I grew up with the idea that healing comes from the medicine that we take. How could I have been so wrong? For a head-ache you take a tablet or something similar.

My body has a symptom and it will get healed when I take some medication for that. I have a pain in my back and when I have taken some muscle relaxants the pain will go away. This was my thinking… only later I discovered that there are two other aspects of healing that I have overlooked.

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

This was the first discovery I made – that food could heal you or could prevent you from getting ill. One example is this: apart from possibly making you fat too much bread could lead to an imbalance of the good fat omega 3 which makes me more susceptible to inflammations. That means if I get a mosquito bite or a scratch that it will take much longer to heal. When I injure a muscle it also takes longer to heal.

My second discovery was in the area of prayer for healing.  My thinking previously was that you resort to prayer when everything else has failed. It is sort of the last resort that you go to after everything else has failed. I have now learned that you could (should) pray for almost anything first. Illness is always the sympton of something that has gone wrong in the body. There could be a emotional, spiritual or psychological reason for the illness. The root of this may be uncovered and healed by prayer. So this means that prayer should be the first resort. I have been taught and I have seen how this happens. I have not seen a dead person coming back to life again, but I have heard accounts of that.

So now I know – prayer first, food second. I know that medicine is there to play a role in the healing process and I acknowledge that, but it is not proper to run to medicine first for non life threatening diseases. So for a headache it will be prayer first and four glasses of water second and then medicine or consultations with medical professionals.  Please do not misunderstand me, though. If you are losing blood after an accident, there must be prayer and immediate medical care to replace the blood that you are losing. So there are life threatening situations that require immediate medical attention. This is quite different from the headache.