Joel Watts, on his website, is lamenting one death from faith healing: http://unsettledchristianity.com/2013/04/i-once-was-lost-but-now-im-found-another-child-death/
and it is a shame. Why? because no one attacks medical science or doctors like they do faith healing advocates when a death occurs. Unfortunately, medical deaths vastly outnumber the number of deaths incurred by those who practice faith healing yet no one cries out that the surgeons or doctors should be arrested or that their children should be removed from their homes or that the hospital be closed down.
Those are all the things that they do when 1 child dies from an attempt to use faith to heal their illness: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/51629861#.UXcGzkryCSo
Prosecutors on Monday sought to have the couple jailed, but Lerner permitted them to remain free because their seven other children had been placed in foster care.
If you look at statistics, that is if you can find accurate ones as faith healers do not keep records and rarely report to government agencies their success and failure rates, you would find an anomaly that is basically ignored. First one figure on faith healing
n 1998-APR, Dr. Seth Asser, a critical-care pediatrician at Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, and Rita Swan, head of the advocacy group Children’s Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD) authored a paper in the professional journal Pediatrics. Asser studied 172 reported deaths of infants and children between 1975 and 1995. (http://www.religioustolerance.org/medical3.htm#)
172 deaths in a 20 year span {less than 10 a year) and you must keep in mind that there is no guarantee that medical science could have saved those children. Now the next figure includes adults but the numbers are so large you get the idea of how many children EACH YEAR die at the hands of medical professionals using medical science:
Even more significantly, the medical system has played a large role in undermining the health of Americans. According to several research studies in the last decade, a total of 225,000 Americans per year have died as a result of their medical treatments: • 12,000 deaths per year due to unnecessary surgery
• 7000 deaths per year due to medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 deaths per year due to other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 deaths per year due to infections in hospitals
• 106,000 deaths per year due to negative effects of drugs
Thus, America’s healthcare-system-induced deaths are the third leading cause of the death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer.(http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm)
Not to mention the millions of children without medical insurance coverage because their parents can’t afford it:
40 million people in the U.S. do not have access to healthcare. The social and economic inequalities that are an integral part of American society are mirrored in the inequality of access to the health care system. (Ibid)
To be honest I did look for children medical death’s specifically but I found that it was not that easy to find separate statistics. The sites I found mainly combined adults with children BUT I did find this:
What would it cost to prevent the vast majority of children’s deaths from pneumonia and diarrhea? About $6.7 billion over the next 12 years—to put it in perspective, that’s less than a quarter of the cost of the 2012 London Olympics. Pneumonia and diarrhea claimed the lives of two million children worldwide in 2011. (http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/keeping-two-million-children-from-dying-each-year/)
It seems that the cost to save 2,000,000 children PER YEAR is quite cheap yet the money is nowhere to be found. And people go ballistic over 1 child’s death at the hands of faith healers.
The hypocrisy is endless when it comes to the enemies of God. By the way that is just 2 diseases that affect children worldwide. If the opponents put as much effort and money into fighting disease around the world as they do to fight 1 small group or family in America who uses faith to heal their loved ones, then maybe they would have an argument against faith healing. But they don’t in either case.
Or if they fought against medical mistakes as hard as they do faith healing maybe tens of thousands of people each year would survive their stay in the hospital but they don’t and we lose people to unnecessary deaths.
Here is a more manageable statistic:
But while such a tally is tragic, that does not mean this year will turn out to be unusually bad. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, and it’s not yet clear the nation will reach that total. (http://www.timescolonist.com/life/health/often-elderly-are-victims-but-100-kids-die-of-flu-on-average-each-year-20-so-far-this-season-1.48048)
2 years of flu season out races faith healing deaths for 20 years. The bias against faith healing is immense and unrealistic. Just think what would be accomplished if the government did not waste its time and resources incarcerating families for faith healing and focused on spending their time and money on other more pressing needs.
Now this is not to say that any faith healing method or group are okay. Not everyone who practices faith healing is of God and they cannot expect God to intercede on their behalf, but they do anyways because they are misguided and not taught correctly.
If one practices faith healing they need to make sure it is truly God’s will and they need to make sure they go to a true christian who has the gift of healing. Faith healing is not denying a person or child of medical care but it does not necessarily replace medical help either. One has to be led of God to do the former and they need to look to God to help in the latter.
Medical science on its own can do nothing, it is not God and has no power over life and death thus the believer needs to use faith no matter which medical treatment they seek. it is all faith healing.
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