Where’d you get this crazy idea? I don’t know anything that works 100% of the time. Once in a while I even have to press my remote button twice to change channels.
BTW, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m an atheist and I think faith-healing is bonkers.
It’s absolutely disgusting and indefensible. Since I actually fucking went through undiagnosed and untreated Type 1 diabetes and unlike 99% of folks here know firsthand the absolute physical and mental torture the girl went through, I can’t really trust myself to say any more on this message board.
Silly goose. Poor kids can’t afford doctors.
Sure.
Faith healing is based on a premise - that God (or a god, but I’ll just use God as the catchall deity) is going to heal you. You have faith that it will happen, and it does. Now, if you have faith that it will happen, but it doesn’t, then obviously something is horrendously wrong - either you didn’t have faith (but thought you did), or God doesn’t exist, or God exists but doesn’t care.
It doesn’t matter which one of these scenarios is the explanation. There’s nothing that you do from trial to trial that will change the outcome. You still think you have enough faith (but you did when you failed), you still think God exists (but whether God exists or not hasn’t changed), and you still think God cares (but whether God cares or not hasn’t changed).
If you can’t get it to work 100% of the time, you shouldn’t be attempting it even 1% of the time.
Medical surgery is different - it doesn’t rely on static principles. Infection is different from surgery to surgery, so attempts to control infection will yield different results from trial to trial. Patient response to drugs is different. Diagnoses are different. There’s a whole host of things that can change from one trial to another which rationalize why a 99% success rate is better than a 1% success rate.
What are you going to say about a faith healing that works 99% of the time? That God can only heal 99% of diseases? That God only cares 99% of the time?
So it’s purely voluntary on your part?
And, FWIW, don’t attribute the actions of these morons in the OP-linked story with faith – it’s pure purblind refusal to face reality.
The whole concept of ‘faith healing’ is presumptuous. Accord to the popular mythology, god alone knows who will live, and who will die. Praying for a medical outcome directly confronts god’s will. Presuming that god will change his will in response to prayer is the height of arrogance, or at least inconsistent with the concept of an omnipotent god.
Wisconsin has BadgerCare, which provides full medical insurance for ALL kids in the state (and their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters) if you qualify by earning less than a surprisingly moderate income. If you make more, you can still get it but you have to pay a premium and co-pays (dirt, dirt cheap) They just made it easier to get, too. I had it until I turned 18, and it was the most fantastic insurance you could get!
Also, if relatives 1000 MILES away worried enough to call police(!) to check on an obviously severely ill child, the parents knew enough to get her to the damn emergency room and worry about the medicaid application later.
Okay, I understand what you were tying to say now. The static principles portion is the key thing I wasn’t picking up in the faith portion of things.
Thank you.
I also held a girl’s hand through this at the same age (ish) and the fact was, she went downhill so suddenly, we almost didn’t get her to the ER in time. There was no prayer/faith/alt medicine stuff muddying the waters, she just went from “flu like symptoms” (explained away not only as the flu, but exhaustion from attending three birthday parties in one weekend*) to “fucking death’s door” in the span of about 20 minutes. She *walked *to the car, and had to be carried into the ER less than 10 minutes later with a blood sugar of 795. Yes. I KNOW you’re supposed to be unconscious long before that. Tell it to the kid.
The kicker? Her mother is an ER nurse. Even *she *didn’t see it coming. Kids are incredibly good at masking their symptoms, as my pediatrician told me a few months ago when my smiling laughing daughter was asking to go to the park as she was diagnosed with pneumonia.
*Where, of course, she was guzzling down sugar in myriad forms. Hindsight is 20/20.
While your description of the results of a case of undiagnosed+untreated diabetes are an accurate description as it sometimes happens, as a factual note you can indeed be much higher than 795 and be perfectly conscious, and many diabetics in poor control will routinely “max out” their meter (often meaning 550 or higher) and appear perfectly normal. A guy I know who had chronic poor control routinely ended up in the 600’s for short times.
I was…1100? I think when I was admitted, and I walked in. Went to sleep and didn’t wake up for two days, but…when I was in another kid was brought in with a blood sugar of about 500 at admission, and he never woke up. Not fun having your roommate die from the same thing you’re admitted for at age 12/13, and watching it happen. 
Yep. There’s a huge range of reactions, isn’t there? So that’s why I’m not prepared to lambaste these folks. It could have been *us *standing there in front of reporters trying to explain why we didn’t take her in sooner. It’s not that we did anything wrong, it’s that undiagnosed diabetes can get very serious and even kill you before you’re certain it’s something worth worrying over, *especially *when it’s in a kid.
Raise awareness, increase funding, whatever. But don’t be a dick to a grieving family who is, no doubt, already beating themselves up for missing the clues that are so very apparent with hindsight and so subtle in the moment.
I can just barely understand calling a doctor to pray for your child, but calling the police? I’d rather they were out catching murderers and stuff like that than praying over toddlers.
Are you directing this at me?
Thank you, Poly.
No, no, I’m sorry it looked like that because I quoted you. Deepest apologies. I was agreeing/elaborating with you, and *then *addressing the “don’t be a dick” to the people who *are *lambasting the parents in question. I’m so sorry, I should have made that more clear in my post. My only excuse is that it’s way past my bedtime.
Thank you very much for the clarification. 
(Hey, how come your SDSAB title is still an acronym, and the others are all spelled out?)
If the relatives, 1000 miles away where so worried about the state of the girl to call the police to check her out I think the clues must have been pretty hard to be missed by the parents
I don’t think you have any way of knowing that. My mother-in-law wants me to take the kids in to the doctor for the slightest sniffle - sniffles which even the doctor says, “don’t bother, wait and see.” I don’t think it ever occurred to her to call the police, thank goodness!
This is a silly statement. People here don’t rail on religion every time a religious person does something dumb, and correspondingly, they don’t rail on atheism every time an atheist does something dumb.
People are railing on religion here because someone did something stupid because of their religious beliefs. When somone does something stupid because of their atheism, we’ll no doubt rail on them for it.