Speaking to a room full of students, nursing majors, community members and friends, retired professor of research medicine Richard Timms guided his audience on a journey through medical history examining the relationship between bio-scientific medicine and spiritual healing during his lecture “Medicine and Spirituality: Past-Present-Future.”
“Irrational faith in bio-scientific medicine deters a rational acceptance of the inevitable,” Timms said in his Oct. 7 lecture.
Bio-scientific medicine, also known as modern medicine, includes every medical discovery made over the last century including antibiotics, vaccines and medical tools such as the EKG machine. “Ninety to ninety-five percent of what we know has occurred in the last one hundred years,” Timms said.
Caring for terminally ill patients in his 30s, Timms found inspiration for his research when a middle-aged woman with breast cancer without friends or family was under his care. She agreed to take part in his research project investigating the neurological effects of terminal illness. Writing down all of her thoughts and feelings about struggling with cancer, she became excited to share her work. Eventually, the frail woman who never left her bed walked out into the hall to show Timms her latest entry. In the end, this allowed her to “have a spiritual death,” Timms said.
“There is no real accepted definition of spirituality,” Timms said, who prefers to think of spirituality as healing from within, and as an SRJC student pointed out during the lecture, spirituality doesn’t require a specific brand of religion.
When our ancestors fell ill, the cause was believed to be the wrath of god: that this individual must have done something wrong. “When you read diaries of people in the past, you see just how much mystery they were faced with,” Timms said. “If you were a carpenter back then and all you had was a hammer and a dust pan, you just don’t have the tools a modern carpenter has.”
Beginning with Asclepian medicine, Timms walked his audience through a pilgrimage to an ancient Asclepian medicine temple where patients would give up their possessions and stay until Asclepian, the Greek god of healing, came to them in their dreams telling them how to cure themselves from within. “A person’s experience of the illness was just as important as the illness itself,” Timms said.
Timms presented his audience with periods in which spirituality and the practice of medicine went hand-in-hand, from Judeo-Christian ethics taking over for Asclepius to the merging of state and religion to fight illness, clerics delivering newborns in 18th century France and early 19th century U.S hospitals founded by religious and spiritual organizations,
In the 21st century, people receive care from strangers in an unfamiliar place while new and improved tools and medicines are discovered at a rapid pace. “It’s amazing how seductive the power of modern medicine is, it can be very absorbing to say the least.” Timms said. Concentrating solely on the cure and prolonged life, Timms believes doctors disregard the healing process and the patient’s experience with their illness, creating a disconnect between doctors and patients.
“When physicists interview a patient, they only take in the scientific information in order to care for them. Meanwhile the patient can tune in to the nonverbal cues of the physician, the spiritual side if you will, and see them as a whole being,” said Sandy Rylance, a friend of Timms.
When asked if they wanted their spiritual needs addressed, 80-90 percent of patients said yes. Throughout the U.S. less than one-fifth of patients had spiritual healing addressed in Intensive Care Units. Medical practitioners are focused on efficiency and cutting down time, and this system does not allow for rituals and spiritual practices. Also, most physicians are inexperienced with spiritual healing, and cannot perform such requests.
“I liked the correlation between terminal patients, and that they have a higher need for spirituality at a time when their life is coming to an end,” said Riley McCrery, an SRJC student currently enrolled in a comparative religion course.
The craft of medicine expanded at an awe inspiring rate. Increasingly, specialists and doctors can only specialize in one area since new information is discovered constantly. As a result, patients experience a loop of tests, diagnostics and referrals, leaving a huge divide between patients and doctors.
“Medical staff and patients feel a growing degree of alienation despite its growing advances.” Timms said. In his studies, Timms revealed that when a bond is shared between physician and patient, the patient is more likely to go through with treatments and become more trustworthy, resulting in a more positive and even spiritual experience.
