How Prayer and Pastoral Care Help in Medicine

Discussion: Medicine

1

Prayer, prescriptions, and pastoral care can all be useful tools in providing quality care. However, as Safer (2019) points out, overprescribing is a problem in health care. The pharmaceutical industry benefits from increased prescriptions, but there is little indication that long-term prescriptions of certain drugs have any increased benefit for patients (Safer, 2019). On the other hand, there are many benefits to prayer and pastoral care in medicine: as alternative treatments that are part of holistic medicine, prayer and pastoral care can be used to good effect on the mind and the body (Green, 2018). Oral Roberts University of Medicine, for example, believes in a philosophy of prayer and medicine (Crouch, Jr., 2019). Pastoral care recognizes that patients have spiritual needs just as much as they have physical needs. Prayer and pastoral care, therefore, should be part of any quality care approach, but especially holistic approaches in medicine.

Prescriptions become somewhat the norm or go-to approach in health care in the 20th century and into the 21st—but the opioid epidemic caused people to rethink this approach to medicine. Pharmaceuticals, it seemed, might not always be the best answer to a health problem. Researchers, scholars, doctors, nurses, psychologists, and teachers began identifying the benefits of prayer and pastoral care in medicine, showing that patient health and wellness can be enhanced through spiritual components of care provision.

The benefits derived from prayer and pastoral care can actually be more positive, satisfying, and effective than those allegedly derived from prescriptions. Prescriptions might address symptoms and physical issues, but prayer and pastoral care go deeper into the human soul and help the patient to deal with problems or issues that seem to be beyond the reach of physical medicine (Crouch, Jr., 2019). Prayer and pastoral care can bring joy to the patient’s life, peace, and healing at the spiritual level. In cases where patients are struggling with issues like addiction, depression, pain, or isolation, prayer and pastoral care can make all the difference between a patient’s improvement and a patient’s regression. Prayer and pastoral care really take into consideration the fact that every human being has a soul with spiritual needs. And as Scripture points out, God heals in wonderful ways: there is Psalm 30:2-3: “Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me. You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead; you spared me from going down to the pit.” And there is Jeremiah 17:14: “Lord, heal me and I will be completely well; rescue me and I will be perfectly safe. You are the one I praise!” Prayer can thus be a powerful remedy for those inclined to faith and spirituality.

2

Socialized medicine is really just an attempt to force everyone to prop up or support or buy into an industry; it takes away a person’s right to choose (providers, insurance, or care at all), and obliges everyone to pay more in taxes so that the government can spend more on health care. By subsidizing health care, the industry then becomes more confident that it can raise prices since there is a willing buyer (the government); and unless the government were to introduce price controls, the industry would raise rates across the board, as it has done for years already. The government would be unlikely to implement price controls at any rate since the health care industry has its lobbyists positioned at every level of government to make sure legislators represent their special interests first and foremost. In socialized medicine (as already exists with Medicare and Medicaid and other programs), there is no real free or competitive market; care providers, moreover, are regulated in such a way that the industry becomes monopolized and any practitioner that dares to step outside the lines of what is considered “acceptable” medicine is marginalized or perhaps even has his or her license revoked (Rubin, 2022). As Ryan (2020) points out, crises like the COVID pandemic were great for the for-profit industry that would continue to be just as it has been all along a for-profit industry even in the face of a socialist framework.