Health and Wellness

Should Christians seek help from physicians?

Jesus said the sick needs a physician. Still yet, many Christians, especially some among the fundamentalist group who do not believe in medical science. And even if their circumstances forced them to see a doctor they never take the medication the doctor prescribed.

About two years ago, one of my favorite cousins and I talked length about the state of our health. I told her I took medication to stabilise my blood pressure. She looked at me with a funny face. Then she asked me if I wasn’t a Christian. According to her, Christians should never take medications. They should pray for God’s healing. Oddly enough, my cousin died a year later (may her soul rest in perpetual peace) from a condition for which she refused to take medication.

The Jehovah Witness faith is another group that practice a strange principle. When I was a boy a beloved gentleman who practised the faith from a nearby town got hurt in a motor vehicle accident. He lost a lot of blood, and a blood transfusion was necessary to keep him alive. But the family and the Church refused. The poor man died and left a wife and four kids to fend for themselves.

Fellow Christians, prayer does work, but sometimes you need a physician to tell what is going with your health. Do not allow religious principles and rituals to prevent you from doing what’s right for you and your family at a given moment. Let Jesus be your moral compass, and fashion your life after Him

‘When Breath Becomes Air:’ a dying doctor’s memoir teaches about love and loss

Dr. Paul Kalanithi read the CT scan. He could clearly see tumors matting the lungs and deforming the spine. As a resident in neurosurgery in his final year of training at Stanford, he’d seen plenty of such scans before. But this time, the scan was his own.

Source: ‘When Breath Becomes Air:’ a dying doctor’s memoir teaches about love and loss

Why do you worry so much?

images[4]Worrying seems to be part of our lives. We cannot not worry about something or the other. Some of us worry about our kids, and rightly so. Those of us who are employed worry about our jobs. We worry about financial security, health and safety and whatever else we can find to add to the list. Still, worrying never solve anything, so why worry.

Worrying is an addiction for some of us. Often we worry about things over which we have no control. Mind you, there is a difference between worry and concern. Once we zero in on something to worry about, we put up barriers making it difficult for family and friends to convince us to do otherwise. Jesus had His hands full convincing His disciples not to worry, when He told them that His time had come to return to the Father.

“Let not your hearts be troubled”, He said. “If you believed in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1). That, however, was not enough to convince the disciples not to worry. After all, these men had given up everything they owned to follow Jesus. Furthermore, it was only three years in, so they were not about to let Jesus off the hook until He did some more explaining.

Obviously, the disciples had good reasons to worry, but worrying is not a good thing. Worry is a tool of the devil, and when worry gets out of control it can have a devastating effect on health, family and even your Christian life. Jesus warns against worrying (read Matthew 6:32-34). And the beloved apostle Paul, admonish us in the following verses: “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).

Therefore, brothers and sister, the next time you get the urge to worry about something, ask yourself the following questions. “Why do you worry so much?” “Do you not know you are a child of a King?” Then take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

 

WATER! you are what you drink.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Therefore, brothers and sister, we must take care of our bodies, even as we take care of our places of worship.

My fear for breast cancer forces me to do a double mastectomy.

Editor’s note: October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. Author Allison Gilbert shares why she chose to undergo a double mastectomy after testing positive for the breast cancer gene.

(CNN) — I’m not a helicopter parent and my children would tell you I don’t bake cupcakes for their birthday parties. But I’d readily cut off my breasts for them — and recently, I did.

Removing breast tissue uncompromised by cancer is relatively easy. It took the breast surgeon about two hours to slice through my chest and complete the double mastectomy seven weeks ago.

The time-consuming part was left to the plastic surgeon who created new breasts out of my own belly fat so I could avoid getting implants. Total operating time: 11.5 hours. And I don’t regret a second.

The decision to have surgery without having cancer wasn’t easy, but it seemed logical to me. My mother, aunt and grandmother have all died from breast or ovarian cancer, and I tested positive for the breast cancer gene.

Being BRCA positive means a woman’s chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer is substantially elevated.

“Patients with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations have 50%-85% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer and up to approximately 60% lifetime risk of ovarian cancer,” according to Karen Brown, director of the Cancer Genetic Counseling Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

By comparison, the lifetime risk of breast cancer for the general population is 13% and 1.7% for ovarian cancer.

CNN iReport: Tested for the breast cancer gene?

At my gynecologist’s urging, I tackled the threat of ovarian cancer first. Because the disease is hard to detect and so often fatal, my ovaries were removed in 2007, a few years after my husband and I decided we were done having kids.

The most difficult part of the operation came in the months that followed: I was thrust into menopause at 37. Despite age-inappropriate night sweats and hot flashes, I was relieved to have the surgery behind me and wrote about it in my book, “Parentless Parents: How the Loss of Our Mothers and Fathers Impacts the Way We Raise Our Children.”

The emotional release was short-lived. Less than a year later, my mother’s sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and died within four months.

Aunt Ronnie’s death set me on a preventive mastectomy warpath. I had already been under high-risk surveillance for more than a decade — being examined annually by a leading breast specialist and alternating between mammograms, breast MRIs and sonograms every three months — but suddenly being on watch didn’t seem enough, and I began researching surgical options.

Regardless of my family history and BRCA status, I still went back and forth on having a mastectomy. I vacillated between feeling smug and insane.

Over the years, I’d read too many stories like the one in the Wall Street Journal last week, on doctors who make fatal mistakes (up to 98,000 people die every year in the United States because of medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine). I was anxious about choosing a bad surgeon and a bad hospital.

The stakes felt even higher after I decided to go an unconventional route to reconstruction. Implants generally offer a quicker surgery and recovery, but they’re also known to leak, shift out of place, and feel hard to the touch and uncomfortable.

I would also likely have to replace them every 10 years — not an unimportant consideration, since I’m 42.

Ultimately, on August 7, I underwent double mastectomy with DIEP (Deep Inferior Epigastric Perforator) flap reconstruction. The benefits would be that my new breasts would be permanent, made from my own skin and flesh, and I’d be getting rid of my childbearing belly fat in the process.

I had multiple consultations with surgeons who explained every reason not to have the procedure. They warned me that I’d be under anesthesia unnecessarily long and I’d be opening myself up to needless complications.

While every concern was valid, it wasn’t until I was six doctors into my investigation that I realized the likely reason why I was getting such push-back. The plastic surgeons I was consulting, despite their shining pedigrees and swanky offices, couldn’t perform a DIEP. The procedure requires highly skilled microsurgery and not every plastic surgeon, I learned, is a microsurgeon.

It also requires a great deal of stamina. The doctors I interviewed who perform DIEP flaps were generally younger and fitter than those who didn’t. On average, a double mastectomy with DIEP reconstruction takes 10-12 hours, while reconstruction using implants can take as little as three.

In total, I met with 10 surgeons before choosing my team, and while I am now thrilled with the outcome, all the years of research and worry took a toll on me.

The worst moment came one night when my husband and I were in bed. I began to cry uncontrollably and wished I could talk with my mother and aunt about which procedure to have, which doctor I should choose, and whether I should even have the surgery.

Then a moment of bittersweet grace clarified what I needed to do. It struck me that the reason I couldn’t speak to my mother and aunt is exactly the reason I had to have the surgery.

Undergoing a prophylactic double mastectomy was a great decision for me. It’s clearly not a choice every woman would make, but I’m convinced without it I would have been one of the estimated 226,000 women the American Cancer Society says is diagnosed with invasive breast cancer every year.

I could have tried to eat my way to a cancer-free life, but even Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of the popular vegetables-are-key-to-health book “The China Study” admits diet may not be enough to protect BRCA patients from cancer.

“We need more research,” Campbell told me. “Conservatively, I’d say go ahead and have the surgery, and eat a plant-based diet after.”

I also could have waited for a vaccine, a pill or some other medical advance to come my way that would have made such a radical decision avoidable.

Perhaps MD Anderson Cancer Center’s newly announced war on cancer will produce positive results for patients who are susceptible to triple negative breast cancer, the type of aggressive disease likely to afflict BRCA1 patients and the kind my aunt most likely died from.

But every surgery substitute seemed locked in hope, not statistics. And as I’ve told my husband and children, I wasn’t willing to wait. I love them more than my chest.