Procrustes Stretched
"intuition and imagination and intelligence"
How is "Strong Faith" helping to Bankrupt America's Health Care Delivery Systems?
Our society spends extraordinary amounts of money on care at the end of life. If all that money really did lead to flourishing health, it would be well spent.
But many families choose the uncanny valley without understanding just how hard the journey will be. Raymond Barfield, director of the pediatric palliative-care program at Duke, sees every day what researchers have documented: religious families are consistently the ones most likely to insist on heroic measures and most likely to resist doctors' assessments of viability. It is the people with a "strong faith" who also want the most dramatic technological interventions.
"Medicine has access to massively powerful technologies that can keep molecules going in the right direction," Barfield told me. "And when a family believes healing will come if they just demonstrate enough faith, they often believe they must use every possible technology to keep their loved one alive."
Jahi McMath, Ariel Sharon, and the Valley of Death - TIME
Why does society out up with this? 57.4% of Americans believe a god can heal patients even if doctors have declared further medical treatment pointless. - recent study cited in Time magazine
Culture warriors wonder why the American medical system is being strained? Bring on the so-called death panels.
Psilly 32:4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the culture wars, I will not be in my opposition to society paying for others beliefs: for my own delusions in an all seeing father figure watching over each and every individual believer in the irrationality of intercession prayer and miracles, dictate society pay no matter the costs; irrationality and delusion they comfort me.
Our society spends extraordinary amounts of money on care at the end of life. If all that money really did lead to flourishing health, it would be well spent.
But many families choose the uncanny valley without understanding just how hard the journey will be. Raymond Barfield, director of the pediatric palliative-care program at Duke, sees every day what researchers have documented: religious families are consistently the ones most likely to insist on heroic measures and most likely to resist doctors' assessments of viability. It is the people with a "strong faith" who also want the most dramatic technological interventions.
"Medicine has access to massively powerful technologies that can keep molecules going in the right direction," Barfield told me. "And when a family believes healing will come if they just demonstrate enough faith, they often believe they must use every possible technology to keep their loved one alive."
Jahi McMath, Ariel Sharon, and the Valley of Death - TIME
Why does society out up with this? 57.4% of Americans believe a god can heal patients even if doctors have declared further medical treatment pointless. - recent study cited in Time magazine
Culture warriors wonder why the American medical system is being strained? Bring on the so-called death panels.
Psilly 32:4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the culture wars, I will not be in my opposition to society paying for others beliefs: for my own delusions in an all seeing father figure watching over each and every individual believer in the irrationality of intercession prayer and miracles, dictate society pay no matter the costs; irrationality and delusion they comfort me.