When faith impedes healing

The care of very ill patients is onerous enough. The added stress of having to cope with what is the considered opinion of one pastor or imam is making it more and more difficult to make people see reason, especially with respect to their well-being and the path to securing their health.

The status of any person’s health ought to be a private matter that could be divulged to the clergyman concerned so that he could support the treatment with prayers. However, it is no longer a situation in which the religious faith co-exists with the treatment, but one in which the established treatment is replaced by faith. As a result, many folks have died early, quite needlessly and in very bizarre circumstances.

What we have in many communities in Nigeria today is a situation where the person who is ill is asked to leave the hospital – where he is being treated – and go to a certain place for prayers or the village for some herbal medicines. A few examples will be enumerated here to show the extent of the problem.

• A few years ago at one of the tertiary health institutions in Lagos, there was a four-year-old boy who was the only child of the parents, both of whom are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The little boy had kidney cancer and thus required surgery to remove the tumour and pave the way for chemotherapy. Potentially, this is a curable type of cancer in children. The parents refused to consent to blood transfusion based on their faith. Not only that, a sizeable number of their congregation was on hand to ensure the parents did not compromise their belief. They sang and prayed with the parents and encouraged them to consent to surgery but with the understanding that there would be no blood transfusion. On the fateful day, the surgery was done but the degree of blood loss was, despite all precautions taken to minimise it, still too much for the little boy’s heart to bear. He died. One would have expected sadness from the parents and the parish members who abandoned whatever they were doing in order to encourage the young parents. They were jubilant instead because “the boy’s parents kept the faith”.
• Several weeks ago, in the same hospital, another bizarre situation occurred. A two-year-old girl was on treatment for a life-threatening ailment. The parents belong to different faiths; the mother is a Jehovah’s Witness and the father an Anglican. The child required some blood transfusion in order to make it safe enough for the toxic drugs that she needed to be given. The father consented to transfusion but the mother refused. She was the one staying with the child in the hospital and was ably supported by her church members. As the treatment could not proceed in the absence of blood, there was no possible hope of recovery and the poor soul departed this earth aided and abetted by the mother and the church.
• Some 20 years ago, when I first encountered this peculiar trait among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one could not help feeling sad that the benefit of fine diagnostic work was allowed to waste simply because of a belief in some doctrine. A diagnostic puzzle was resolved by a dedicated team and the old man was offered surgery. He would undergo surgery, he said, if only he could be guaranteed there would be no blood transfusion. Since nobody could give him that one guarantee, he rejected the surgical option and was dead within three months.
• About a year ago at a general hospital was a seven-month-old male infant with a strangulated inguinal hernia. The child was gravely ill with dehydration, constipation, intermittent fever and an inability to feed. The child was resuscitated with intravenous fluids and antibiotics and a tube was passed into his stomach through the nose to drain it of its contents and make him somewhat more comfortable. All the relevant tests were done and the parents told that an emergency operation needed to be performed to save his life. Within an hour, the father appeared on the scene. He said he was a pastor and that his child would not be marked with a knife. He then began to quote the scripture and said that his son was a gift from above and that such a gift could not have sorrow added to it. Surgery was sorrow and he was taking his son home to enable him get perfect healing. No amount of counter quotations could convince him to act otherwise. He was not impressed that God performed the first operation and with anaesthesia for that matter. He merely countered that God did not have to cut man open in order to perform that feat.
• A middle-aged man was recently diagnosed with internal haemorrhoids from which he bled intermittently over a two-month period. He was offered various medications but did not really get the result he had hoped for and so was offered an operation. He ran away from Lagos when he was confronted with that option to his village in Edo state for herbal treatment and has not, to my knowledge, returned to his family in Lagos up till this time. This is a bit odd because when people fall ill in the hinterland and they have relatives in any of the cities, they tend to migrate in the direction of the better healthcare facilities there. However, some city dwellers with strong faith in the efficacy of herbal products would rather do the opposite and seek help from alternative practitioners.
• There was also this young woman who had suffered recurrent episodes of miscarriage in the past. She was pregnant again some months ago when she began to bleed through the vagina. She went to the hospital that she normally attends and was admitted. Her pastor soon got wind of her predicament and counselled her that what she needed more was prayer and fasting and not hospitalisation. She discharged herself and went to their church for the said prayers and fasting. After several days, she returned to the hospital where an ultrasound scan done revealed that she had suffered yet another abortion. The pastor was more persuasive, however, and assured her that the baby was in place but was merely weak. The baby was not dead he emphasised and so there were more prayers said to prevent the baby’s death. The scan report was dismissed as the report of man. By this time, an infection had set in and she was taken back to her hospital when she became more ill every day that passed. That infection was so severe and so prolonged that it is not now possible to determine if indeed she can even get pregnant again. Such is the damage that has now been wrought.
• Finally, is the case of a certain female infant who was six months old at the time she was taken to a hospital with intestinal obstruction. She was diagnosed with intussusceptions, a malady in which a part of the intestinal tract forces itself into an adjacent part and causes a blockage. An operation was offered the child which the parents accepted but a certain imam, who did not even show up, sent a message that the child was not to be operated but should instead be brought to him in their village for treatment. The parents took the baby away without delay.

In all of these instances, the end result is predictable. We also see the powerful influence of clergymen and women in inducing confused people to making wrong choices that ultimately lead to loss of life.

This piece was first published on May 18, 2014.