Having outlined the great misconceptions of medical science, now I want to examine more carefully this field of endeavor in more practical detail. If we analyze medicine in terms of its own goal–healing–what do we see? My answer is critical, but not for-criticism’s sake. I simply want to point out exactly where it has failed. I hope that my purpose will not be misunderstood and what I say will be given honest consideration in a spirit of openness to the truth.
As an example of the way medicine is handled, at least in Japan, when doctors are requested to give full reports to their patients, they seldom do. Their responses to questions are often equivocal, perfunctory, or evasive. They rarely make definitive statements to patients about their sickness, but hedge with vague inconsistencies. “This may be cured,” or, “We have evidence that this is curable, so you’ll be all right,” or perhaps, “This measure is known to be effective.” The doctor might assert that a certain method is the only option or that the disease can be cured, provided the patient carefully heeds medical advice.
Another way to avoid directness is to say, “This is a very unusual case, one in a million,” or sometimes, “You’re going to need hospitalization.” When the patient asks if hospital care will cure the disease, the response is, “That depends… I cannot guarantee it.” From their own experience doctors know better than anyone how a case develops in unexpected ways that totally confound the diagnosis.
The standard examination includes percussion, auscultation, thermometry, X-ray, blood tests, injections to test reactions, microscopic tests, and others, involving all sorts of different instruments. If medical science is truly “scientific,” doctors should be able to tell after all that precisely what the condition of a patient is. During the examination the physician often requests information in the most minute detail, not only on the medical history of the patient, but also illnesses and causes of death in the family, sometimes going back two or three generations. The doctor may only be trying to verify the diagnosis, but whatever he or she does, no medical method is perfect.
If medical methods were scientifically valid, why are so many people not healed in accordance with medical theory? Either the diagnosis or treatment must be wrong, or perhaps both are based on invalid assumptions. 01: all people treated, those who are completely cured constitute probably less than ten percent. Even when treatment appears to have been effective, it is only temporary. The patient is never entirely free from anxiety, since in most cases the disease either recurs or develops into another illness. It is extremely doubtful that very many have ever been truly, permanently cured. All this is well known to doctors, the people who must struggle directly with the inherent contradictions of their profession.
The term “my doctor” suggests that everyone should have a physician to consult regularly. But if the doctor could bring about perfect health, eventually no one would need his or her services. If medical science were capable of genuine healing, we would see a steady decrease in the sick and ailing. Doctors would be running out of work, and hospitals would be losing their clientele. Hospital buildings would be up for sale for lack of funds to run them and no sick to populate them. Sadly, though, not only are patients increasing but the variety of diseases is growing larger and waiting lists for the hospitals are getting steadily longer.
Further, to the dismay of the health care authorities medical expenses in both public and private institutions grow alarmingly higher each year. Obviously something is deeply wrong right at the core of medical practice and theory, and yet no one even suspects the nature of the obvious and terribly costly defect. Most are not aware of it only because they have become so dependent upon materialistic science that they can see nothing else.
Think for a moment about the medical diagnosis after examination. When a patient is examined by several doctors, their diagnoses often diverge significantly, casting doubt from the beginning on the scientific validity of the medical hypothesis itself. If the diagnostic criteria were genuinely scientific, conflicting opinions on the same data or phenomena would not occur. In fact, an illness is often diagnosed in different ways simply because diagnostic methods are derived only from materialistic science.
One would think, likewise, that doctors’ families would have fewer illnesses and better health than others, and that the doctors themselves would enjoy greater longevity, assuming that their knowledge of medical science gives them close access to effective treatment. On the contrary, doctors and their families are in no better health and sometimes have even more ailments than other people. When someone in a doctor’s family is sick, one would imagine that the physician is especially attentive in Providing the best care for the child, parent, or whoever. Actually, however, instead of treating family members themselves, doctors often have someone else take care of them, even when the problem is easy to handle.
Many doctors are said to be reluctant to make a diagnosis -for members of their own – families because they either doubt their ability to be objective or do not trust their own conclusions. They are probably wary of the guesswork and speculation that enter into their diagnoses, which lack a real scientific basis. Once, while one of my doctor friends was reminiscing, he mentioned the difficulty of diagnosing diseases correctly. He confessed that postmortem examinations in a large hospital sometimes disclosed that the diagnosis of the trouble and the actual cause of death did not coincide. The number of such cases was greater than he wished to state, he admitted. In his experience, the remedies he prescribed did not always work as effectively as he had expected. They often made the condition worse – sometimes they even jeopardized the patient’s life. At such times the doctor could hardly sleep at night worrying about how to explain the situation to the patients and their families. This, he added, was the greatest burden for a doctor. I felt deep compassion for him then, understanding the difficult position his profession sometimes created for him.
In spite of progress in medical science, conspicuous discrepancies remain between the diagnosis and the real facts of a case. Some doctors no longer give much credence to medical treatment and turn to psychological or spiritual healing. This is seen more among veteran physicians than among young, idealistic, and inexperienced doctors. The late Tatsukichi Irisawa, physician to the emperor, wrote a waka poem on his deathbed:
I know this drug can have no effect on me,
But it is my duty toward the world
To take what I have always administered
To my patients.
Among my acquaintances is an M.D. who often comes to me when he or someone in his family becomes ill and he cannot cure them himself. He comes willingly, knowing that whatever the disease is, I will soon be able to heal it with Johrei, once I worked on a long-standing case of neuralgia. The patient was a well-known professor and a medical doctor, and with Johrei I was able to heal him in a short time. I also healed his daughter, who had tuberculosis. His wife was so impressed that she urged him to give up medicine and turn to our method of healing. He could not bring himself to change, because of his social status, professional obligations, and financial needs, and he is still following his old practice.
In another case, I was asked to see the wife of a prominent businessman. She was suffering from facial palsy that had disfigured her face so badly that one could hardly bear to look at her. I warned her not to accept any medical treatment. She confessed that her family had been very insistent that she consult a doctor, and she had gone to a hospital for examination. When she talked with the head physician, who was a close friend, he apparently said to her, “Your condition will return to normal in a couple of years if it is left alone. You must never have electrotherapy or anything of that nature, although other doctors at this hospital will probably encourage it.” “Yes, they already have, but I refused,” she replied. “That was wise,” the doctor told her. I was impressed by her story, feeling great admiration ‘for this doctor. He must have been a truly great medical man. After about two months of Johrei, she was completely healed.