AMEN 2014: Joined Together

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Sessions A

Tim Howe

Healthy Soil, Healthy People

So the name of the lecture is Healthy Soil, Healthy People.

That actually is the name that was given to a conference in Bangor, Maine, 2 years ago February or about a year and a half ago now, where Michael McNeil, who is an agronomist in Iowa, He spoke there and I also spoke.

Before we talk about GMO and organic though I'd like to just take a minute and look at Christ view of healthy soil and healthy people and before we do let's bow our heads for prayer our father we're certainly thankful that you know all about us.

And we know that you'll be with us here today.

Guide our minds, guide our thoughts, bless and keep us.

May we understand this topic better and your world better for having been here.

And importantly, our mission as you explain it to us in your word.

Jesus gave a parable some 2, 000 years ago about a sower that went forth to sow and he scattered seed, the word of truth, and he scattered that in various grounds.

The first was fell on the pathway and the birds of the air snatched it away.

Those represent, as you know, the devil snatching the words of truth out of our hardened hearts, hardened by sin.

And you know, it's interesting, Christ gave a parable of just a few verses, and Ellen White spends 30 pages in Christ Object Lessons explaining the meaning, and she barely scratches the surface.

But in that wonderful chapter the sower went forth to sow, she says, the stony ground, the stones in the ground is the selfishness of our hearts.

And then the next soil that Christ spoke about was the soil that I think afflicts medical professionals the most, and that's the soil where the thorns are.

Christ said it's the cares of this world that just crowd out the gospel.

As medical professionals, we all have cares of this world.

I thought about that as I listened to Phil Mills talk this morning, and he showed that picture of that crowded waiting room.

Have you ever had a waiting room like that?

I don't know if any of you are as bad as I am, but often I get to the end of the day and I'm an hour behind.

You know, and I think, Lord, shouldn't I be on time?

Iris thought that Christ was a little bit behind time.

Because I've been right there wondering what my patients were thinking.

Sometimes we get the good soil is ruined by the cares of this life.

But The good news is, if you've got a hard surface for a heart, if you've got stony ground, if you've got the cares of this life, the plow of the gospel can change the soil of your heart.

And I just pray that each of us as physicians as dentists as health care workers would remember Healthy people begins with healthy soil, and we want to have the gospel plow Work in the soil of our own hearts That's way more important than anything else I'll tell you today.

Because you know, if we worry about all the food that we're eating, I love the passage in Ellen White's writings where she says, if you're afraid your food will hurt you, it most assuredly will.

But if we're all worried about the food we're eating and don't take time to allow our hearts to be purified by God's word and that soil turned over and the rocks cleaned out, we're going to have real trouble.

So don't lose sight of the most important Soil and that's the soil of the heart Well, I'm going to talk to you about organic and GMO and conventional methods of crop Growing if you will or raising of crops You raise crops and you rear children, I'm told.

I don't think that means the application of punishment to that part of the anatomy of the children, although in my house that happened.

But There are basically 3 different ways that you can raise crops the first would be conventional There's not much conventional Raising of crops anymore, it's You know application of pesticides once in a while and tilling the soil.

And I'll come back to glyphosate over and over again.

You may know glyphosate by the term Roundup.

That's most of the crop raising in our country today is GMO and Roundup ready crops.

It's really difficult in our country to separate between Conventional and organic because I mean conventional and GMO because there's no labeling laws What we find if you can separate it out is that conventional isn't too bad if you use a few pesticides, but GMO and glyphosate, as you will see, can cause more problems.

Now there have been some really good studies on the various ways of raising crops.

And there's been quite a few other studies that look at this as well.

The important thing to remember is that there is a lot of difference of opinion that happens to sort of influence the outcomes.

You know, conventional raising of crops, GMO raising of crops versus organic is sort of like medicine.

You have lifestyle medicine and you have traditional medicine.

In lifestyle medicine, as Ellen White put it, in the case of sickness, the cause should be ascertained.

Unhealthful conditions should be changed.

Then nature is to be assisted in her effort to expel impurities and reestablish right conditions in the system That's that's lifestyle medicine As I point out when I'm lecturing to my patients one's the last time you went to the doctor, he diagnosed you with hypertension and he sat down with you and said, now let's see what the problem is here that we can correct so we can get this blood pressure down.

Usually what the doctor does is takes out the prescription pad and writes out an antihypertensive and then takes this, gives this to you and you take it.

Conventional medicine and conventional farming is, well, we've got a disease state, what chemical can I use to fix it?

We don't do that in lifestyle medicine, or there's a new branch of medicine now called functional medicine.

You can think what you want to about that, but their intent in that, and there's a lot of mixture in that, but their intent is to find out what the problem is and fix it so that the organism can get healthy and nature can take care of itself.

And that's really the difference in philosophies between conventional farming and organic farming.

Organic farming seeks to improve the soil or to take out the toxins in the soil to support the plant.

And My wife's sister, her family that she's married into, raises organic walnuts in Northern California.

And they are always Examining their soil and seeing what they need to add to it to keep the the trees as healthy as possible So that they can resist disease and produce wonderful walnuts Whereas you know a couple miles down the road They say well this plants getting this disease and so it needs this pesticide or this herbicide or this fungicide.

You have this disease, you need this medication.

Versus, well, you have this disease, I wonder why you have it, Now let's correct the problem.

So that's sort of the difference between the 2 branches of raising crops.

Now in the last, if you look at online or any reference, you will see a large number of articles supporting both methods of treatment of plants, just like you do in medicine.

Many of the articles in support of the raising of conventional crops, or crops using conventional medicine and GMO and the use of glyphosate or Roundup were very supportive of it, and they were not as supportive of organic methods in years past.

If you look at a survey of the literature in the last 2 to 3 years, mostly the last 2 years, the balance is starting to tip as more and more information gets out.

And it's leaning more toward a organic non-GMO method of raising crops.

If we look at nutritive quality, how many of you read the Annals of Internal Medicine article September 2012.

Okay, well, at least 1 person was alert to the fact that there was a critical article there.

In that article published in Annals, the research or the paper was from a group at Stanford.

They said there is no difference qualitatively between the nutritional content of food raised with conventional methods, GMO food and pesticides and organic food.

They just looked at all the papers that had been published, and they said there is no difference except in 1 area, and that said that was that the pesticide levels were higher in conventionally raised crops.

And they went on to say that this is probably not important because the pesticide levels were likely within the acceptable range of toxicity.

We do the same with medication when we're treating patients, right?

We know that medications have Toxicities, but we say yeah, they do, but they don't happen very often, and they probably won't affect you and So we use statins and and You know I'm sure that no athlete would use a statin right you know that Why?

It decreases their muscle strength and no No ultra athlete would use a statin because their muscle strength goes down.

Of course, we don't think about that in the average person because we have more muscle strength than we need until you get to the elderly.

And there's good data that you probably shouldn't use statins in people over 85 because then a little bit of muscle strength may be the difference between falling and breaking a hip and not.

Same idea goes with when we're dealing with toxins and pesticides.

Well, if you're young and healthy and you're not going to have kids, but if you're in the childbearing years or if you're elderly.

So you have to play all of this in when you're thinking about toxicities.

Interestingly, another study was just published in August of this year, and that was in the British Journal of Medicine, August 2014.

And they did another meta-analysis and review of all the studies looking at the question of nutritive quality of organic versus non-organic waste.

And they came to the opposite conclusion.

Now it's interesting to look at the the blogs on this article Because you have all of these people saying, oh, the publishers of that article are just a bunch of organic greenies, and they clearly have a vested interest.

But wait a minute, let's follow the money here.

How many organic growers do you know that have as much interest in their product financially as the GMO group does?

James McMillan

Kathy McMillan

CLEAR: A Simple Model for Providing Whole Person Care

So I'd like to start with a little prayer and just ask God to guide us as we talk.

Loving God, as we talk about delivering whole person care to your people, I pray that your spirit will be with us.

Guide us as we talk and bring those that you would like to influence by what we have to say.

So the way we wanted to present this was to start with a little case of a patient that I dealt with on the wards.

And then Kathy's going to kind of put together the model that she helped develop at Loma Linda for delivering whole person care.

And then I will wrap it up by applying that model to the case that I saw.

So as a nephrologist, I not only take care of kidney patients, but I also rotate on the wards as a chief in the internal medicine section.

And so just to describe how we do our ward work, Our wards are comprised of 4 teaching teams with usually 1 resident and 2 interns and usually 2 students.

And so it was in this role about 2 weeks ago that I saw a 33-year-old gentleman who had come to the hospital with chief complaint of flank pain.

He had been vacationing in Mexico with, He had gone to a party, was down visiting his girlfriend near Cancun.

He was in the poor section of Cancun, which he told me is just pathetic compared with the rich section of Cancun.

And came back with a very bad case of diarrhea.

He had seen the physicians down there who had given him some antibiotics and some anti-motility agents, and unfortunately continued to have diarrhea.

Thought he was getting a little better, but then just before arriving at our emergency room just really kind of felt so much worse that he felt like, you know, I've got to see somebody.

So he come to our emergency room and there discovered to have an elevated creatinine of 2.6.

His exam was mostly significant for flank pain when you pounded on his back.

His belly was a little bit tender, but otherwise was pretty unremarkable.

He's a very muscular man, was a weightlifter, tall and handsome and just otherwise a picture of health.

Had very little other medical problems, was on an antidepressant for some post-traumatic stress disorder, but otherwise was pretty healthy.

The emergency room gave him 2 liters of normal saline, and he was continued on a rather rapid normal saline drip in the hospital.

But unfortunately, over the next 3 days, there was very little improvement of his symptoms of flank pain.

1 of us will greet the patient and just explain that we're gonna talk about him.

And we like to include the patient in our rounds.

It was the fourth day of this patient's hospital stay and his creatinine had risen steadily since then.

And we were starting to talk about doing a kidney biopsy on him because We were worried that there may be something more than this just plain diarrhea and volume depletion going on.

So the student had presented the case very nicely and at the end said, And the creatinine continues to go up.

And the patient who is an LVN understood that.

And you could just see that he was just crestfallen.

There was a tear in his eyes And here's this big macho guy crying in front of us.

And with that, I'll leave the case and let Kathy sort of present this model that she's helped develop.

And we'll come back to the case afterward.

So in recent years, there has been a renewed desire at Loma Linda University to teach and mentor medical students and other students on campus through all of the schools in how we provide whole person care, and also include the employees in that as well.

And we've wanted to do that in a consistent way, because up until a few years ago, if somebody from the East Coast or Africa were to call and say, so how does Loma Linda do whole person care?

The response would have been based on whoever they happened to talk to because we didn't have a Loma Linda way of doing it.

And so several years ago, There was a group formed of about a dozen people led by Dr.

Gober is the director for the Center for Spiritual Life and Wholeness.

And she pulled together a group of 12 of us from across campus, both on the university side and the health care side, to say, how can we do this in a way that actually applies to all of the disciplines on campus and that it's something memorable And that we can teach it easily and then people will be able to remember it.

So we have developed the CLEAR model and in the last couple years it's evolved a little bit.

We've tried to refine it a little bit more.

And We use this with every single employee who comes to work at Loma Linda.

And we now are teaching it in the curriculum for both first and second year medical students.

And then this year it's being also now taught with nursing students and physical therapy students, all of our allied health students across campus.

So just 1 other thing in terms of introduction on the model.

We tried to come up with something that, like I said, would be used across the disciplines and because of that we realized it's not comprehensive.

This is just like a beginning point for how we would teach this.

A mental health professional would use it differently than a physician or a dentist.

We loved the fact that we had someone from the dental school on our committee and so many times we'd be talking about patients in the hospital and he would raise his hand and say, what about the dentist?

And so we always had to keep thinking about our language so that it would be applicable across.

But we would never expect somebody to sit down with this model and go through every question.

It's just, like I said, some ideas of how we might go about it.

So let's first of all look at the bottom of that beginning page where you begin to see the whole person care model.

Our goal with this is to create an atmosphere of compassion exemplified by the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

What we want to do is to introduce people to Jesus.

And so the way that we do that, first of all, is to connect.

And you see that summary statement is to connecting intentionally with God, self, and others.

Second is listen, being fully present in a sacred time of sharing.

Thirdly, we explore, inviting whole person conversations.

Then we acknowledge, empathizing and communicating understanding.

And lastly, respond, sharing resources that affirm strength and offer hope.

In fact, for me, what was so exciting about it is sometimes you get an acronym and afterwards you're sitting there going, what did that L mean?

And this is something that from the time that our committee finished it, that we were able to easily remember what we were talking about.

So I want to start then with the connect piece.

Connecting intentionally with God, self, and others.

Sometimes when we think about connecting, which seems like a very obvious thing when we're doing whole person care, we begin by thinking about how do we connect with that person.

But in our model, we want to step back even further than that, because when we look at the ministry of Jesus, we realize that he was first connecting with his father.

In fact, there's a quote in the Ministry of Healing when it talks about as Jesus was approaching the pool of Bethesda, when the man was there by the pool that was paralyzed, It says, Jesus was walking alone in apparent meditation and prayer.

And I think that's just a perfect example.

So before we connect with the patient, we have to be in connection with God.

And that's our very first connection piece.

Then we find ways to connect with that patient.

We may want to connect with them in their environment, to say, oh, incredible flowers there by your bedside.

We want to connect them to other people in their family, if possible.

If there's some struggles or relationship issues, we want to connect them with God.

So there's all types of dimensions involved in that connect piece.

Continuing on with the story of the man at the pool of Bethesda, Ellen White talks about the fact that Jesus then came to the pool, he saw all of the people around the pool, And then she says, the sick man was lying on his mat and occasionally lifting his head to gaze at the pool when a tender, compassionate face bent over him.

So here is Jesus connecting with this man.

He was connecting with him in very significant ways.

Another Bible story that I think of is the woman at the well when Jesus came up and she was drawing water.

And he said to her, give me something to drink.

Antionette Duck

Dianne Wagner

Post Abortion Trauma: Recognizing and Responding to the Need for Redemption and Restoration

I was brought up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I have great memories of band trips and choir trips, temperance rallies and Bible conferences.

Now I was baptized in elementary school, but in academy, that's when I gave my heart to Jesus.

Now the college years were harder for me.

It was during this time that my parents divorced and I saw the inconsistency and the prejudice within our church.

It caused me to withdraw for a while and I had to ask questions that I think a lot of young people have to ask.

Is the Lord here, even with the hypocrisies?

Was I just growing up in some enchanted Seventh-day Adventist bubble?

Well, you know, God is good, and He knew how to answer every 1 of those questions.

So when the time came for me to marry my college sweetheart, we both knew we wanted a Christian home and we wanted a Seventh-day Adventist home.

Even with our problems I knew the Lord had anointed this church and we had been given a higher calling.

But now with that said, 6 months before my wedding day, I realized I was pregnant.

And to make matters worse, I had a series of x-rays on my lower spine for work.

I called every physician I knew in the area that I worked with and they all advised me, abort the pregnancy, abort.

It was never referred to as your baby or your child.

I found out how far along I had to be, how much it would cost, and I set a date.

Now you know I must have been in a panic.

I don't remember my husband's response at all when I told him.

When I went to the clinic I talked to a counselor first.

She wasn't a Christian, just a sympathetic ear.

And she assured me at that time it was just a fuzzball.

Now I was a nurse, and I had taken enough anatomy and physiology, but I didn't think to question that.

Now, my life must have been a panic blur for me to consider having this procedure without any anesthesia.

I look back now, and I can't even imagine where my mind was.

I do know that I was scared to death, And the procedure was a nightmare.

The pain was so bad I lost consciousness.

Now when it's all over, I felt a sense of relief, but it was short-lived and very deceptive.

The fact of what I had done was harrowing, so harrowing that it just about destroyed me.

I hated myself and this man that I loved with all my heart and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, all of a sudden became repulsive to me.

You see, the topic of abortion had never been a part of my life.

I had no clue what the effect of making that decision would have on my life.

Now I've taught my children since they were young that panic kills.

Panic is the worst thing you can do, because you're more likely to do something stupid and get yourself killed or someone else.

Now I worked in a regional burn unit for a while, and we used to get some pretty nasty burns and every once in a while we would admit a victim who had actually run into a fire because they panicked instead of away from it.

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