Tag Archives: Sickness

Commentary

Max Andrews writes about the blessings of suffering

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From Max’s blog Sententia. (H/T Fred W.)

Except:

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in May 2004 at the end of my Junior year of high school. Crohn’s is an autoimmune disease and mine happens to be in my terminal ileum at the end of my small intestine.  When I first went to the emergency room seven years ago I felt like someone had reached into my gut and started twisting my organs around while I was digesting glass.  It was, and is, extremely painful and nauseating.  It was about the sixth day in the hospital when the doctor diagnosed me.  I wept once he left the room because I knew that this had ruined my life dreams of serving in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst.  Well, seven years later I can look at this disease and honestly say that it has been one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me.

I’ve had a flare up (reoccurrence) about once a year since I was first diagnosed.  I refused long-term medication for a while since it started out as a mild case and medication wouldn’t allow me to join the Army.  I graduated high school and took a year off before going to college so I could work with the Army and doctors so I could enlist.  My attempts fell short and I could not overturn or appeal my medical disqualification.  It had been my dream since I was a young child.  I have a very patriotic family and both of my grandfathers served.  My mother’s father was an NCO in the U.S. Air Force around the Korean War and worked with nuclear bombs.  My father’s father was an officer in the U.S. Navy and served on the U.S.S. Dauphin. I felt it was my duty to serve my country.  I excelled in J.R.O.T.C. in high school as the Battalion Commander, the leader of over 250 other cadets and I was one of the most decorated (if not the most decorated) cadets in the school’s history.  I studied government until my second semester sophomore year of college.  I knew then that I was called to something greater; I knew that God had a specific purpose for me and his purpose was greater than anything I could have planned for.  I then became an undergraduate biblical studies student and I’m now a philosophy graduate student.  However, these are peripheral details that resulted from my Crohn’s.  The blessing is so much greater than any classes I’ve ever taken.

God used Crohn’s to alter the course of my life.  This one event was a catalyst for so many changes.  Since getting Crohn’s I have gotten saved. Since being saved I started asking myself the deeper questions of life and existence, which led me to study philosophy.  My relationship with God continually grows and I think about God throughout the entire day.  There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about God or ask him questions about him and existence.  God has used Crohn’s as a means to demonstrate my purpose in life.  Well, it’s not so much that I know my meta-purpose, so to speak, but it’s a way that God has shown me that I do have purpose and meaning. When I think about the way my life would have been without Crohn’s I don’t believe I would appreciate my existence and God’s work as much as I do now; because of that I have no problem believing Crohn’s is a gift from God.

Please read the whole post, there’s more to it. It shows you how Christians think about suffering in a completely different way from non-Christians. We think that suffering can be valuable if a person endures it well and learns from it.

News

New study finds that gay men are twice as likely to report having cancer

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From the Sydney Morning Herald.

Excerpt:

A large study in California released Monday found that cancer may be nearly twice as prevalent among gay men as among straight men.

The study relied on self-reported data from the California Health Interview survey, the largest state survey of its kind in the United States, and included more than 120,000 people over three years: 2001, 2003 and 2005.

A total of 3,690 men reported a cancer diagnosis as adults. Gay men were 1.9 times as likely as straight men to have been diagnosed with cancer, said the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer.

There was no such difference witnessed among lesbian and straight women, but gay and bisexual females were twice as likely to say they were in fair or poor health after a cancer diagnosis compared to their heterosexual counterparts.

[…]The survey did not address how cancer survival rates may differ among those of varying sexual orientation, and may not reflect a true difference in the actual cancer rate because it relied on data from survivors only.

But researchers believe that higher anal cancer rates, caused by the sexually transmitted human papillomaviruses, as well as complications from human immunodeficiency virus, may be at least partly to blame.

“The greater cancer prevalence among gay men may be caused by a higher rate of anal cancer, as suggested by earlier studies that point to an excess risk of anal cancer,” said the study.

Researchers “did not have data available on the rate of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, which is higher among gay men, and may have contributed to the significant association of cancer prevalence and sexual orientation.”

HIV and AIDS have been linked to a series of cancers including Kaposi sarcoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma as well as anal, lung, testicular cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma.

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Commentary

Mary Eberstadt’s book “Home Alone America”

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I thought I would write quickly about Mary Eberstadt’s book “Home Alone America”, which I read a few years back.

Here’s an article from National Review by Stanley Kurtz.

Excerpt:

Up until now, public discussion of issues like day care has been dominated by feminist journalists and academics who take their own career decisions for granted and call on society to make their lives easier: How can I be equal to a man if society won’t give me better day care? Eberstadt strides into this situation and asks a totally different series of questions: Are children any happier in day care than they are with their mothers? If not, should that effect a woman’s career decisions? Are unhappy children who bite and get aggressive or ill in day care growing tougher, stronger, and more ruggedly individualist, or is it we adults who are being coarsened to needs of our children?

[…]Increasingly, we’re medicating children for mental illnesses that barely existed in the past. Take “separation anxiety disorder” (SAD), defined as “developmentally inappropriate and excessive anxiety concerning separation from home or from those to whom the individual is attached.” This syndrome is now said to affect about 10 percent of the nation’s children. One of its symptoms is “refusal to attend classes or difficulty remaining in school for an entire day” — in other words, what used to be called “truancy.”

Are 10 percent of the nation’s children really in need of treatment for SAD, or are most of these children actually behaving more normally than mothers who have little trouble parting from their children for most of the day? Is it surprising that children get SAD in the absence of their parents? As Eberstadt suggests, maybe we need to define a whole new range of disorders: “There is no mental disorder…called, say, preoccupied parent disorder, to pathologize a mother or father too distracted to read Winnie the Pooh for the fourth time or to stay up on Saturday night waiting for a teenager to come home from the movies. Nor will one find divorced second-family father disorder, even though the latter might explain what we could call the ‘developmentally inappropriate’ behaviors of certain fathers, such as failure to pay child support or to show up for certain important events. There is also nothing…like separation non-anxiety disorder to pathologize parents who can separate for long stretches from their children without a pang.”

And here’s an article from National Review by Rich Lowry.

Excerpt:

Eberstadt writes: “Of reported cases of chlamydia in 2000, 74 percent occurred in persons age 15 to 24, and that number is judged to be ‘a substantial underestimate of the true incidence of chlamydia among young people,’ in the words of The Alan Guttmacher Institute. An estimated 11 percent of people age 15 to 24 are infected with genital herpes, and 33 percent of females in the same age group are thought to be infected with human papillomavirus (HPV). This age group is also thought to account for 60 percent of gonorrhea cases. … Of the 18.9 million new STD cases in the United States in 2000, about 9.1 million, or half, were found in people between the ages of 15 and 24.”

[…]Where are many of these kids having sex? In empty homes. A study in the journal Pediatrics of public-school kids found that 91 percent were having sex in a home setting — usually after school, when parents aren’t around. Absent parents are practically an invitation to early sexual initiation. According to Pediatrics, “Youths who were unsupervised for 30 or more hours per week were more likely to be sexually active compared with those who were unsupervised for 5 hours a week or less.”

[…]This is just the beginning of Eberstadt’s distressing catalog:

There has been a dramatic increase in ear infections, technically known as otitis media, in children. Eberstadt quotes a specialist: “Virtually every study ever done on the increase in otitis media has shown that day care is the most important difference.”

According to Eberstadt, “Practically every index of juvenile mental and emotional problems is rising.” Many of these maladies are linked to absent parents. A Department of Health and Human Services report found that “children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.”

And so on.

A sample chapter is here.

If you’ve never thought about the effects of day care and parent-child separation, you should take a look. I thought that there were places in the book where the argumentation was a bit loose, and evidence was suspect or absent, but it is a good thing to get a different point of view on these issues. My concern is that parents will be all too ready to blame the suffering of the children on “mental problems” caused by “genetics” or “brain chemistry”, rather than give up their two-parents-working lifestyle, and the economic perks that it brings. Frankly, children are a pain, and some parents will prefer to have to deal with grown-ups at work instead of screaming babies at home. Somehow, they feel ashamed for having to take care of children – as if raising children is somehow useless work because the government doesn’t get any tax revenue from it. And the government might encourage parents to keep working even if the children are showing symptoms of anxiety, depression, etc.

Imagine how this works out in a single-payer system, e.g. – Canada. The government wants women to work, so they can get more tax money for taking over more of private businesses and redistributing wealth in more areas to make everyone “equal”. They raise taxes, and now more women must work instead of staying home. Children go into government-run day care centers funded by the government via tax money from working mothers. The day cares educate the children instead of the parents. What happens when the children develop mental problems or behavioral problems? Can the state-run medical system blame the government for forcing women to work? Of course not – the child is somehow to blame, and will have to be medicated. The parents believe this because they do not want to believe that their drive for more material possessions has caused their child any harm. It must be the brain chemicals that are to blame – not the intrusion of government and not the selfishness of the parents.