Offit - Bad faith: when religious belief undermines modern medicine

BAD FAITH

Also by Paul A. Offit, M.D.

Deadly Choices

Vaccinated

The Cutter Incident

Autisms False Prophets

Do You Believe in Magic?

Copyright 2015 by Paul A. Offit, M.D.

Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

Design by Cynthia Young in Adobe Garamond Pro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Offit, Paul A., author.

Bad faith : when religious belief undermines modern medicine / Paul A. Offit.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-04061-2 (e-book)

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Religion and Medicine. 2. Child Welfare. 3. Faith Healing. 4. Treatment Refusal. BL 65.M4]

BL65.M4

201.661dc23

2014041626

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all those who perform good deeds in the name of their faith

Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren you have done it unto me.

MATTHEW 25:40

CONTENTS

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above for mercy, Save me, if you please.

ROBERT JOHNSON

O n April 13, 2013, Brandon Schaible, the seven-month-old son of Herbert and Catherine Schaible, died. For several days, Brandon had suffered from pneumonia. The Schaibles prayed, but to no avail. At 8:00 P.M., they called caretakers at the John F. Fluery & Sons Funeral Home, who called the county medical examiner, who called the police. Paramedics rushed to the house and pronounced the child dead.

It wasnt the first time the Schaibles had lost a child to a treatable illness. A few years earlier, in 2009, the Schaibles had also chosen prayer instead of antibiotics for their two-year-old son, Kent, when he contracted bacterial pneumonia.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible are members of the First-Century Gospel Church, a faith healing group in northeast Philadelphia that relies on the advice given in James 5:1415: Is anyone among you sick? Let him call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. After Kent died, Herbert said, We tried to fight the Devil, but the Devil won.

Every year, tens of thousands of Americans refuse medical care for their children in the name of God.

IN 2009, A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD girl was admitted to a hospital in northeastern Pennsylvania with severe anemia. The doctor told her parents that she needed a blood transfusion to survive. Because the girl and her parents were Jehovahs Witnesses, they refused, quoting Leviticus 7:26: And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. The doctor got a court order to allow the transfusion that saved her life.

Four years later, the patient, now married and twenty-one years old, returned to the hospital. She wanted to tell a group of medical students not to make the same mistake on other Jehovahs Witnesses that her doctor had made on her. Intelligent, well-spoken, and attractive, with long brown hair and a disarmingly calm demeanor, she stood in front of a group of stunned students and explained how eternal paradise could no longer be hers. I would rather have died pure, she said, than to live impure. So moving was her speech that several medical students said that, if confronted with a similar situation, they wouldnt give a blood transfusion.

ON AUGUST 22, 2003, Ray Hemphill, an evangelist at the Faith Temple Church of Apostolic Faith in Milwaukee, performed an exorcism on Terrance Cottrell Jr., an eight-year-old boy with autism. Hemphill quoted Mark 1:2526: Be quiet! said Jesus sternly. Come out of him! The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

Hemphill placed Terrance on the floor, put his knee on the boys chest, and screamed, In the name of Jesus, Devil get out! Two hours later, Terrance Cottrell Jr. was dead. The coroner reported that Terrance had died from mechanical asphyxiation due to external chest compression.

In 2005, in response to growing demand, a pontifical academy in Rome sponsored an exorcism training course in Baltimore; more than a hundred priests and bishops showed up.

IN NOVEMBER 2004, New York Citys Department of Health received a report about two newborn boys from Brooklyn who had suffered herpes virus infections. Both had been circumcised by the same ultra-Orthodox Jewish mohel (person who performs a ritual circumcision), who pointed to a sixteenth-century religious text stating that after performing a circumcision, We spit blood into the earth.

Eight years later, on June 8, 2012, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers traveled to New York City to investigate another herpes outbreak. This time it wasnt two babies whod been infected with herpes; it was eleven. Two of the eleven had died, and two others had suffered permanent brain damage. All had been circumcised by mohels who had used their mouths to suck off the blood. New York City health officials estimate that the procedure, called metzitzah bpeh (sucking with the mouth), is performed on about thirty-six hundred babies in their city every yearand on tens of thousands throughout the world.

ON AUGUST 14, 2013, sixteen people in Tarrant County, Texasincluding a four-month-old infantcame down with measles. A few days later, another five children from nearby Denton County also developed measles. All of the cases were traced to the Eagle Mountain International Church, a ministry associated with a popular televangelist named Kenneth Copeland. Measles had spread through the congregation, the staff, and a daycare center on church property. Virtually everyone who became infected was unvaccinated.

During the outbreak, churchgoers were unafraid cause I know Jesus is a healer, said one. So I know that Hes covered us with His blood. More than a thousand people in the surrounding community were exposed in what became the largest measles outbreak in the United States in more than twenty years. Frightened, church officials immediately encouraged parishioners to get their measles vaccine.

On any given day in America, tens of thousands of children whose parents have chosen not to vaccinate them for religious reasons can be found in daycare centers, schools, playgrounds, and churches across the country.

ON NOVEMBER 3, 2009, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of four entered St. Josephs Medical Center, a Roman Catholic hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. The woman was eleven weeks pregnant and gravely ill, suffering from a disorder called pulmonary hypertension. Because the arterial pressure in her lungs was extremely high, the right side of her heart, which pumps blood to the lungs, had begun to fail. Badly. The problem had been caused by her pregnancy. For the next several weeks, doctors tried to treat her disease and save her unborn child. But her condition worsened. It soon became clear that unless she had an abortion, her chance of dying was close to 100 percent.