Re: Belief and the Brain

It may be a bit dated scientifically speaking (from the early 80s I
think), but Paul Brand (coauthored with Philip Yancey) wrote a book
"Pain: the Gift Nobody Wants" that offers excellent medical/spiritual
insight to how humans do/don't deal with pain. He was an orthopedic
surgeon that spent much of his career with the pain-free lepers of
India. While he sympathized with the apparent excesses of pain that
sometimes physiologically burden us, he also became acutely aware of how
important pain is to the healthy functioning of a human being and how
much of an ingenious gift it really is. We can't even say that we take
this gift for granted. We despise it. And of course I wouldn't be
writing or thinking this way in the slightest if I was in the midst of a
migraine or a toothache. But since I'm not, I happily babble away. If
anybody is tempted to write off all pain as an evil curse from a
creation gone awry, then they should read this work.

--merv

Iain Strachan wrote:

> Dave,
>
> Some responses interleaved. BTW isn't it good to be having a
> discussion about something that is unquestionably about science/faith,
> but not, for a change about evolution/creation/ID?
>
>
> the brain. However, there are areas that still puzzle. For
> example, why
> are some people sensitized to pain? The same stimulus will produce
> moderate pain in one person and intense pain in another.
>
>
> It's said that if men were the ones who had babies, that the human
> race would die out!! I certainly have a much lower pain threshold
> than my wife! Joking aside, I think one's perception of pain, and how
> much one can bear also is connected with psychological factors. If
> you stress about things, it makes it worse. Although it's not related
> to pain as such, the following incident that happened to my
> mother-in-law may illustrate this. Some while back, she was plagued
> by buzzing and drumming in her ears. She was extremely anxious about
> it and thought that she might have a brain tumour or something. The
> drumming was so loud and insistent that on occasion she nearly
> fainted. After several weeks wait, she got examined at the hospital.
> The good news was that there was nothing at all serious wrong, no
> tumour or anything. The bad news was there was nothing they could do
> about it - it was due to a bone pressing on an artery or something
> like that, and what she could hear was due to the flow of blood.
> However, despite the fact that there was nothing that could be done
> about it, she quickly recovered enough to cope with the pain - freed
> of worry about the potential sinister implications of the buzzing
> noise, she found quite soon that the buzzing decreased in intensity.
> It never really went away - still now, several years later, she can
> hear it if she thinks about it, but she hardly ever thinks about it,
> and so it doesn't bother her. When she thought it might be due to a
> tumour, of course she thought about it all the time, and it was
> unbearable. Now, what I don't know is if the buzzing noise decreased
> objectively (is there an objective measure of the noise in your ears,
> or an objective measure for pain?), or was it subjectively? I'm
> guessing it was a bit of both.
>
>
>
>
> The lack of faith impaired the work of Jesus (Matthew 13:58). With
> what
> you mention, this gives us a positive correlation between faith and
> miracle.
>
>
> Yes, but one has to remember that it's not necessarily the faith of
> the person being healed, but that of the person asking for the healing
> to take place. Two examples: the centurion's servant, and the man who
> was lowered through the roof. In that case it was the faith of the
> friends. So for that case, we can't argue that it was a positive
> attitude in the patient towards their own illness that triggered a
> placebo effect (or I would perhaps prefer to say a cognitive
> approach). In that case, it was purely the effect of the friends that
> brought about the miracle, and as such, I don't think there's any
> scientific explanation available. Perhaps it also tells us that we
> should show similar faith and pray for the sick (which indeed we do).
>
> As a personal note, my wife and I have been praying for a friend I
> mentioned elsewhere who believes electric fields from household
> appliances affect her (nocebo) for about two years now and are
> saddened to see the isolation of that person getting more and more
> extreme (sleeping in a tent next to a lake to get away from the
> emanations coming from the street lamps etc). Sometimes I get quite
> cross with God for allowing this to happen .. :-(
>
> Iain
>
Received on Sat Jan 14 16:46:32 2006