Are religious people more likely to believe in the efficacy of alternative medicine?
“Patients are fleeing the medical profession because doctors concentrate on rational knowledge at the expense of life’s mysteries,” he writes. “Organized religion concentrates exclusively on the unknown, and therefore seems to know nothing. In alternative medicine, people have discovered a compromise.” [...]
Alternative therapies … attract patients disaffected by conventional medicine as well as those dissatisfied by religion’s solutions. In Dworkin’s view, practitioners of alternative therapy appeal to patients because they synthesize the most attractive aspects of medical science and religion, “Because alternative medicine is not confined by the limits of rational or testable knowledge, its powers of explanation are enormous, and patients leave … thinking that their troubles have real spiritual significance.” [...]
Instead of receiving cold, hard truths — or the indifference of assembly-line medicine — patients are told by their alternative practitioners that their condition is unique to them, and that the power to heal may exist inside their own bodies. The “boundless possibilities that suddenly appear on the horizon raise the spirits of these patients in the present. This is not a bad thing.”
- “Science, Faith, and Alternative Medicine” by Ronald W. Dworkin, in Policy Review (Aug. & Sept. 2001)
I personally know a number of Christians, mostly women, who really buy into the whole alternative medicine scene. Just curious to hear your opinion and/or if you have had first-hand experience with this relationship between religion and alternative medicine
