AMEN Australia 2020 Conference: Centres of Influence

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Bee See

God in Idiopathy

Good evening and welcome to this evening's session of the AEMEN 2020 conference.

I pray that you have been blessed to see your colleagues, your fellow believers, celebrating and giving thanks for the blessings of the past year.

I want to share a little bit about 1 concept that I've been pondering on in this past few months and that is the concept of idiopathy.

If there's 1 word that equally frustrates doctors, dentists, healthcare professionals, parents, patients alike, I'm pretty sure that idiopathic may come pretty close.

You know the singular word usually concludes what has often been a barrage of tests, referral from 1 practitioner to another, to a specialist, to an academic, to perhaps another specialist, looking for a suggestion of something else that might work or a roller coaster of hope followed by disappointment in a long process of investigation.

And oftentimes, what comes is the diagnosis of idiopathic disease, the upper limit of human understanding of what that person is going through, and in some sense, a mark of surrender.

Idiopathic disease is defined as a disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin.

In Greek, literally meaning one's own suffering or a disease of its own kind.

You know, the story of John 9, starting in verse 1, tells of a man that was born blind.

Verse 1 tells us, as he went along Jesus saw a man blind from his birth and his disciples asked him, Rabbi who sinned?

This man or his parents that he was born blind?

You know in the mind of a health care professional we're taught to run through all the differentials when someone comes in with a certain set of signs or symptoms.

What are the questions that we would need to ask?

What are the special tests or x-rays that we might need to take or other investigations?

Who would we refer to if we need a second opinion or a third or a fourth?

Of course in that day and age back in Jesus's time the default explanation was that his disability was a result of sin perhaps his sin or his parents in most likely something they did something they ate something they didn't do perhaps in other words their lifestyle You know in the ancient Israelite times beyond the limit of their contemporary medical understanding they had their own warped concept of lifestyle medicine.

If you were to eat certain kosher foods, if you were to follow certain rules, if you were to obey shabbat in a certain way, to pay your tithes etc etc etc you would be blessed with good health.

I'm not sure what sins they must have attributed to equate to blindness.

Maybe they didn't have a strong enough faith in God.

Through, though In a slightly different context and against the backdrop of medical science today, I find that as I discuss lifestyle concepts with my patients, there is an uncanny, similarly pervasive misconception and oversimplification of lifestyle medicine that still persists.

As I reflect on my experience, my very small niche of lifestyle practice, as it were, in private dental practice, I realize that dentistry is nothing if not a lifestyle discipline.

We advocate for lifestyle change each and every day.

The vast majority of what I see as a dentist has to do with diet, smoking, alcohol consumption, stress management.

It comes from excessive sugar intake, poor cardiovascular or diabetes control, poor stress control, excessive smoking, alcohol intake, poor hygiene.

Yet the vast majority of people that I see in my practice are health literate enough to know these things are bad for them before I even have to say it.

What's more, most of my colleagues, my dental colleagues, are saying exactly the same thing wherever they are, whether they be a people of faith or not.

Therefore, if a dentist or a dental health practitioner is advocating for all of the above, choose your foods wisely, abstain from vices, abstain from alcohol and smoking, be temperate, they're essentially a lifestyle practitioner.

So then the question to me is what value do I bring, what value do I add above and beyond what Google and common knowledge and the dentist down the road already tells them to do.

Perhaps this oversimplification is a similar misconception for lifestyle medicine and I guess many of you might be able to relate this to some degree in your practice or resonate with this in other ways.

If you ask the average person in Australian communities today to choose healthier foods, to seize harmful vices, to get more exercise, to have a greater sense of mental wellness, it turns out these suggestions are not foreign news to them.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry, every news outlet, every media outlet is now pushing these healthful messages.

And then the lifestyle practitioner's expertise then becomes about providing experience and wisdom on dosage, frequency, and application to manage their particular scenario in combination with pharmaceuticals or other techniques.

What then does your Adventist lifestyle medicine practice add beyond what a holistic, well-considered practitioner down the road would provide to your patient?

What would your practice add beyond what the non-believing naturopath would tell your patient?

If all patients were to follow all the lifestyle recommendations that you provide and all the rules that are prescribed, healthy eating, healthy lifestyle, healthful mental hygiene, but they still have disease, What is the power of your lifestyle practice then?

Many of us like to share the success stories.

We like to share about how we cured someone's depression or managed it really successfully through these and these and these techniques.

Or we got someone's diabetes under control because of this and this and this and this.

Or someone reversed their cardiovascular risk because of this and this and this and this.

But I'd like to submit to you today that perhaps there is a value-add opportunity in the moments of idiopathy, idiopathic disease, in our practice.

Some examples that I've come across that have really made me stop and ponder in the quiet moments of this year.

I'd see siblings from the same family presumably eating the same diets.

Mom is very fastidious about no refined sugars, only fruit, whole fruit, as snacks during the day.

They brush the same way, they have the same genetics, but 1 has rampant oral disease and the other barely has anything.

Well, the 6 year old who has just broken through their adult molars, their first adult molars, has a condition called molar incisor hypomineralization, which basically means that as soon as these molars come through into the mouth, they start to break down.

The structure breaks down, it exposes the sensitive inner layers of the tooth.

The kid is not able to eat or drink without being in pain, they lose sleep, they have toothaches, they have abscesses, not because of any wrongdoing on the parent's or the child's part, but because of this developmental condition in the teeth of a six-year-old who will then have to go on to have either multiple fillings at best potentially root canals and crowns for the rest of their life in this tooth or an extraction of 4 adult teeth at the age of 6 to 9 years old.

What about the more sinister social and systemic examples that we might see in our practice of idiopathic disease?

Why does someone that is a strong believer in Christ still have a tendency to mental illness?

Why do they struggle with depression year after year even though they claim the promises of God, they eat all the flaxseed in the world, they have a raw vegan diet, they go to church, they are active.

And the person down the street that doesn't believe in Jesus is perfectly healthy mentally.

Why do some people struggle with addiction more than others?

Why do some people seemingly healthy with no comorbidities contract COVID and others don't?

Or more tragically, as my patient shared with me this year, why did some of them lose their businesses that they'd worked so hard for because they followed the COVID rules, when others chose to run their businesses flagrantly, breaking the restrictions, and prospered and thrived as a result.

The Bible has numerous examples of idiopathic disease.

Job and his boils and his plagues, Lazarus and his sudden death, and the blind man of John 9.

In the Bible, in life, and particularly in 2020, there are a lot of I don't knows.

But you see, where our humanity ends, there's where divinity begins.

When the secular medicine diagnosis ultimately says idiopathy, there is a sense of resignation.

Self-contempt the created being that you are.

Yet God delivers an alternative prognosis for the case of idiopathic disease.

John 9 verse 3 says, Neither this man nor his parents sinned, said Jesus, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

When our sickness, our health, our everything has so much more to do with the universe than it has to do with us.

For the glory of God, there is a reason for our suffering, a reason for our faith, a reason to hope, a reason to share.

There is a reason to remain cheerful with a song in our lips, even though we go bankrupt.

There is a reason to persist with treatment, even though your depression is so tiring, so seemingly fruitless and unresponsive to any treatment so far.

There is a reason to get up every day and hope even though society has spit on you and cast you aside as a blind person for the past 20-30 years.

1st Corinthians 4.9 God has set forth the apostles last as if it were appointed to death for we are made a spectacle unto the world and to angels and to men.

There will be some of us vegan, raw food eating, holy Christians, devout, amen attendees, who will suffer devastating loss, possibly disease.

We'll have family members and friends who succumb to mental illness despite the best of efforts of upbringing, of faith and circumstance.

We'll have some amongst our ranks that have succumbed to COVID, had their business bankrupted, or suffered other types of loss in their families.

Likewise, there'll be patients that you have that you see that won't get the results that you want, or that they were expecting either.

Because they are an opportunity to bridge humanity and divinity, to share the reason why you, despite your challenges, despite the losses, despite your idiopathies, choose to persist beyond the very best that human understanding and science can offer.

Lifestyle medicine to you is so much more than relishing the physical optimal that we have.

Because ultimately, lifestyle to you means that you believe your body, in sickness or in health, is a temple of God to be used for His glory.

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God in Idiopathy

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