INR5: Harriet Hall "Religion Can Be Hazardous to your Health"

religion and health you know if you ask people whether religion has good effects or bad effects on the health of believers most people will say it has a good effect here are some typical result results from surveys 70% of adults believe that spiritual faith can help people recover from disease 25% of adults use prayer is medical therapy 99% of family physicians believe religious beliefs can heal and a 75% of family physicians believe that the prayers of others can reach can promote a patient's recovery well I think all those people are wrong there's those beliefs aren't supported by any evidence now science can't prove or disprove the existence of God but science can try to answer questions like these do religious people live longer are they healthier does prayer improve illness outcomes does faith healing really heal well the evidence-based answer to all of these questions is know people may get subjective comfort from religious beliefs or from prayer or from religious rituals but those things don't have any effect on the objective outcomes of disease and prayer and faith may make a terminal patient terminal cancer patient feel better but the cancer won't go away and you won't live any longer that's not to say that there aren't positive findings from a lot of studies studies have found that religious devotion is associated with a decreased rule of morbidity and mortality that church attendance is associated with better health but maybe only in women hmm church attendance is associated with the decreases in memory loss high blood pressure depression and suicide but you notice every one of those claims have the word associated in it the crowing of roosters is associated with the rising of the Sun the crowing of roosters doesn't make the Sun come up correlation is not causation you know if if there's a whole website that's devoted to spurious correlations like this the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets is correlated with the number of lawyers in Georgia you know if a is correlated by B that might mean that a causes B but it might also mean that because is a or it might be that something else C causes both a and B or it might be that the apparent correlation is just a chance to tist achill fluke and of course we know that all half of all published clinical studies are wrong so we can't play place much reliance on studies like those unless they get replicated and a body of consistent evidence builds up and that simply hasn't happened there's a lot of problems with doing Studies on religion and prayer for instance how do you measure religiosity do you ask people if they're members of a church do you ask them how many times how often they attend church do you ask them if they believe in God do they ask them if if they believe in a personal God who answers prayers if you're going to study something you've got to define exactly what it is you're studying and that can be very hard to do and in prayer studies how can you control for people praying for the subjects outside of the study there's all kinds of confounding factors for instance if there's reduced mortality in church scores what does that mean because if you're sick in bed you may not get up and go to church so is it that church-going makes people healthier or is it that healthier people attend church seventh-day adventists have lower cholesterol levels but they're also vegetarians and they don't smoke and drink alcohol and I'd be willing to bet that if you had atheists who followed the same lifestyle they'd probably have similar cholesterol levels so it's not religion it's lifestyle and and one study when people believed that illness meant punishment or abandonment by God they were 19 to 28 percent more likely to die and in another study people who believed in God did better but they also believed in doctors so maybe it wasn't religion maybe it was something about the belief mechanism maybe they trusted their doctors more and complied with the treatment and a lot of the studies on religion have had multiple endpoints and that's a problem because if you test for enough things you're going to get a few positive results just by chance for instance if you do 20 lab tests on a normal person one of them is likely to come up abnormal just by just by chance here's an example of a study with multiple endpoints that was pretty much designed to guarantee that they'd have positive findings they studied patients in a coronary care unit they randomized them and half of them got prayed for and the other half didn't they looked at a whopping 29 endpoints they looked at everything how many days in the coronary care unit how many total days in the hospital how many prescriptions how much of this how much of that blood pressure you name it and for 23 of those endpoints there was no difference whatsoever but there were six endpoints the patients who were prayed for it did better and they made a big deal of that but those six endpoints weren't independent variables for instance they measured the the diagnosis of pneumonia and the prescriptions for antibiotics but those are linked if you have pneumonia you get antibiotics and they measured heart failure and prescriptions for diuretics and again those are linked if you have heart failure you get treated with diuretics and birds data has been described as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy that's where the sharpshooter wants to show you what a good shot he is so he fires a bunch of shots at the side of a barn and then he looks for someplace where there's a nice cluster of shots and it goes up and draws the target around that says C and in studies it's the same kind of thing if you can search through the data and you find a statistically significant results and then you can draw your bull's eye around that here's another flawed study they went to an in-vitro fertilization clinic and they had some of the patients prayed for and some of them not and in the first place the design was bewildering ly complicated they had sub groups and subgroups of sub groups and they claimed that prayer doubled the pregnancy rate and that was just the women who got pregnant I don't think the rate of live births increased but there were three authors listed on this study Lobo was the lead author and believe it or not he didn't even know about this study until six to 12 months after it was finished when they asked him to help write up the results the second author cha failed to respond to inquiries and then he sued his critics for defamation unsuccessfully and the third author Daniel Worth was a real piece of work he was a parapsychologist with no medical training he was a con man with the 20 year history of criminal activities he'd been investigated by the FBI and was in prison after pleading guilty to fraud and he'd been involved in some shenanigans and other research studies that make us suspect that the data from this prayer study was either just completely made-up or was was manipulated in some way now this study has never been replicated and Lobo and Columbia University retracted their names from the study the study itself has never been retracted and it's still being widely cited as proof that prayer works well it isn't proof of anything except that faulty studies sometimes get published and this is my favorite the retroactive prayer study love Avicii went into a hospital records department and he pulled the charts of patients who had been treated for blood infections four to ten years previously he randomized the charts into two stacks one stack got prayed for the other didn't only then did he open the charts and look for differences and sure enough he found that and the patients had been prayed for the length of the hospital stay and the duration of fever were significantly decreased now of course this is just silly and he later explained that this was an experiment intended lightheartedly to illustrate the importance of asking research questions that fit with scientific models and then there's a the faith healing miracles at Lourdes there have been 200 million pilgrims to Lourdes over the years and the Catholic Church has validated 67 miracle cures that's a success rate of 0.0003 percent and Joe Nickell has reviewed these cases and he found that that all of those supposed miracles were conditions that were susceptible to psychosomatic influences or that were known to to show spawning spontaneous remissions and Seth mentioned Mother Teresa on Friday the miracle that got her beatified was Monica besra and Monica said she had a cancer in her abdomen and she had a locket with a picture of mother Teresa and she saw some kind of a beam of light coming out of it and she was cured of her cancer her own husband said mother Teresa didn't care her the doctors cured her and one of her doctors spoke out and said she never had cancer what she had was assist in tuberculosis and she improved slowly over the course of a year on anti-tuberculosis medicine and you've all seen reports like this in the press mom prays dead son comes back to life doctor said he was dead for 45 minutes was that a miracle no it was incompetent reporting the reporter didn't get all effects and he misinterpreted the facts that he did get you know the boy was never really dead in the sense that most of us think of it of his death he technically met the strict definition of clinical death which means that your heart stops beating and you stopped breathing but that's reversible I mean that's the reason we do CPR and the other kind of breath death brain death is always irreversible no one has ever come back after they've been diagnosed with brain death you know death is not instantaneous it's a gradual process and the brain cells are the first ones to die and they start to die after about 16 about 6 minutes without oxygen but CPR provides oxygen and keeps the brain cells alive and hypothermia can protect brain cells for far longer than six minutes the record is a Swedish woman who was trapped under the ice in a skiing accident for 40 minutes before she was rescued it was 40 minutes was no heartbeat and no blood flow to the blank to the brain but they rescued her performed CPR about her body temperature back up and she recovered and doctors know never to stop CPR until the body temperatures back up to normal in the case of this boy he had drowned in an icy lake and was rescued after spending 15 minutes underwater the rescuers immediately started CPR and they kept blood flowing to his brain and supplying oxygen after half an hour of CPR his body temperature was finally back up high enough for the heart to start beating again and his mother's prayers had had nothing to do with it they just happened to coincide with the rise in the body temperature God wasn't responsible for him waking up the doctors were Richard Sloan wrote this book where he examined all the published evidence and he exposed questionable research practices and his conclusion was that even in the best studies the evidence of an association between religion spirituality and health is weak and inconsistent and there's so there's no good credible evidence that from scientific studies that religion improves health but there's plenty of credible evidence that religion can harm and I'm going to cover some of those things this book are in the name of God the true story of the fight to save children from faith-healing homicide by camera and stealth mandir 'full book it exposes the harm that faith healing can do and if you can stomach it it's full of horror stories he says year after year hundreds of people possibly even thousands were killed maimed disabled and disfigured most of the victims were among America's most vulnerable children to vulnerable children women in childbirth and the elderly but it was extremely well hidden you know the faith healing religion that you're probably most familiar with is Christian science they believe that man is not material that illness is an illusion and illness can be banished by correct thoughts and they think that using any kind of medical treatment constitutes a lapse in faith perhaps the best introduction to Christian sciences to tell Rita Swan the story Rita and Doug Swan were Christian Scientists who firmly believed that disease was an illusion and that the most dangerous thing they could do was to show a lack of faith in God by relying on medical treatment and when their baby developed a fever they called in a Christian Science practitioner and he came into their home and prayed over the baby and he told them that Matthew's fever was an illusion that was caused by the fear of the parents and sure enough Matthew recovered so this reinforced Rita's beliefs but at age 16 months Matthew developed a fever again and this time he didn't get better with the Christian Science practitioners prayers and the parents were worried but they weren't willing to reject the lifelong beliefs that made sense of their lives so instead of taking Matthew to a doctor they called in a second Christian Science practitioner and he accused retos sabotaging his work with fear and both of the parents believed that it was defects in their own thoughts that were responsible for Matthew's illness so eventually they called in a Christian Science nurse now that's an oxymoron like military intelligence Christian Science nurses are trained in metaphysics not in medicine and they're not even allowed to use a thermometer in this case the nurse didn't even interact with the child he just talked to Rita and they after the nurse left Matthew went into convulsions and the parents were really desperate at this point and they found an escape strategy it seems that in Christian Science is okay to take someone to a doctor for a broken bone so they said oh well we'll take Matthew to the doctor and say please check him for broken bones and we won't mention the fever and of course the doctor diagnosed bacterial meningitis and a brain abscess and they gave him IV antibiotics and they operated on him to try to reduce the pressure on his brain but it was too late and he died now of course Rita and Doug were devastated and this was a wake-up call that made them realize that the church had been lying to them so they left the church and they even tried to sue the church and that didn't work and then Rita devoted the rest of her life to preventing similar tragedies and other families and she believed that society should not have allowed her to kill her child by medical neglect in 1998 she collaborated with a pediatrician named Seth a sir and they published a study in the journal Pediatrics on child fatalities from religion motivated medical neglect they found 172 well documented cases where they could definitely conclude that the child would have survived if he'd had medical care this involved 23 sex and 34 states and most of the deaths were from Christian Science the Church of the firstborn endtime ministry is faith assembly and faith tabernacle but this was just the tip of the iceberg because they could only publish about patients where they had full documentation there were a lot of other cases that they were pretty sure would have survived with treatment but they didn't have enough documentation to prove it and there were a lot of other cases that they never even had the opportunity to hear about and at the time all but five states had religious shield laws you could essentially murder your child and get away scot free as long as you said you did it because of your religious beliefs reyda established an organization called child children's healthcare is a legal duty they published a newsletter and they have archives they have all kinds of information about cases of medical neglect and legislative efforts and Rita became a one-woman tornado she cut a swath across America she she wrote articles she became a media presence she spoke at conferences on child abuse she lobbied and testified in states where there were there were bills that would have either help or hinder her cause she even moved to Oregon for a time when they were trying to get legislation passed there and she was eventually instrumental in getting religious shield laws changed in several states you may not know that Texas subsidized Christian Science the practitioners and nurses charge fees and their income is not taxed the treatments are covered by government and private insurance and the services are deductible as medical expenses I'm sure you've heard of Jehovah's Witnesses they're not a faith healing sect but they reject blood transfusions and quite often the courts intervene to protect children and when they do that the parents are often relieved they want the child to live and on one level they want them to have the transfusion that'll save their life but on the other level what they don't want to have to do something that they think God doesn't want them to do so they're glad to give the responsibility to someone else there's a new novel out by Ian McEwan The Children Act that gives some insight into this situation the main character is a judge who has to decide whether to order if a transfusion for a jehovah's witness child the child doesn't want a transfusion and he's almost old enough to decide for himself as an adult but he's still technically a child and the eyes of the law so after much soul soul-searching the judge finally orders the transfusion and the child's life is saved but he watches his parents reaction and they're overjoyed they are ecstatic that he got the transfusion and is going to live and he says you know this is really hypocritical and it leads him to lose his faith and to leave the church and to leave his home in all kinds of interesting complications in it's quite a good book you know another faith-healing sect is the followers of Christ in Oregon and this is Jeffrey and Marcy Begley their son Neal suffered all his life from a urinary tract obstruction that could easily have been treated and he eventually died from complications at the age of 16 and towards the end he was too weak to even go to the bathroom by himself and his father would carry him into the bathroom and make jokes about it and in 2010 his parents were sentenced to 16 months in prison for criminally criminally negligent homicide this is Alaina Weiland her parents belong to the followers of Christ too she had a birthmark that kept enlarging his enlarging hemangioma that obstructed her vision and they were treating her with prayer and anointing her without with oils and she was going blind and they were able to remove her from a home just in time to prevent permanent blindness but she's probably still going to have permanent consequences the Shay Bowles belong to the first century gospel Church in Pennsylvania they let their two-year-old son die from untreated bacterial pneumonia they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and they weren't put in jail that were put on probation for 10 years and they were ordered to get medical insurance and have a pediatrician care for their other children well they ignored the terms of the probation and they let another son die of exactly the same thing at the age of seven months their reasoning was that it was more important to obey the laws of God than the laws of man and their pastor commented they lost their sons because of a spiritual lack in their lives the faith assembly Church is a Pentecostal offshoot Natalie joy Mudd died when she was 4 years old they found her the detectives found her dead in her own home with a tumor in her eye that was almost as big as the rest of her head at the horrific scene a police surgeon found horizontal trails of blood along the walls that matched the height of the girl's head Natalie had apparently been leaning against the wall as she dragged herself from room to room blinded trying to find a way to freedom before the tumor killed her later her sister died her sister Leah was five years old and she had a tumor in her stomach the size of a basketball and the courts intervened that it was too late and she died now no charges were filed in these cases because Indiana law has has a resumption an a religious exemption clause the faith assembly church has been responsible for as many as a hundred children's deaths and it has a marginal maternal mortality rate of 870 times the usual the Faith Tabernacle Church has been responsible for deaths from exorcisms one believers strangled her five-year-old son to death and kept his body for several days hoping for his resurrection one couple in Pennsylvania lost six children to untreated illnesses all before the age of two in the faith temple Church of apostolic faith there was an autistic child and they decided he didn't have autism he had demons in his soul so they called him an exorcist The Exorcist wrapped him in sheets pinned his arms and legs and put his knee on the child's chest and screamed in the name of Jesus devil get out well after the child struggled for a while and then stopped struggling after two hours the Exorcist got up to go to the bathroom and the other people in the room noticed that the child was blue and unresponsive and they called 911 too late The Exorcist had an excuse he said God took him I didn't when he was punished thirty months in prison 1224 dollars and seventy five cents restitution you got to wonder how they've calculated that and get this he was barred from exorcisms until he got further training and ex in the one mind ministries they starved a 16 month old to death just because he wouldn't say Amen and they prayed over his corpse for days and then they put it in a suitcase with mothballs and put it in a storage locker where the police found it a year later the mother was indicted for murder and she agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges on the condition that the charges must be dropped if the child was resurrected here's a map showing the faith healing laws by state in the United States in the red states there are no religious exemptions from criminal and civil charges and the black states there are religious exemptions for negligent homicide manslaughter and capital murder and the other states have limited religious exemptions the dark gray would allow religious exemptions for felony crimes against children including child endangerment and neglect the light gray states allow religious exemptions for misdemeanor crimes against children including endangerment and deprivation the pink states allows civil exemptions for medical neglect which can discourage intervention from Child Protective Services now Oregon has one of the best laws with no religious exemptions but it's right next door to Idaho which is one of it has one of the worst laws and some of the faith healing families from Oregon have moved across the state line into Idaho and now Idaho is starting to fill up with the graves of children who didn't need to die in Idaho at least twelve children of faith healers have died of medically preventable conditions just since 2011 but no criminal charges have been filed because the law doesn't allow it there and since Oregon eliminated exemptions in 2011 its convicted three families in the deaths of their children now punishment does work to some extent Christian Scientists have always been law-abiding citizens if the law required medical care they'd be relieved to comply and in Oregon before the laws got passed the followers of Christ Church had buried 83 children who died unnecessarily early and after the laws were passed they had no further deaths in Canada and the UK faith healers can be charged with a crime and two children have died in Canada and none have died in the UK but it's still happening this is Sybil Rossiter and her parents she died at the age of 12 of untreated diabetes a simple shot of insulin would have saved her life they belong to the Church of the firstborn in Albany Oregon her parents were tried and convicted of manslaughter and got 10 years in prison and this happened just in November of 2014 now what were they thinking how could Sybil's parents stand by and see her suffer and die like that well they believe the doctors are only for people who don't believe strongly enough in God and even after they were convicted they said they had no regrets they wouldn't have done anything differently now sometimes these faith healing people are so ignorant of medicine that they can't recognize an emergency and they can't realize how easily a life could have been saved in one case a dying child went into convulsions and they said oh look she's more active she's getting better so what's it like to be immersed in that kind of culture well a former member reached out to me and she asked me to keep her name secret because she was afraid of repercussions from her family in her church but here's what she had to say I am a former member of the followers of Christ I can only describe the deaths of their children as a ritualistic torture for anyone who is against changing laws to protect children I ask you to read the coroner's report so children who've died and then think how would you feel if you were restrained for days at a time while you screamed in pain until you were too weak to fight the disease any longer it's not only the children who are suffering from the abuse but many adults have begged to be taken to a doctor only to be told no and forcibly restrained I suffered for years from ear infections that progressed to the point of bleeding eardrums I went to school with whooping cough I often wonder how many kids I infected with contagious illnesses that could have been prevented I can't begin to make people understand how horrific a life this is I never wanted to be part of the church even as a child I've always wondered why we never went to the dentist or the doctor or the eye doctor our animals always had vaccines in vet care and when I when I asked people in the church why that was they never gave me an answer children were to be seen and not heard to completely understand where I'm coming from you'd have to know my whole story I left the church and my family when I was 16 I chose to get married to escape the abuse at home the church members believe that medicine is a temptation from Satan and to go to a doctor is to give in to that temptation to them it shows a weakness in faith and it's not just in the faith healing churches there have been deaths and traditional churches Larry Parker wrote this book we let our son die they had a guest speaker come into his mainstream church and the speaker related how he had been healed by prayer and Larry's son Wesley was 11 years old and he heard this speaker and he became convinced that he was healed of his diabetes so he stopped taking his insulin after a while he started to feel sick so he tested his urine and sure enough there was lots of sugar in his urine but his father said don't believe the urine test it's a lie of Satan the father withheld insulin and considered it a test of his own faith and he took his son's entire supply of insulin to the local dump and threw it away and his own pastor told him to take Wesley to a doctor and he didn't listen Wesley got worse and worse he developed frequent urination thirst headache pain all over his body vomiting labored breathing weakness after a couple of days of agony he developed hallucinations and then lapsed into a coma and died well his father believed that what resolutely would be resurrected and he wanted to put his body on the church altar the pastor said no you can't do that and he told Larry it was all wrong but at the funeral service with Larry still believed that Wesley would be resurrected and he got the children to chant rise Wesley well he went to jail he went to trial and he recanted but and he was found guilty and given probation and he wrote this book to explain what had happened in the hopes that other people wouldn't follow in his footsteps then there the Christian con artists I just recently reread Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis it's a great book for explaining how people can claim to believe things that they don't really believe and how they can sort of convince themselves that they really do believe or at least convince themselves that they're doing good for the world by saying they believe and today we have people like peter Popoff and Minnie hen who do public performances for paying audiences and they claim here at healing miracles many hadn't even claimed to have raised a man from the dead during one of his services but none of these healings have ever been documented and dr. William Nolan spent many years attending faith healing services all around the world trying to find a single documented case where a person had been healed and he never found one and he wrote a book about it healing a doctor in search of a miracle and of course James Randi wrote the faith healers and he exposed peter Popoff on The Tonight Show and some of the things these con men do have been exposed they have tricks or ways to obtain information about the audience they do cold readings they offer wheelchairs to people who don't need them and then they tell them get up and walk and when people are slain by the spirit and collapse sometimes it's because there's a Confederate behind them that's hitting them behind the knees and helping them collapse and his services do a lot of harm they interfere with proper treatment they encourage people to discard their medications and throw them up on the stage they offer false hope and when healing doesn't occur people feel guilty they feel like like they weren't weren't worthy enough to be healed or like they didn't believe enough like it was their fault and there are even examples of direct harm in one of Kathryn Kuhlman services there was a lady who had spine cancer and Kathryn Kuhlman made her discard her brace and run across the stage well that caused the cancer ridden bones and her spine to collapse and she died after four months of unnecessary pain and disability Paul Offit has written a new book about how religious belief undermines modern medicine and how the duty of society to protect children conflicts with the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom he covers faith healing deaths but he also stresses vaccine refusal and all the harm that that's done now when parents refuse vaccines for their children they aren't just endangering their own children they're endangering everyone's public health and as herd immunity decreases you get outbreaks like the measles outbreak in Disneyland recently and during an outbreak the cases are much more prevalent and the unvaccinated but they can also occur in people who have been vaccinated whose immunity is waned and they can affect aunt some infants who are too young to have been vaccinated they can affect the elderly who are particularly susceptible and they can affect people who were immunosuppressed because of disease or medication in 1991 there was a measles outbreak in Philadelphia and the first thority has heard of it was when the public health commissioner got an anonymous phone call from a woman whose daughter belonged to the Faith Tabernacle Church which doesn't believe in medical care and this woman was worried about her granddaughter because children were getting sick and her granddaughters school and this was the first the public health commissioner knew about it now measles are required to be by law to be reported and he realized there were cases that weren't being reported and before long children started dying five children died in ten days the death rate among the church that the trip that the children in church who got measles was one death out of every 35 cases of measles and that's worse than in any developing country and the church thwarted public health efforts doctors tried to go door to door to identify cases and the church members either wouldn't let them in or they let them in but keep the sick child hidden and they didn't isolate sick children from well children and they continued to refuse vaccination until the judge made children Ward's of the court and ordered compulsory vaccination the final count six four hundred and eighty six cases and church members with six deaths nine hundred and thirty eight cases and non church members with three deaths and all of those nine deaths were in children the attack rate among church members was one thousand times higher than in the surrounding community six years before the Philadelphia outbreak there had been a similar outbreak in a Christian Science School with a hundred and twenty five cases in three deaths and again the school throated Public Health efforts and the students themselves denied having a measles rash they even covered mirrors so they wouldn't have to see the spots in the mirror because they thought that if they admitted they were sick that would mean they weren't right with God unbelievably there was another outbreak in that same school nine years later in that year there were 247 cases of measles in that school compared to 934 cases in the entire country that year there was a measles outbreak not long ago in Texas the Eagle Mountain mega church discouraged vaccinations and one of their parishioners went to Indonesia and brought measles back and gave it to 21 people and the pastor responded he he did offer a vaccine clinic which was a good thing but he gave his parishioners a mixed message he said so I'm going to tell you what the facts are and the facts are the facts but then we know the truth that always overcomes facts forty-eight states allow religious exemptions only Mississippi and West Virginia don't and that is probably no coincidence that Mississippi has the lowest rate of of pertussis or whooping cough of any of the states there are other religious exemptions for a metabolic screening of newborns the PKU screening hearing tests vitamin K and prophylactic eyedrops at birth even religious exemptions for bicycle helmets no when I first heard that I thought what on earth I've read the whole Bible and I should guarantee you there's nothing about bicycle helmets in the Bible and I couldn't even remember anything in the Bible that could be interpreted as not trying to protect yourself from injury but it turns out that this exemption was aimed at Sikhs because they have to wear those big turbans and you can't put a bicycle helmet on over a turban and there have even been religious exemptions for giving blood samples to law enforcement a man named Gregory Michael Zimmerman quoted the Bible when he refused to allow a blood sample to be taken for DNA in an appeals court confirmed his right to refuse but law enforcement got the last laugh because they did a cheek swab and got his DNA anyway you know I strongly feel that all non-medical exemptions should be abolished period because exemptions only interfere with society's duty to protect children there's other medical harms this is one that particularly aggravates me there are Orthodox Jewish sects that practice a thing called meds it's Ababa when mohel does the ritual circumcision he sucks the baby's penis sucks the blood off the penis and this is justified by a text that says we spit blood into the ground this used to be done more often it kind of fell out of favor after it caused tuberculosis and syphilis and 70 babies but in 2004 twins caught herpes from their mohel and one of them died in 2012 there was an outbreak of mohel caused herpes there were 11 cases with two deaths and two babies with permanent brain damage now if the rabbi if the rabbi is is harboring the herpes virus even if he doesn't have a cold sore sucking the baby's penis can introduce the virus into the baby's bloodstream and babies are very susceptible to this virus it goes to the central nervous system and wreaks great havoc so the government tried to intervene they said well we're not going to tell them they can't do it but we'll at least require a farm consent so that parents will know that there's a risk of infection and the rabbi's tried to block the informed consent regulations but they passed and then the rabbi's ignored them in 2013 and 2014 there were three more cases and you know each case the parents said nobody had warned them that there was any possible risk of infection some of the other medical harms I mentioned transfusions and children with Jehovah's Witnesses but adult Jehovah's Witnesses died particularly in childbirth from transfusion refusals there been a number of deaths from Scientology's Narconon program you all know about the sexual abuse by Catholic priests there was an imam in a mosque in Iowa that was accused of sexual abuse and he argued that those charges violated his religious freedom and homosexuality is considered a sin even punishable by death in some countries and it's treated in North America with conversion therapy which doesn't work and in some jurisdictions is prohibited at law prohibited by law at least for children and there's abstinence only sex education which does not work there is HPV vaccine refusal the religious parents are afraid if they give children an HPV vaccine they'll become permitted sexually promiscuous the studies have been done and they've shown that girls who have had the vaccine don't have any more sex than girls who haven't had the vaccine then there are prohibitions on birth control some religions induce guilt over masturbation or guilt over sex for any reason but procreation and Seth told us on Friday how mother Teresa abused her dying patients in her facilities there was a lack of Hygiene inadequate food no medical care and no painkillers and when she herself was terminally ill she went into hospice and got all of the treatments that she denied her patients then there's condoms the Pope has soften to stance on condoms he recently said well condoms are okay for male prostitutes as a first step to becoming morally responsible well that's too little too late and the Catholic Church is responsible for contributing today's epidemic the churches have interfere with embryonic stem cell research and they've prohibited abortions in Ireland in 2012 a woman named Savita halep anavar died she was having a miscarriage and she developed septicemia a blood infection and the treatment for that is to remove the fetus as soon as possible but and the death of the fetus was inevitable there was nothing they could do to save the baby at this point but under Irish law they couldn't intervene as long as they could detect a fetal heartbeat well there was an international outcry and the law was changed in Ireland and now abortions can be done to save the mother's life in Brazil in 2009 two doctors performed an abortion on a 15-week 2038 fetuses and the archbishop excommunicated the doctors they didn't excommunicate the woman who had the abortion they couldn't because in order to be excommunicated in the Catholic Church you have to be 18 this mother was nine years old and she'd been repeatedly raped by her stepfather from the age of six and the stepfather wasn't excommunicated because he said he disapproved of the abortion and in the United States there was a pregnant patient with heart failure and the director of how the hospital Ethics Board was sister Margaret Mary McBride and she was faced with a dilemma with an abortion the fetus would die but the mother would live without an abortion both the mother and fetus would die and four other children would be left without a mother but abortion would violate the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith so she could either save one life or no lives and she chose what she thought was the lesser of two evils and she approved the abortion and saved the mother's life and she was excommunicated you know photos of abortion ask when does life begin and they say life begins at conception but that's the wrong question with a question that we really want to ask is does a fertilized egg have the same rights as an adult human and they say yes but I don't think they really believe that this is an anthology that John Loftus recently published and I contributed a chapter to it and one of the other authors proposed a brilliant thought experiment about abortion the scenario is is this a hospital is on fire and a fireman goes into the building and he's faced with a choice he can either turn left and go to the ward and save a patient or he can go turn right and go to the lab to rescue five frozen embryos that are stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen now if if he really believes that all of these lives are equal it would make sense to save five lives instead of one but I don't think any decent human being which is to turn left I do think that any human decent human being would turn left and save the patient at least I hope they would then there's the harm that religious child training does conservative Christians say that the Bible wants you to beat your children this book by Michael and Debbie pearl advocates training children with harsh coercive methods if a nursing infant bites the breast you're supposed to pull the infant's hair you're supposed to start using a switch as early as six months they recommend using plastic plumbing tubing to spank children because it can be rolled up and carried in a pocket conveniently and it's too light to damage muscle or bone damaging skin and soft-tissue is all right I guess as long as you don't damage a muscle or bone they say a little fasting is good training if a child has a potty training accident they recommend taking him out just outdoors and hosing him off outside they recommend a spanking a child as young as the age of three until he is totally broken the husband is firmly in command over the children and over the and they have strict gender roles here's a quotation don't let a coven of sodomites and Socialists hiding behind the badge of professional psychologists reprogram your natural feelings on male and female distinctiveness you know there have been a lot of negative reactions to the book one reviewer said this isn't training it's child abuse and systematic torture another said the title should have been how to kill your child or make them wish they were dead a review in Psychology Today suggested that those methods should be used on the parents and a star chain in the UK pulled his book off the shelves and apologized to its customers but there have been a lot of positive reactions it's wildly popular in some Christian circles and homeschooling circles it's available free on the internet and it's distributed free de mental military families it's been responsible for at least 3 deaths that we know of Hannah Williams was found naked unconscious facedown in the mud in her backyard she had been locked out of the house and rainy 40 degree weather the family had watched her out the window and laughed as she staggered and fell the other children were convinced that she was possessed by demons and said people like her went to the fires of hell she had been punished by being locked in a closet she'd been denied meals for days at a time her head had been shaved she'd been whipped she had been made to shower outdoors with a hose and on autopsy they found the cause of death was hypothermia complicated by malnutrition and gastritis and her parents were convicted of homicide and sentenced to 28 to 37 years in prison Lydia was whipped for hours at a time they literally beat her to death they beat her older sister to her older sister had to be hospitalized and survived and the father was convicted a second-degree murder in torture and the mother was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and unlawful corporal punishment Shaun paddock was wrapped tightly in a blanket until he suffocated his mother was convicted of first degree murder and his siblings testified that they were beaten daily with by the plumbing tube now people have these rights they have the freedom of religion freedom of speech and they have the right to make their own medical decisions but people can believe anything they want to believe they can speak out about their beliefs so they can try to persuade others they can act on those beliefs even to the extent of rejecting life-saving medical interventions and dying for their beliefs but they don't have the right to force others to act according to those beliefs they don't have the right to endanger children and they don't have the right to endanger public health now the law limits religious freedoms in Thomas Jefferson's bill establishing religious freedom he said the acts of the body unlike the operations of the mind are subject to coercion of the laws and a Jehovah's Witness court case a judge wrote parents may be free to make martyrs of themselves but they are not free and identical circumstances to make martyrs of their children the ACLU has declined to defend a Church's right to refuse vaccines now in conclusion religion can do a certain amount of good it can provide subjective benefits and social social support and comfort but religion does not improve objective health outcomes and religion can be hazardous to health it isn't always it doesn't need to be but all too often it is in the hazards are usually due to perversions of religion but that's the problem religion is inherently prone to such persons into such perversions so that's the end of my talk okay you

Channel: BillJ Castleman

Views: 12,671

Rating: 4.8058252 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Harriet Hall, SkepDoc, INR5, Imagine No Religion 5, Religion and Health, Skepticism

Id: c9Jm1816rrQ

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2015