Review: Sacred Matters-Chapter 6 Medicine

The question of what qualifies as medicine is a hotly debated topic at the moment containing issues such as the legalization of marijuana in California. It is becoming more and more obvious that the medicinal value of many drugs depends on a person’s perspective. Like the rest of the chapters in his book Laderman does not make any proscriptive judgments about the use of medicine or drugs, he simply argues that medicine is a source of religious experience for Americans. Whether drugs are taken to achieve a transcendent experience, live free of pain, or cure an illness they are consumed in order to have a certain kind of lifestyle.

Laderman spends a significant amount of time exploring the advertising connected to the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies are very careful to connect attractive lifestyles to their product thereby promising such lifestyles to people who would only have to take a pill. Whether we know it or not much of what Americans think of as health has been influenced by the prescription drug industry; we have been brainwashed to think of health in the very narrow sense of lack of disease. One of the things Laderman discusses in the chapter is the recent influence in the West of Eastern conceptions of health. These conceptions of health are often much more holistic involving emotional and spiritual health along with physical health, and they often emphasize lifestyle changes over drug therapy. We are coming to the realization that the pursuit of good health and a long life is a religious one and that many cultures and traditions have approached it quite differently. We are realizing that doctors are not the gods we once thought they were and that we might have something to learn from cultures other than our own.

In the end medicine seeks to control aspects of our lives to change them from some deficient existence to our desired end, that end being health. So what is health? Who gets to say what it means to live a healthy life? Is it defined by drug commercials? I would hope not, since their idea of health is largely formulated around a fantasy that they hope will motivate people to buy their product. While Laderman recited the now familiar refrain that god is not a necessity in the religion of medicine he did not address how the presence of gods or a god, and quite possibly some kind of afterlife, changes a persons understanding of health in this life. The belief in some kind of afterlife changes a person's motivations to extend their life or accept a natural end. Not only length of life, but the definition of life comes into play when talking about modern advances in medicine and the ability to keep people 'alive'.

Stanley Hauerwas has written a very helpful book on this particular subject from a decidedly Christian perspective. In God, Medicine and Suffering he points out the fact that we not only allow pagan cultures to shape our understanding of health and life, but we are often misguided in our attempts to achieve 'health'. Hauerwas argues that the attempt to provide a theodicy, or explanation for the presence of evil in the world, is pagan pursuit which distracts from the traditional Christian response to the presence of evil, which is a community of people able to absorb its effects. He comes to the conclusion that modern medicine is another form of theodicy, but one that usually fails to actually contribute to person well-being and only succeeds in making the person feel better. This is a great little book which would be an excellent supplement to Laderman's chapter on medicine.