Medical Fanaticism vs. Religious Fanaticism

Two controversies reported recently in the media caught people’s imagination. One was the report that a Hodgkins-affected boy and his mother had to flee from their city to escape law that ordained that chemotherapy drugs be given to the unwilling 13-year boy. The other report was about the ethics of forcing circumcision on infants, an age-old controversy reopened by studies that “showed” male circumcisions significantly reduced the risk of acquiring HIV, HPV (human papilloma virus) and genital herpes infections. Both reports raise common issues.

• How infallible are the scientific investigations or the religious indoctrinations on which we base important decisions regarding future?
• Assuming both parents and the state has a right to ensure the welfare of children, who has the upper hand in decision making?

Let’s answer the second question first, as it is the easier of the two. If we can all agree without any doubt what is best for the child, we can ensure that it’s executed at any cost. If the State is unwilling to do its bit, we can rise against it and expose its apathy to child welfare. In the same way, if parents are negligent, they can be punished by law (Canada is one of the best child-welfare oriented countries).

What’s making the problem so intractable is the fact nobody knows what’s good for health for sure. The complicity of pharmaceutical industry in funding medical research doesn’t contribute to the credibility of research.

Take, for example, the issue of vaccination for children. Do the MMR vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella damaging to the children? No, says the FDA and the pharmaceutical giants who stand to benefit by the sale of the vaccines. Yes, say the parents of hundreds of children suffering after the administration of the vaccine. Whether or not the use of mercury-containing thimerosal used as a preservative is to be blamed for the mishap, let’s remember there are scientists and health researchers who question the very wisdom of the concept and the efficacy of immunization.

The modern western science believes that immune system intervention is superior to immune system adaptation and dismisses all rebuttals as hearsay.  

Meanwhile, new research at Nottingham University (UK) shows that human health improves when it is exposed to full-strength pathogens and infections that force the body to activate an adaptive response. “Infecting patients with worms could hold key to treating asthma” says this interesting Telegraph story, explaining the reason we are sick often is that we have “sanitized” our surrounding so much that we have not been able to develop natural resistance to infection. Our bodies need the “exercise” that an exposure to real pathogens provides to make the immune system adaptive.

Let’s take up circumcision now. Every person has the right to normal, whole genitalia. Circumcision is a human rights issue: whose body is it anyway? Parents don’t have a right to cut a healthy non-renewable (and erogenous) part of a child’s body that mutilates him permanently, unless it’s unequivocally proved that they could not postpone the surgery to a later date (when the person in question can give informed consent) without endangering their child’s life.

Most of such decisions are based on archaic religious practices. Believers everywhere are anxious to justify their faith and actions and they jump in to embrace every research slated to prove their beliefs. One must remember that there have been no large-scale epidemiological and demographical studies on circumcision.

Read this moving account of an Egyptian mother fighting against her son’s circumcision.

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