The Point Blog

As the medical system groans beneath the burden of the pandemic, conversations have appropriately turned to burnout among healthcare professionals. Most dialogues point to external systems, e.g., the shrinking workforce, limited supplies and political contentions over vaccines. While these forces exert significant influence, and indeed pose a crisis in many parts of the U.S., deeper and more personal dynamics are at play.

“Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14, ESV).

How do we, as followers of Christ, engage the secular world?

This is no simple question, as the situations and circumstances are nearly infinite in possibility.

Since St. Augustine penned The City of God, there has been a general understanding that Jesus did not come to establish an earthly dominion. One might argue there have been “Christian nations” in a particular sense, but through most of Western history, church and state have always been separate power bases in an uneasy tension. Sometimes the church was on the ascendancy, as when Pope Gregory VII excommunicated emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) over the investiture controversy. You may have heard the story about how Henry stood three days barefoot in the snow to beg forgiveness. This feeds the popular myth of an all-powerful Catholic church embraced by many secularists. Less well known is that three years later, after his second excommunication, Henry IV led his armies against Rome, forcibly deposing Gregory VII and putting his own man in charge. So much for the “all-powerful” church. Power is fleeting, even for emperors and popes.

While many people, including healthcare professionals, think that much of medical ethics is highly arbitrary and relativistic, with the single prevailing rule being patient autonomy, there are nonetheless some widely accepted principles within medical ethics. Principlism, which is based on four guides made famous by Beauchamp and Childress, includes patient autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. Unfortunately, for many people, these are the only ethical considerations needed to make informed decisions regarding right and wrong regarding patient care. Several other considerations are needed to decide complex issues rightly.

As I continue my series on faith and culture, Thanksgiving is right around the corner. But believe it or not, I didn’t choose this topic because of its appropriateness for Thanksgiving week. The topic has been close at hand in my own life of late, which has made me even more aware of its cultural applications.

By way of background, I must admit that I struggle to ask anyone to do anything for me. Asking a friend down the street to give my daughter a ride home from school is difficult and makes me think about what I need to do to even the playing field.

I joined CMDA in 1982 in the middle of my OB/Gyn residency. At that time, I had known the Lord for about eight years but had not grown spiritually, because I had failed to find a solid, biblical church. Around that time, I finally found a church that helped me grow and develop in my Christian faith. With that growth, I began thinking about how I could incorporate my faith into the practice of medicine and discovered the Christian Medical & Dental Society (CMDS), which was CMDA’s name at that time.

Ideology-driven legislative initiatives are underway to ban therapeutic choice—“conversion therapy” being the provocative, pejorative and ill-defined colloquial term used as a jamming tactic—in the U.S. and internationally for people with undesired same-sex attraction or levels thereof. Carolyn Pela and Philip Sutton have delivered a very welcome contribution in the form of a stringent study answering criticisms levied against what is more properly termed SAFE-T (sexual attraction fluidity exploration in therapy), SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) or change-allowing therapy. The foundational requirement for such therapy—and for talk-therapy of any kind for any patient complaint—is a willing, motivated and self-directed client. Involuntary therapy is failed therapy, no matter the problem.

As far back as data exists, the universal experience has been that transgenderism was an extraordinarily rare occurrence, especially among females.
The last decade, however, witnessed an unprecedented increase in the numbers of young people identifying as transgender and seeking to transition. The surge was particularly striking among young adolescent females who were heavy users of social media but had no prior history of gender dysphoria. Something seemed amiss.

Last week, a friend asked me, as a family physician knowledgeable about COVID-19, to speak to a group she belongs to of community leaders, here in northeast Louisiana. I spoke about the current status of COVID infections in our area and the need for vaccination. The vaccination rate is low in our area—currently only 37 percent are fully vaccinated in our parish.

My kids have attended a classical, Christian school for many years. While we love the school for several reasons, its academic rigor set it apart from the several other schools we considered when making the decision to move our kids there 16 years ago. Other schools offered personal attention, others had great mission statements, others had in-depth biblical teaching. But it was all of these things, combined with high academic expectations, that sold us in the end, since the primary purpose of school is to educate kids academically. In the grammar school grades at our school, the students are taught to always do an “Excellence Check,” that is, to look back over their test or assignment and double-check for any errors prior to turning it in. The concept of the Excellence Check resonated with me when my kids were that age because it served as a regular reminder to them that they should be giving their best to each assignment. It was never a “Perfection Check” or a “Compare to Your Neighbor’s Performance Check.” It was a reminder for each student to do his or her best at all times. One student’s best might be a perfect score, while another student’s best might be much lower, but the expectation to do one’s best was clear. We might think of excellence as being at the top of the class or someone who stands out in his field, but that isn’t the way our school defined it, nor the way I am defining it here.

In the spring 2021 edition of CMDA Today, CMDA published an article that examined the ethical basis for taking a COVID-19 vaccine. The goal of the article was to reassure CMDA members of the good reasons to utilize the COVID-19 vaccines produced in the last year. Since the article’s publication, several members have written with ongoing questions and concerns about the ethical status of the vaccines due to their association with abortion-derived fetal cell lines. The purpose of this blog post is to address those concerns. An update on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines will be addressed in the future.

In a weekly column on Sunday, August 29, Evangelical attorney David French declared “It’s Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection.”

Is that really a thing, you may ask?

There certainly is some evidence for that. Among those who have already been vaccinated against COVID-19, white Evangelicals trail the national average by 10 percent. A significant difference, but not a dramatic difference. In fact, the majority are vaccinated, according to this tweet displayed in the article.

Legislation to ban so-called “conversion” therapy or practices for people with undesired same-sex attraction, gender dysphoria and other sexual minority issues is being put forward across the globe.

Some systems have treated healthcare professionals with clinical skill loss in an almost punitive manner. Aside from careless incompetence, abandonment of patients or grossly unprofessional behavior, this is inappropriate, damaging to the professionals and harmful to society.

As Christian healthcare professionals, God has granted us the high privilege and responsibility of serving others through healthcare. Part of this responsibility is that of maintaining clinical knowledge and skill in order to provide high quality care to our patients. If we lose some of our skills due to trauma, physical or mental illness, or due to normal aging, this may not always be optimally possible.

“I’m still a zero’: Vaccine-resistant Republicans warn that their skepticism is worsening”) that examined the vaccine hesitancy of conservatives.

Some would say it started earlier this year in January when the 2021 legislative session began in most states. Some would say it started with our increasingly more “live and let live” culture. However, the iniquity started before any of us were born.

The Washington Examiner recently published my op-ed on the radical Equality Act. This ideologically coercive and discriminatory bill, which has already passed the House and now is on the Senate calendar, will radically impact your professional career and your ability to live out your faith.

The commentary is below, followed by excerpts of a CMDA letter to U.S. Senators and of written testimony submitted by several CMDA members.

While COVID-19 has consumed the attention and energies of the world for the last year, other bioethical and scientific challenges have not gone away and are set to burst back to the forefront this year. Significant advances were made in 2020 to move away from the antiquated science using human fetal tissue from abortion and toward development of modern techniques and biological models that do not use fetal tissue. However, a resurgence of research using trafficked aborted fetal body parts is likely with the new White House Administration. Calls have already been made to gut the current ethical regulations on federal funding of fetal tissue research. The drumbeat for taxpayer dollars to pay for experiments using fetal organs and tissues from abortion continues, trying to make use of the crisis to justify unethical research, e.g., making humanized “lung-only mice” to investigate COVID-19. In the meantime, adult stem cells have made “mini-lungs” in the lab that faithfully model normal lungs, and they are already being used to study COVID-19 infections and therapies.

n the process of these elections—national, state, county, city—people who used to treat others civilly have forgotten how to do so. Politics has torn families apart, severed relationships and caused some people to say and do things that can never be unsaid or undone. In their efforts to obtain elected office, politicians and their support teams in both parties perpetrated rumors, lies and innuendo regarding opposition candidates. Some of these actions have destroyed reputations. Social media has helped to perpetrate the spread of misinformation.