medicine and religion

when it comes to medicine and medical research I feel that it is an integral part of our society to the degree that healing people even shows up in religious text. There are many who mean well but end up choosing one side of the issue of medical research over the other due to either religious grounds or due to not believing that medicine should work that way.

I feel that even though my own religious beliefs state that killing is not allowed, the belief to heal supersedes the belief against killing due to the fact that if we do not learn to heal the sick we are essentially killing the very people we need to heal.

In the United States there is a moratorium on using federal money to do embryonic stem cell research even though it is legal. Even though the wording does not specifically state that it is due to religious beliefs, it was made clear in statements that religious beliefs were at the heart of the issue. I think that it is a view that is far too rigid to be acceptable in mainstream religion and mainstream medicine.

If everyone held that view we would still be practicing medicine like it was practiced at the time of the plague. At one time it was blasphemous, open up the human body to perform any type of medical procedure. Until the Vietnam war American medicine prohibited different types of medical treatments from being tried. During that war techniques that had, had a moratorium on them became common place in the MASH units and are not common place in society.

Now we are in a similar situation as right before the Vietnam war with a moratorium on specific things that could potentially help the sick, more specifically the embryonic stem cell research.

In order to heal the sick and to protect life, we must learn to find out why we get sick and die so we can learn how to heal and to protect. to tell someone that is deathly ill that it is against your beliefs to do the research to keep them from dying is basically telling them you are killing them which also goes against beliefs.