Dr Paul Allen

Jesus Speaks Regarding the Use of Medicine The Good Samaritan Jesus replied and said, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. And by chance a priest was going down on that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him. On the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, 'Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return I will repay you.' Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers' hands? And he said, "The one wh...

Español: Imagen del Mercado Medieval Tres Culturas, celebrado en Aranda de Duero del 13 al 15 de marzo de 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Conventional Western medicine fails miserably at considering this holistic view . So engrossed with what can be numerically measured and scientifically proven, it often neglects the human spirit, treating patients as bundles of body parts and malfunctioning cells sitting in an isolated exam room. To be sure, there are individual doctors whose compassion and care challenge the system, but as a whole the system leaves little room for the time and heart it takes to treat patients holistically. There is no doubt that the advances of modern medicine have vastly improved our quality of life and life span. I worry, however,that Western medicine itself can become idolatrous if it causes us to rely solely on scientific certainty and our own ability to master the human body instead of humbly admitting that we don't know and can't fix everything...

English: Mobile Blood Transfusion Service A collection at an office work place on Queensferry Road, Orchard Brae (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In November 2007, a fourteen year old boy, Dennis Lindberg refused the blood transfusion needed to save his life. After chemotherapy for leukemia had destroyed his red blood cells, the available blood transfusion from a donor was the simple, and only way to save the boy’s life. Doctors explained to him that with the transfusion he had a 70% chance of living to age of 19, but without it he would be dead within days. Dennis was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. This religious group does not normally refuse medical treatment, but in the case of blood transfusions they typically teach that it is against Jehovah’s will to allow another person’s blood into your body. Since the blood is believed to contain the soul of the human, mixing blood would leave the person unclean and unacceptable to God. Interestingly, Dennis’s parents were in favor of allowin...

The New England Journal of Medicine   looks through  200 years of back issues to understand how we die differently: The first thing to notice here is how much our mortality rate has dropped over the course of a century, largely due to big reductions in infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza. The way we talk about medical conditions has changed, too. NEJM finds that, back in 1812 – the first year it published – reports of spontaneous combustion were taken quite seriously by the medical community , as were debates over how, exactly one would be injured by a close-call with a cannonball: Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people , or even kill them (1812f). Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of “brandy-drinking men and women,” received serious, if skeptical, consideration (1812g). And physicians were obsessed with fevers — puerperal, petechial, catarrhal, and even an outbreak of “ ...