Since both Christmas and All Saints Day are originally pagan holidays that Christianity is still trying to influence I think there is a place in both Christmas and Halloween for Christians to add to the potential cultural shifts. I have memories from youth about the fear that was created around this time because many of my Church influences focused on how Satan was honored in Halloween. While this may be the case in limited situations, the holiday is generally benign in our culture. For this reason I and my wife have allowed limited involvement in trick-or-treating (in fun and not scary costume), and carving of pumpkins. Our goal is to avoid the fear that even those in God's house feel during this time, and also to add to the cultural shift to fun at Halloween and not pagan mischief. As my children develop a higher awareness of their history I want to take full advantage of the history that the Christian Church has remembered on the sunset of the 31st of October and continue to teach it to our children. We don't spend enough time telling the stories of Corrie ten Boom, Martin Luther, and Eric Liddell in between stories of Moses, Noah, and Paul. Instead of hiding from Halloween, let's use it for the purpose our Church fathers and mothers intended.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Halloween
Since both Christmas and All Saints Day are originally pagan holidays that Christianity is still trying to influence I think there is a place in both Christmas and Halloween for Christians to add to the potential cultural shifts. I have memories from youth about the fear that was created around this time because many of my Church influences focused on how Satan was honored in Halloween. While this may be the case in limited situations, the holiday is generally benign in our culture. For this reason I and my wife have allowed limited involvement in trick-or-treating (in fun and not scary costume), and carving of pumpkins. Our goal is to avoid the fear that even those in God's house feel during this time, and also to add to the cultural shift to fun at Halloween and not pagan mischief. As my children develop a higher awareness of their history I want to take full advantage of the history that the Christian Church has remembered on the sunset of the 31st of October and continue to teach it to our children. We don't spend enough time telling the stories of Corrie ten Boom, Martin Luther, and Eric Liddell in between stories of Moses, Noah, and Paul. Instead of hiding from Halloween, let's use it for the purpose our Church fathers and mothers intended.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Who I Really Am
On my facebook account I recently engaged in a conversation with an old friend who knew me as a teenager and young adult. She wasn't aware that I had left my family business nine years ago and that I had changed my stance on healthcare. My friend was apparently quite surprised when I took up for a modality that was quite opposite my former practice. I have also been directly and indirectly accused of taking up only for conventional medicine while summarily rejecting anything that smacks of alternative or complementary "medicine". In an effort to show that I am a bit more complex than this let me tell a little about how "Josh Mather, Nurse" came to be.
The most important people in this story are my parents. When I was very young they generally followed the pediatrician's advice, even taking us to the clinic with cartoons on the wall for the horror of childhood vaccines. My parents were strict in the sense that they made rules and expected us to follow them, but our home was a very loving home where both parents passionately loved each other and their children. This is important because some have suggested that I left my father's Naturopathic practice in a reaction to how strictly he raised us. My parents could certainly have done some things better, but I honestly felt that I was loved and even sometimes suspected that I was loved more than my three siblings. To this day I feel lucky to have parents that love each other and their children without condition or reserve.
I was about six years old when the doctors told my parents that Mom was not going to see us open our Christmas gifts even with aggressive treatment with chemotherapy. The new protocols for treating Hodgkin's disease hadn't been adequately used to develop an accurate prediction for its effectiveness in the early 1980s when Mom found she was covered by cancer. When the medical system seemed a failure my parents turned alternative "medicine" for hope. Mom eventually did receive chemotherapy that turned out to be effective even for her advanced form of the disease, but by the time conventional medicine came to the rescue my parents had convinced themselves that conventional medicine may provide temporary help, but no matter what appeared to occur alternative "medicine" would provide the permanent success.
I was six when everything fell apart but I was about ten when Mom finally came back to being an active part of my life. In the intervening years I saw Mom reduced to sitting in a recliner weakly kissing us goodbye as we went to school in the morning and often being in a hospital unexpectedly when we came home to be met at the door by a neighbor who fed us supper at her house. The anemic insurance we had would not pay for Mom's treatments so my siblings and I wore hand-me-downs left on our porch in garbage bags while money for clothes was spent on herbs and medical bills. We all sacrificed to see that Mom survived, and after she finally recovered from her chemotherapy Mom started to slowly have more good days than bad until she made her first family meal since she was sick. I remember our joy at having her in our pew at church, and no one could keep tears at bay when Mom's beautiful voice filled the church singing and weeping through "I thank you Lord" in her first vocal solo since becoming bedridden.
I know the story so far seems to be a sob story, but for a bulk of my childhood every member of the family was somehow engaged in Mom's fight for survival. We all bought into the plan of alternative "medicine" with a little conventional medicine. We all dealt in some degree with the disapproval from conventional medicine for how my parents chose to treat Mom's case. One doctor even went so far as to accuse my father of trying kill my mother by brainwashing her. My family used the emotions of the controversy to rally around my parents' choice of alternative, and our closeness as a family was partly built on our common bond in the midst of controversy. Our choices as individuals in healthcare have been partly guided by this strong emotion still evoked when discussing these things. This is why my initial choice to practice naturopathic "medicine" makes sense. It was more than family background, it was emotional identification with "the cause" that made it an easy choice to follow my father's footsteps into alternative "medicine" which I did without reserve.
Rather than simply following the typical apprenticeship model of learning that my father did in developing his alternative "medicine" practice after Mom's recovery I was encouraged to take a more formal education and take some advanced science classes taught from the conventional medicine view. Dad hoped that I would develop a well-rounded view of healthcare and be able to approach our joint practice from a fresh perspective to bring further advancement to alternative "medicine". The approach worked, and for more than a year we worked as an effective team. We envisioned me as the primary caregiver in the office while Dad transitioned into a more educational role teaching classes and writing books. Near the end of this year together problems developed as my intellectual involvement overtook my emotional involvement. The following link details how some aspects of this change developed. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/confessions.html
More to come.
The most important people in this story are my parents. When I was very young they generally followed the pediatrician's advice, even taking us to the clinic with cartoons on the wall for the horror of childhood vaccines. My parents were strict in the sense that they made rules and expected us to follow them, but our home was a very loving home where both parents passionately loved each other and their children. This is important because some have suggested that I left my father's Naturopathic practice in a reaction to how strictly he raised us. My parents could certainly have done some things better, but I honestly felt that I was loved and even sometimes suspected that I was loved more than my three siblings. To this day I feel lucky to have parents that love each other and their children without condition or reserve.
I was about six years old when the doctors told my parents that Mom was not going to see us open our Christmas gifts even with aggressive treatment with chemotherapy. The new protocols for treating Hodgkin's disease hadn't been adequately used to develop an accurate prediction for its effectiveness in the early 1980s when Mom found she was covered by cancer. When the medical system seemed a failure my parents turned alternative "medicine" for hope. Mom eventually did receive chemotherapy that turned out to be effective even for her advanced form of the disease, but by the time conventional medicine came to the rescue my parents had convinced themselves that conventional medicine may provide temporary help, but no matter what appeared to occur alternative "medicine" would provide the permanent success.
I was six when everything fell apart but I was about ten when Mom finally came back to being an active part of my life. In the intervening years I saw Mom reduced to sitting in a recliner weakly kissing us goodbye as we went to school in the morning and often being in a hospital unexpectedly when we came home to be met at the door by a neighbor who fed us supper at her house. The anemic insurance we had would not pay for Mom's treatments so my siblings and I wore hand-me-downs left on our porch in garbage bags while money for clothes was spent on herbs and medical bills. We all sacrificed to see that Mom survived, and after she finally recovered from her chemotherapy Mom started to slowly have more good days than bad until she made her first family meal since she was sick. I remember our joy at having her in our pew at church, and no one could keep tears at bay when Mom's beautiful voice filled the church singing and weeping through "I thank you Lord" in her first vocal solo since becoming bedridden.
I know the story so far seems to be a sob story, but for a bulk of my childhood every member of the family was somehow engaged in Mom's fight for survival. We all bought into the plan of alternative "medicine" with a little conventional medicine. We all dealt in some degree with the disapproval from conventional medicine for how my parents chose to treat Mom's case. One doctor even went so far as to accuse my father of trying kill my mother by brainwashing her. My family used the emotions of the controversy to rally around my parents' choice of alternative, and our closeness as a family was partly built on our common bond in the midst of controversy. Our choices as individuals in healthcare have been partly guided by this strong emotion still evoked when discussing these things. This is why my initial choice to practice naturopathic "medicine" makes sense. It was more than family background, it was emotional identification with "the cause" that made it an easy choice to follow my father's footsteps into alternative "medicine" which I did without reserve.
Rather than simply following the typical apprenticeship model of learning that my father did in developing his alternative "medicine" practice after Mom's recovery I was encouraged to take a more formal education and take some advanced science classes taught from the conventional medicine view. Dad hoped that I would develop a well-rounded view of healthcare and be able to approach our joint practice from a fresh perspective to bring further advancement to alternative "medicine". The approach worked, and for more than a year we worked as an effective team. We envisioned me as the primary caregiver in the office while Dad transitioned into a more educational role teaching classes and writing books. Near the end of this year together problems developed as my intellectual involvement overtook my emotional involvement. The following link details how some aspects of this change developed. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/confessions.html
More to come.
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