Faith Healers: A Force in Nigeria

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Recommended: Religion and its impacts

The Faith Healers are out in force in Nigeria. There is a problem with medicine. Medicine is so far removed from the understanding of most people who it appears to be medicine.
When discussing a terminal disease many people are desperate for a solution. It’s the same for Chronic Disease. You just want it to stop. Even something as minor as myopia is an annoyance and many people fall for scams to get rid of their glasses. However you see this at it’s deadliest in the hands of the cures for diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS and diabetes.
I have seen a fair few signs of alternative medicine practitioners who insist that thee can cure these diseases. Maybe not AIDS, in India people still fear the HIV/AIDS patient and believe all sorts of superstitions about how the disease transmits but I have seen signs promising a cure for diabetes. This is not out of the goodness of their hearts or the willingness to do good but because either they are unscrupulous charlatans who hope to make some money at the hands of people who are desperate, or who genuinely believe that they have the power to cure these diseases.
This is where religion comes in. The faith healers genuinely may believe that they are capable of healing people through mechanisms of the spiritual. In the USA this takes the form of these immense revival meetings where slick production values allow these faith healers an impressive audience to prove their powers. We know this is merely an extension of the placebo effect. We know that the drama and pageantry play an integral role in treating patients and that in our more ethical medical practices we are no longer to be unscrupulous with claims about medicines.
But there is a large and significant group of people 0END.0 anti-medicine. ...

... middle of paper ...

...HIV+ have their faith affirmed and strengthened. The pastor also makes a lot of money out of this since word of mouth spreads about his “good” work.
The HIV/AIDS patients who give up their drugs are easily taken care off because they either die (and may even spread the disease to others ensuring more people to take advantage of) or if they do survive, they can be easily ostracised since HIV/AIDS patients already are ostracised and the disease’s link with immorality means it’s easy to character assassinate any angry victims of this scam and simply ignore them. After all, they got HIV/AIDS because they were immoral once. If the healing failed it must be due to the fact they never really accepted the power of god in the first place.
And all that happens is the pastor gets richer and more people fall into his flock and more HIV patients are sacrificed to drive his greed.

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