Fraser Health Authority Experiments With Modern Medicine

New strategy leads to the firing of 12 witch doctors

Naturally the Calgary Herald and its sister paper The Vancouver Sun are outraged. Imagine, the publicly funded Fraser Health Authority actually committing itself to modern medicine and tossing out its staff of witch doctors or spiritual care directors.

Vancouver Sun writer Douglass Todd is leading the charge against this outrage. His biography on the Vancouver Sun website states: Although he was raised in a family of staunch atheists, Douglas Todd has gone on to become one of the most decorated spirituality and ethics writers in North America. (Whew, that was close!)

His piece entitled, Spiritual care directors help keep Canada healthy, was published in the Sunday, January 17 edition of the Calgary Herald.  This seemed to be a follow up piece to Fraser Health’s firing of spiritual-care directors a step backwards, published in the Vancouver Sun on December 21.

Mr. Todd’s arguments against this disturbing shift in strategy are two fold. First, he argues that spiritual care directors help improve health outcomes. This would be important to consider if it were remotely true but it isn’t. Second, he argues that while public funding of spiritual care directors is a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, it’s okay because we do that all the time in Canada anyway. In other words, Mr. Todd is saying two wrongs make a right and a thousand wrongs should make policy.

Concerning the efficacy of spirituality on health outcomes, Mr. Todd engages in the kind of obfuscation, half truths and misrepresentation of the facts normally reserved for politicians and takes them to the point of self confusion. For example, in his piece in the Vancouver Sun he states:  . . . since 2001, more than 5,000 research studies have been published showing a strong correlation between patients’ spirituality and their physical and mental well-being. Yet in his Calgary Herald piece written less than a month later he states that there are: hundreds of studies showing a correlation with greater health. Boy, the trend in the number of studies supporting spirituality certainly seems to be going down – from more than 5,000 to mere hundreds in the course of a month. At this rate, and by this time next month, the number of such studies should be about zero, which coincidentally, is the most accurate of the estimates.

Mr. Todd displays either his incompetence or his sad attempts at obfuscation when he speaks of correlation as he does in the two points above. Correlation, as anyone taking an introductory statistics course remembers,  is not causation. Correlation is an interesting first step in the search for causal relationships, but no competent health care professional would draw health policy conclusions on the basis of such soft correlations alone. (Nor should a competent journalist, but fortunately for Mr. Todd, there is a big difference in the standards between journalists and medical professionals.) For example, there is an extremely strong correlation between hospitals and death (more people die in health care facilities than just about any other location).  Using Mr. Todd’s logic, if we closed all the hospitals, we would live forever.

Mr. Todd’s position concerning the separation of church and state are just as confusing. He accepts that the funding of spiritual care advisers violates the principle, but argues its okay because:

But since Canadians often hear the U.S. mantra about  how “church and state”  should be strictly and legally separate at all times, we sometimes forget that we actually blend state and religion quite a bit in this country. For instance, six Canadian provinces, including B.C., fund religious schools to various degrees. . .  In other words, taxpayer funded chaplains are not exactly an anomaly in this country.

True, but taxpayer funded chaplains, and other witch doctors, should be an anomaly in this country. I have nothing against anyone seeking spiritual guidance or comfort in accordance with one’s faith in a hospital or anywhere else. But I sure object to paying for it. Personally, I take great spiritual comfort in consuming large quantities of rum and gin while sailing the eastern Caribbean. (Some evenings, I even experience visions.) I don’t, however, expect the government to pay for it. Although now that I think about it, I could be on to something here.

So in the near term, the Fraser Health Authority is going to continue its radical, unprecedented and horrendous (according to Phillip Crowell, director of spiritual care at Vancouver’s Children’s and Women’s Health Centre) flirtation with modern medicine and will continue to leave the witch doctoring to others.

We can only hope.