Timothy Keller on Medicine and Spirituality part II.

Here's another passage from Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor. He tells a story about Dr. Martyn Lloyd, a famous London preacher in the early 1900's, who had disagreements on how to treat patients: holistically versus physically.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes the same point in one of his lectures to medical professionals. LLoyd-Jones was on staff at Saint Bart's in London under the famous chief of staff Lord Horder in the late 1920s. At one point the junior physician was asked by Lord Horder to rearrange and reclassify his case history records. He created a new filing system, arranging the cases not by name but by diagnosis and treatment. As Lloyd-Jones did this task he was astonished that Horder's diagnostic notes in well over half the cases included comments such as "works far too hard," "drinks too much," "unhappy in home and marriage." At one point he spent the weekend with Lord Horder and took the opportunity to ask him about what he had seen in the case files. Horder responded that he reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical--the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves. Severe cases, of course, could be sent to the psychiatrist, but most of the time that wasn't appropriate. So, Horder concluded, a doctor should basically mind his or her own business. Lloyd-Jones said that after he heard that response:

...we argued for the whole of the weekend! My contention was that we should be treating [the whole of the person's life]. "Ah," said Horder, "that is where you are wrong! If these people like to pay us our fees for more or less doing nothing, then let them do so. We can then concentrate on the 35 percent or so of real medicine." But my contention was that to treat these other people [taking into account their whole life] was "real medicine" also. All of them were really sick. They certainly were not well! They have gone to the doctor--perhaps more than one--in quest of help.

Lloyd-Jones was not proposing that physicians were by themselves competent to do this, but rather that together with other counselors and helping professions they needed to address the whole person. People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown. And even patients whose original illness was caused by strictly physical factors eventually need much more than mere medicine to recuperate and heal. (pp. 177-178, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work)

Doctor Matt Anderson's views and goals on the practice of medicine has a historical and theological foundation :)