Are all Alternative Medicines and Practices equal?

Maybe some of our readers would say that this question isn’t necessary. Some would say that the answer is yes, while others would say that it is no. Some have assumed that because certain products have been used by evil men, that they are then by their very nature, evil. Believe it or not, some even feel that way about herbs. I recently read a church booklet that slammed all alternative practices and the use of oriental herbs. So, maybe to try to bring clarity to the issue, the pursuit of the answer to this question is valid.

From the creation of the world until today, God has allowed every culture to discover some truths about the plants and animals that they live beside every day. There is no one, but God Himself, who knows all there is to know about His fascinating creation. So, it is important that we be able to learn from each other. However, every culture has a dark, occultic side, as well. This we want to avoid.

My interest in learning about different cultures started when I was young. I was raised with a Korean sister and a Vietnamese brother, who were my siblings through adoption. Also, although the Hess family has Swiss background, I ended up being raised in a predominantly Russian Church.

Over the years, I have been able to study a bit on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, as well as many diverse groups of Catholic, Protestant and Anabaptist Christians. I have also been greatly blessed with the opportunity to learn about many other cultures when my family was preparing to go to the mission field.

For two and a half years, we had the opportunity of living in the very primitive culture of rural Haiti. There, many of our native neighbors practiced a type of witchcraft called Voodoo, a hybrid form of animism (fear and the worship of many nature spirits/demons) and Roman Catholicism.

I have also been privileged, as a mission board chairman, to travel to remote eastern Tanzania’s Rukwa Valley (in Africa) and to sit with, and interview, the animistic tribal people in the bush. There too, their animistic world view leads them to practice a form of witchcraft with charms, spells, and lots of fear.

I applaud the desire of our churches to protect our unsuspecting members from the involvements in the cults and the occultic, often presented as alternative medicine. Both my wife and I have had some witchcraft involvements in our extended families. This we have renounced and have no desire to return to.

As Christians, we are called to love all people from all nations, races, and belief systems since we are all made in the image of God Yet, in wisdom, we need to abhor that which God hates. Witchcraft would be one of those things. (see Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and Galatians 5:19-21) Having said this, I have a concern that we should take a fair and balanced look at this very important subject.

Oriental or Occidental

The simplest way of understanding and talking about cultures is to divide the world in two halves—Occident (western culture) and Oriental (eastern culture). There are differences greater than locations and races involved here. It is how we think and process our experiences, how we write our thoughts and poetry, etc. We need to be very cautious when starting this dividing process in cultural learning. We should not set up ourselves and our culture as superior. By nature, we all tend to think that “we” and “ours” are better than others, but no culture, or race is superior to another, just different. Pride will always divide. Paul declared that “God made of one blood all nations” (see Acts 17:26). Cultural and racial pride produces prejudice, and I know that it is not our desire to be prejudiced. Rather, we should seek to try to understand each other, the best that we can.

Does Oriental equal evil? Does the term “Traditional Chinese Medicine” mean it is, without further consideration, wrong by its very nature? Because of the fall of man into sin, the Oriental and Occidental cultures both have their fair share of evil in them. They both have their false religions, folk superstitions, and forms of witchcraft and idolatry. Neither culture has the dark-side market cornered. In other words, neither culture has a measurable difference in its amount of darkness (evil).

Interestingly enough, according to the location depicted in the Bible, the Garden of Eden was part of the Oriental world, not the Occidental. The reality is that each of the biblical writers, whom God inspired to record the Bible, were Orientals by birth. Jesus Christ, Himself, grew up in an oriental culture. Both Judaism and Christianity are eastern religions. The Apostle Paul was, by birth, from Oriental culture, but had an incredible ability to understand and address those of Occidental cultures, like those with the Roman and the Greek worldviews.

What is a Worldview?

An individual’s worldview includes all their experiences, upbringing, religion, traditions, superstitions, education, influences, economics, and even their local climate. All that has affected and impacted a person helps to form their worldview.

Every culture strives to explain that which they cannot see in one way or another. The more primitive cultures (animists), will attribute almost everything negative in life (like sickness, mysterious events, or calamity) to the unseen spirit world, including the fear of their own ancestral spirits. I saw this in Africa and in Haiti. It is surely the motivator of the Taoist priests in the orient, as well.

Fear drives people to do lots of different things to “appease” the spirit world. Sacrifices, charms, offerings, altars and special furnishings, rituals, herbal concoctions, ceremonies, incense, burning candles, self-abuse, libations, and other superstitions, all get woven in with the hope of causing the spirits to leave them alone. This is what establishes their world view.

The world view of the industrial world, on the other hand, is often established on a denial of the spirit world adopting secular humanism and the godless theory of evolution, thus making man the highest moral being. Therefore, many conventional doctors’ worldviews have been shaped and corrupted by their secular humanistic education. According to this world’s wisdom, today’s medical professionals are taught that it is their duty to control births, abort unborn babies, use vaccines made with human fetus materials, excuse the sin of fornication, and perform gender-change operations. Did you know that pharmaceutical companies are very much involved in influencing the training material for medical doctors, presenting pharmaceutical drugs as the only option? These things deserve to be questioned and challenged by sincere Christians. Is one worldview (primitive or industrial) actually superior to the other?

Should Doctors be trusted without question?

If you grew up like I did, you believed, “Just trust the doctor, he knows best”. But doctors are human beings, with all of the shortcomings and limitations of mankind. The modern medical education is highly specialized, often not allowing room for nutritional training, much less, time to consider any alternatives to the conventional path of medicine. When a conventional doctor suggests that someone should use contraceptives (even though the ones they are recommending may cause the body to abort after conception or raise the risk of cancer) will you accept his suggestion without question. What about if a medical professional advises that you should be sterilized or have an abortion because you can’t afford more children (this happened in my own family), will you accept this advice of the world? What about when you are told that you need to accept vaccines made with aborted fetal tissue (more that 50% of them are), or allow your aged parent to die of morphine overdoses, should you hear this counsel? Obviously, the god of this world has darkened the thinking of these medical professionals.

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful –Psalm1:1.

Second Opinions… Even in areas of no moral question a second opinion is wise. Soon after our tenth child (a daughter) was born, it was discovered that there was a problem with her hip. Some medical professionals who were advising us about her care told us that she would need to have a series of operations to repair a “hip click” or her future walking would be hindered. They were talking, at that time, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of surgeries.

I had been in the operating room when the C-section was performed. I had observed that she was a breech presentation and that the doctor had placed his fingers on either side of the baby’s waist to pull her out of the womb, while she was still doubled up. Because of this, I decided we should have another opinion before going through with the surgeries. When she was one week old, we took her to our chiropractor, who correctly diagnosed a dislocated hip. Then, in less than a minute, he gently lifted her off the table by her feet, gave a gentle but firm shake, helping the hip to pop back into place. She has had no hip problem from then until now, 17 years later. Wisdom cries for a second opinion.

Sometimes it is said that money talks. I’m not sure that the medical world is any more guilty of this than any other profession. When I was young there were three careers that no one pursued unless they felt a sense of calling to serve the community—the teacher, the preacher, and the doctor—since the income wasn’t very good.

This has changed for all three of these. Maybe the greatest amount of increase has been in the medical world. After a recent hospitalization, I looked at the bill and declared, “They make it so that it doesn’t pay to live.” (Six days of care for the price of a house!)

Healing Traditions: An Herbal Apology

From ancient times, every culture has identified some of their local plant life that could help them against the onslaught of human sickness, both minor and major. In God’s infinite wisdom, He created a huge variety and diversity of plant life in most micro-cultures. This has allowed both Judeo/Christian cultures and pagan cultures alike to find ways of making medicine long before the industrial age developed. Some of these cures were truly more superstitious than anything, but many of the herbal remedies were actually quite effective and now have been verified by scientific research and double-blind testing* for their genuine healing properties.

Can Herbs be evil?

Come, let us reason together and consider the following points:

1. Satan is the source of evil. Can Satan create life? He is only a creature, not a creator; he can only create havoc.
2. God alone is the Creator of all things living. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and all that is contained therein.
3. If the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and the cattle on a thousand hills are His, is there anything, including herbs, that doesn’t belong to God by right of creation?
4. The Genesis account is very clear; God created all things good.
5. The Bible teaches us that God was the very first Gardener, And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed –Genesis 2:8.
6. Why did God design the herbs and plants and trees in His creation? And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat –Genesis 1:29
7. Since all plants originated from God, it is evident that God lovingly created the plant life for the benefit of man and beast. Maybe Adam and Eve knew how to use every plant that God had made, but somehow over the years much of this knowledge has been forgotten. This is especially true within the last 100 years, as country after country has moved from a third-world status to join the ranks of the industrialized world. As this shift has occurred, many of the old “folk remedies” have been considered “old fashioned” and thus they were replaced by modern treatments and therapies. It is due to this that we have needed to rediscover the purpose and power contained in the God’s created plant life around us.
8. After God had created all the plants and herbs, the record of Scripture tells us: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:31. There is no record of any plant life being created later, so ALL plants would fit this category—it was very good! Thus, there would be NO plant life that is evil by its very nature.
9. Just because man tries to use something from God’s creation for an evil purpose, does not make it become evil. When some people abuse communion or baptism, we Christians don’t discontinue their proper use and practice. (I’ve seen counterfeit baptism in Voodoo.)
10. The reality is that herbs are amoral (neither bad nor good in themselves); it is what we do with them that determines a good or evil result. A witchdoctor may mix a potion of powerful herbs with the intent to kill someone. Some of her herbs may be beneficial, but not in the specific quantity she has mixed them. At the same time a skilled God-fearing herbalist, may make up a formula using some of the very same herbs to help someone’s body heal successfully from a serious sickness.
    • A Haitian or African root doctor may mix his roots and alcohol together, then ring a bell over them to call in a spirit to strengthen them in an occultic fashion. At the same time, an herbal company, using well established science as a foundation, macerates fresh organic herbs to make life-sustaining tinctures that bring glory and honor to God.
    • An Oriental Taoist priest may use an herb that actually has true healing benefits, but then he twists his religious beliefs of Chi energy meridian blockages, that have no scientific foundation, in with it. Autopsies have never discovered these meridians. And, all the source of life energy is from heaven, not the earth.
    • A homeopathic apothecary, following the teachings of C.F. Samuel Hahnamann may use an herb that has true healing benefits, but then dilute it 100,000 times until there is no material presence of that original herbal compound remaining. The reality is that herbal extracts are strengthened by concentration, not dilution.
11. Conventional medicine is the newcomer. Herbal remedies have been successfully used for some 6,000 years. Both herbal and conventional medicine are learning new things all the time. Remember, it was the mainstream medical thought that promoted “bloodletting” and the use of leeches back in the early 1800s. Why should the use of herbs be automatically linked to false religion or witchcraft? Isaiah 38:21 says that Isaiah had told Hezekiah, to wear a poultice or plaster of figs for their healing benefits—to recover from a deadly boil.
12. If you look into it, most conventional drugs that are developed, have started by observing an herb, identifying which of the properties in the herb make its potency, and then finding a synthetic way to produce that constituent in a highly concentrated form. That is what conventional medicines are. That is also why they must normally have pages of warnings of side effects—because they are now being used out of the natural balance that God designed in the plant—and our bodies may not be able to handle them as well in that way.
13. Many of our early Anabaptist forefathers, settling here on the colonial frontier of what today is modern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, would have perished if it had not been for some wise grandmother or midwife who knew how to use herbs appropriately. (see the article: Mennonites, Misunderstandings and Herbal Medicines in the Summer 2023 magazine).
14. Both herbs and conventional drugs can have their appropriate place. When I suffered with pneumonia from COVID 19, I was glad for strong IV antibiotics. But it is a fact that antibiotics are routinely overprescribed and there are herbs that could treat lesser illnesses better without killing our healthy microbiome (gut bacteria) to accomplish healing.
15. Did you know the general words herb or herbs are used in the Bible 37 times? These words often simply mean a plant or a vegetable, which is what herbs are. It could be anything from an onion in the garden, to a lowly dandelion in your yard, or even an exotic desert tree.

    Specifically mentioned in the Bible are: hyssop, garlic, onion, spikenard, balm, camphire, cinnamon, calamus, frankincense, saffron, rue, mint, cumin, anise, olive, myrrh, aloes, and mandrake. Some of these are both culinary and medicinal, but most are the names of medicinal herbs.

16. The Greek word in the Bible for sorcery, Pharmakia (where we get our word pharmacy) cannot be easily separated from either conventional medicine or herbal medicine. Is God opposed to all medicines? It would appear the term involves more than just medicine. It likely infers witchcraft and placing trust where it does not belong. Whether it is a Taoist priest and his medicine or a conventional doctor and his medicine to which a person gives the trust and faith that only God deserves, both can become a form of idolatry. Medicines, conventional or herbal, can only assist the body with its healing, but God must do the healing. We must admit that it is not just Haitians, Africans, and Taoists who can put their faith where it doesn’t belong.
17. The Greek word magos means oriental scientist, a magician, sorcerer, wiseman. Like in the English language, one word may carry several uses. God-fearing Daniel, who was the head of the Magos in Babylon, certainly was not a sorcerer! Interestingly, of the three gifts brought by the Magos that visited the baby Jesus, two of them were herbal resins, namely myrrh and frankincense. Would we have rejected them because they had come from Oriental Magos? Would we have also rejected the gold they offered? We don’t have record of Jesus’ parents rejecting the proffered gifts, so we would expect that they received them with thanksgiving.

18. Some try to use the average life expectancy of the population in developing countries to prove the superiority of conventional medicines. Average age is a very unreliable way to evaluate the success of drugs or herbs, as there are many factors such as national famines, political upheavals, cultural changes, etc. that affect the average age of a population and rarely do all but one of those factors remain the same.

    When I moved to Haiti in 1997, the average age was 39. By the time I came back to America in the year 2000, it had risen to 54. Why? It wasn’t because I had lived there. Nothing had changed except a major push for birth control and a national childhood vaccination program. Births had slightly decreased in number, along with the deaths of new mothers and infants. The vaccinations prevented some child deaths. These minor changes threw the average up a lot as the few deaths prevented were all young people, which always results in pulling the average down.

19. There are many dark practices right here in America. Ancient powwowing and “saying words” or incantations, water witching and divination, hexing, fortune telling, astrology or following the signs of the zodiac (even used in the Farmer’s Almanacs), psychic readings, Ouija boards, tarot cards, palm reading, seances to call the spirits of the dead, spell casting, etc.— all are motivated by the desire to have power that God did not intend man to have. These practices are supposedly a two-billion-dollar-per-year industry in our “enlightened” country.
20. We do need to be aware of probing into the “darkness” with other questionable practices such as reflexology and use of the black box (radionics). There are some chiropractors who simply adjust to un-pinch nerves in the spine; others use a form of spiritism. Beware of kinesiology, homeopathy, and psychedelic drug use. There are others that practice various forms of meditation to try to attain peace and healing. Meditation will only truly help us when we meditate on the living and written Word of God.
21. Notice the beautiful picture of heaven that John gives us in the last chapter of Revelation 22:1-3 And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him. I wonder why in the end, it doesn’t say “the pills shall be for the healing of the nations”?

*AHPA (American Herbal Product Association), the experts looked to by the FDA** as well as many other universities, have done extensive testing on different herbs, using double blind clinical testing with placeboes to establish efficacy.

**Dietary supplements are very highly regulated under the FDA, much more than the food industry is, with many checks and counter checks and an incredible amount of paperwork for accountability. Always purchase herbal products from companies that are FDA registered and inspected, as there are some companies who are not.