Reiki students[/caption]Gordon Matilla---Crystal healing, Reiki, and energy work are just some of the alternative healing strategies that have gone mainstream. But how do these strategies integrate with religious thought?
The question is examined in a new book called “Examining Alternative Medicine” by Paul C. Reisser, M.D., Dale Mabe, D.O. and Robert Veldarde. It examines the various types of alternative healing and offers Biblical statements and references that allow the reader to examine his/her beliefs in the light of scriptural ideas.
The authors maintain that many of these practices are aligned with the occult in opposition to Biblical teachings. Altering and transforming consciousness and other practices are said to be in violation of religious information and often are transformed by practitioners into a form of religion with the types of rituals that can take place. The author refers to the “I am God, you are God” movement of New Age folks as a negative of the commandment of the Christian not to put other Gods, including the self, before the supremacy of the Creator.
The authors also declare that using these alternative methods flies in the face of scientific thought in that many don’t come from thorough research but instead from anecdotal evidence, often one’s “word for it.” The book does not completely discount methods like massage and other alternatives but reminds the reader that much of the needed evidence about cures is still unknown outside of individual recitation of experience. The concern, however, is that many medical schools are incorporating alternative medicine, including those that have no hard evidence of healing. Much of that healing can be ascribed to the placebo effect, the book’s authors maintain.
Complex diseases have yet to have specific “battle plans,” the book observes, which is part of the reason why alternative therapies have stepped in to fill the patients need to have answers.
Much of Andrew Weil’s work is discounted as incorporating the Eastern mysticism that uses specific exercises in some way psychic to elicit or to stop positive and negative energy sources that are not substantiated by adequate research. Modern “relativism” where nothing is really wholly good or bad is also examined as it negatively impacts the religious truths.
Despite these arguments practitioners of alternative medicines tell people that they can be integrated well with modern medicine. Practitioners say that their methods supplement the physician’s work. But those opposing these methods tell us that all too often people are advised to follow procedures that may conflict with medical direction.
Still the proponents of alternative medicine maintain that it is arrogant not to include patient’s report of help from this type of approach, even as more and more universities are withdrawing some of them in the health curriculum and both science and religion continue to question their effectiveness outside of anecdotal report.
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