What would you think of a major regulatory body, known for its demanding standards for quality and utility—read integrity—that suddenly abandons its own rules, despite the loud protestations of its own quality advisory committee, and put its imprimatur of approval on a medication that: 1) fails to meet its established endpoints of utility; 2) costs more than $50,000 per year; and 3) has well-documented negative side effects? Not much, I hope. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently did with Aducanumab (trade name Aduhelm), a new monthly injection for early Alzheimer’s Disease.

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.