Kenyan doctors must not use prayers to ‘treat’ the sick

 Mountainous hope in form of prayer is seen to be some sort of ‘painkiller,’ yet some patients believe that miracles fall on them

Medical practitioners in Kenya face a myriad of challenges. There have been cases of strikes in various counties over issues of pay and poor working conditions.

One other major challenge touches on managing patients. Many medical practitioners use spiritual hand to manage their patients. It becomes much more complex when practitioners with strong spiritual faith use their spirituality more to manage ailments than to profess a purely scientific practice.

Full of latent spiritual fire, this group of practitioners floats more on spirituality and permit interplay between medicine and faith as they manage clinical ailments which have a scientific backing. With the temerity to justify their personal, faiths even with the expanse of medical research, this group cushions itself with a non-forgiving spiritual defence. Many a patient hunger to get treatment courtesy of medical science and that is why they visit medical institutions that manage various diseases.

Another group of practitioners that keeps away from faith-based beliefs practice medicine only by attending to immediate urges of humanity and nothing spiritual. They believe that they are symbols of restraint from any spiritual interference.

In developed nations, many medical practitioners expose their biceps and engage in a purely scientific practice. They speak only in medical tongues and never up any spiritual ante. They know that getting into souls of faith brings down the quality of therapy being given. Certainly, they don’t believe in treating souls but the physical human beings. They stand with patients during difficult times and they too lose some to sickness.

Now, should there be a demarcation between medicine and spirituality especially when the bleak eyes of disease open? For the scientific practitioner, religious faith is ‘unpredictable and tinctured with ignorance’.

The common devilry is when tangible medicine refuses to sublimate into ‘souls’ of human beings. Thus, spirituality cannot supersede medical treatment. Mountainous hope in form of prayer is seen to be some sort of ‘painkiller’ yet some patients believe that miracles fall on them. The treasured significance here being ‘healing’.

In medicine, spirituality is less documented unless one is receiving psychotherapy which is more mental than spiritual. Dealing with chronic disease like cancer, proves a challenge even with mental therapies around.

Should medical practitioners bring their personal religious beliefs into medical practice? It is a fact that many desperate patients would hobble off to wherever to seek ‘treatment’ including ‘spiritual’.

A patient with chronic disease becomes disillusioned when a practitioner with certainty of a ‘liar’ says that there is not much that can be done. More so, a spiritual practitioner brings in faith as the alternative ‘remedy’ even if no results are expected.

Even with few medical shortfalls, it is sad that some practitioners practice ‘ambulance treatment’ by giving false spiritual hopes. Their coated tablets and capsules of spiritual faith only worsen management of medical ailments. Spirituality is thus daubed on their name-tags and personal faith trumpeted on the conscience of their patients.

A practitioner’s only duty is to feel the pulse of medical practice and not allow merging of science and spiritual faith for the latter would be used to scan for medical failures to discredit the former.

What a practitioner ought to do is flirt with the violence of heartbeats that pound on stethoscopes for the sake of treating a human patient. High emotional spiritual tides should be left to those concerned; not for practitioners to wiggle syringes in the name of faith. Medicine is certainly a secular science.

Mundia is a physiotherapist based in Eldoret.