Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

in 1994. MedSend, based in Orange, Conn., partners with mission agencies to assume monthly student loan payments for healthcare professionals on the mission field. World Pulse correspondent Deann Alford spoke with Topazian at a MedSend conference in Wheaton, Ill.

Q: What do you think have been the major failings of the missions health professionals over the years?
A: Well, I don’t think you can say they’ve failed in any way. They’ve accomplished their mission, but I think the problem is that their mission statements have been geared toward the curative healthcare paradigm that’s becoming outmoded, if it’s not already outmoded.

Q: What is the curative healthcare paradigm?
A: That is, first of all, what we call the worldview of the West. I’ll call it a split bio-medical model. If I’m a physician and you come to me with an illness, I diagnose and treat your illness. And I handle it typically.You come to me with a spiritual problem, I send you to the theologian or the Christian counselor.

[In contrast] most of the world thinks with a much different, integrated worldview. They believe that their health is influenced by dreams, spirits, spells, demons and maybe hallucinogenic substances. All of these things are in the mix. We can’t just say such things are irrelevant and expect a shot of penicillin to provide a lasting cure.

Missionaries who delve further into the causes of illness have found a spiritual component. In some cases it’s the key component in that person’s illness, and God’s solution for their problem is a spiritual solution. Some missionary doctors have uncovered this issue by just taking a few extra minutes with each patient. They don’t have the time to treat their spiritual problems, so they have trained counselors to deal with the spiritual and emotional realm.

The transforming power of the gospel is evident when the doctor sees these patients weeks later and doesn’t even recognize them. Their bodies are healed, but more importantly, the root causes of their physical symptoms have been treated.

So, we want to see more of that kind of thing happening. We want to see the church involved and people in the church trained in this kind of integrated care for the whole person: spirit, body, mind, emotions, relationships. And that requires a shift in the way healthcare has been traditionally done by most medical missionaries.

Missionaries haven’t done the wrong thing, but they have used what Western tradition and training have taught them. They tend to separate the spiritual and the physical. People do not think this way in cultures where this separation does not take place—animistic and superstitious societies, for example.

Q: What do you see coming out of this conference?
A: We’ve heard from missionary professionals who have been involved in several issues calling for healthcare for the whole person, for example, in the HIV/AIDS situation. Others have brought compassionate Christian care to communities that have not had any kind of care, doing it in a way that is culturally sensitive and sustainable, without importing high tech or money.

This might be done, for example, by training village health workers who are quite capable of managing 60 or 70 percent of the illnesses that are common in their communities with some basic medications and vaccines that can be purchased in-country. Village health workers can bring health and the gospel to their communities if they have good, ongoing training and adequate compensation to prevent flight to urban centers for a more lucrative lifestyle.

We heard about teaching and training doctors in developing countries in their own contexts, and improving their ability to take care of people as whole persons. In other words, they’re not specialists, they’re generalists who can treat a range of problems that patients present. With these innovations we see a little light at the end of the tunnel. If this kind of training can start to make changes that are structural, our thinking will move out of traditional confines and more into innovation.

Q: So you are saying that before they take a new approach, the Western doctors may need to sort of step back and train the non-Westerners. If that’s the case, then how do you keep the Westerners from just passing their old values to the new people?
A: Well, people who are pursuing this approach recognize that danger. So they’re trying to reform themselves first. Their outlook has changed from the traditional, total preventive mindset to a training mindset. Generally they find credible the destructive influence of demons, dreams and spells in an otherwise healthy person.

Twenty years ago they might have treated lightly patients who were having bad dreams and consequently believed they were going to have a miscarriage. Their worldview has adapted to meet the actual needs of such patients, and this opens the door to the real solution, the gospel of Christ.

June 21, 2002