious valences includes aroma therapy, acupuncture, herbal healing, massage therapy, macrobiotics, biofeedback, ?yurveda, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, various exercise and dietary movements, and others. All of these fields of practice tend to be holistic. They treat physical, psychological, and existential imbalance as illness. Their popularity is partially based on their respect for the human as a social and religious being and also as a physical organism. They also place significant emphasis on wellness—keeping people healthy and fit as a precaution against illness. In addition, they offer curing in response to illness.

Some of these traditions are modern imports; others developed in American religious history. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous groups appeared that can be loosely categorized as religious human potential movements. Mesmerists and Swedenborgians are two such examples that subsequently led to the development of more recent fields, such as chiropractic medicine. Swedenborgianism is a religion in which healing is the central religious practice. Herbal medicine has several streams of historical confluence: traditional European and African-American folk remedies, Chinese medicine, Native American botanical knowledge and theory, and South Asian Ayurveda. In many ways, theories of herbal medicine have been combined with empirical dietary research to increase sales of vitamins and minerals in the latter twentieth century. The longstanding links between religion and medicine are also seen in the popularity of vitamin and dietary supplements among some Evangelical Christian groups.

Modern medicine developed during the period of secularization and empirical science and has sometimes devalued religion and religious healing. Although there are still many fronts of contention between science and religion, some medical professionals consider religious practice and belief helpful to healing. In the 1990s the medical effects of religious practices and beliefs have begun to be assessed by the medical profession. Psychologists and therapists have studied how religious affiliation contributes positively to mental health. Some studies suggest that members of religious communities tend to suffer fewer personality disorders, such as depression. The use of Asian-inspired meditation methods has been shown to be helpful to sufferers of chronic pain or incurable disease. This field and its developing research are usually referred to as mind/body medicine. In a historical context this is not a new field, but instead a recognition by scientific medicine that some forms of religious practice and belief have transformative effects on immunity and general health. Many empiricists would not replace heart surgery with prayer, but they are beginning to recognize and study how prayer and meditation shorten the recovery time of patients.