Brian Schwartz, MD &amp; Mark Finley, DDiv OBJECTIVES 1. Discuss the value and importance of praying with (for) patients. 2. Identify “do’s and don’ts” in clinically based prayer. 3. Demonstrate how to begin praying with patients.

AMEN 2019: Christ in You

<p>Brian Schwartz, MD &amp; Mark Finley, DDiv OBJECTIVES 1. Discuss the value and importance of praying with (for) patients. 2. Identify “do’s and don’ts” in clinically based prayer. 3. Demonstrate how to begin praying with patients.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Session C

Fred Lee

Jane Lee

Reflecting Christ to Your Community as a Healthcare Provider

Dear kind and gracious heavenly Father, Lord, I just thank you so much for this opportunity today to share our story with you, which is really your story, Lord.

What a good and gracious God you are to use just vessels like yours to do your work.

And we pray that it may be a blessing to those here attending.

I pray that your Holy Spirit will draw near to convict hearts and to not just hear Lord convict hearts, but to further the work in their communities, wherever they may be, to be a part of this great work that you have for us.

And so this is my prayer in Jesus' name, amen.

Fred and I were praying over at the prayer room right before this meeting.

And then As I started praying, it just all came out.

But it's not because I was nervous or anything about this seminar, but it's because I was overwhelmed with the goodness of God.

OK, so I want to introduce my family to you.

He'll be, we're going to be kind of, you know, handing the baton back and forth throughout this session.

But he and I are both dentists, But I am not working now.

Currently, I'm full time at home with my precious boys.

We just wanted to share with you that despite our inadequacies, I know that likely, in light of God's glory, we feel so inadequate, right?

But I just wanted to share with you, despite that, that we just feel compared to share of God's mercy and grace in our lives and how his light can shine forth through us.

So I think it's important that we share our past story, you know, how God has brought us to where we are now because it really sheds light on where we are now today.

So we're just gonna try to go quickly through our history.

Fred and I, we met in dental school and we were classmates and we graduated in 2006 and we got married and shortly after that we went over to Trinidad as missionaries for a few years and then we returned back.

During our time there, there were a lot of trials that we went through, but looking back at it, hindsight, we realized, wow, God, you were preparing us for the mission field of where we are today, which is in the city of Pikeville, Tennessee.

When we came back to the States, we were kind of 4 years after we had graduated.

So when we came back, we saw all our classmates who had already had owning their practices, having their own homes, and things like that.

And we came back with pretty much the same amount of student debt that we had going to the mission field.

And we didn't have a home, no vehicles, nothing.

Like our debt, because both of us went to dental school for training, we had a lot of debt, right?

So double of what you all had, unless you're married to a medical professional or anyways, our debt was about that much when we came back.

And we didn't have a home, so we had to purchase a home, right?

So on top of that we had our house did on top of our student loan debt and we thought, God, you know, we know that you have a plan for us.

We know that you're going to help us to work out our debt.

We, you know, we're in service to you in the mission field, which we don't regret not even an ounce and we're so thankful for the experience we had.

We're in service to you in the mission field, which we don't regret not even an ounce.

And we're so thankful for the experience we had.

We know that you're going to lead us forward, continue to lead us in this.

And you're going to help us pay off this debt.

Because at that time, we were studying prophecy.

We were recognizing the time that we were living in.

You know, though we kind of understood it before, when we really delved into what we were studying, we realized, God, you know, time is short, we need to get out of debt and we need to move to the country.

And so we began our search for country practice, because that's where, of course, Fred needed to be to provide a living for our family.

And so through, you know, long story short, I don't have time to go through the whole process, but it was really neat to see how he had brought us to Pikeville.

But at the end of all of the searching, he got a tip from somebody that there might be a practice in Pikeville for sale, you might want to check that out.

So he gave them a call and the manager picked up and she just seemed kind of confused like that he was calling about the practice for sale, you know, because she said, I don't know how you found out about this practice for sale, but it wasn't actually publicly for sale, you know?

But actually what happened was that we were already in contract with another dentist who was interested in purchasing this practice.

But we have, we were, we've been trying to get a hold of him for several months now, but we can't get a hold of him." And they were like in the final stages of their contract.

And she just said it was just the oddest thing because he was very much interested in this practice, but it's like he just fell off the face of the earth, you know.

For several months we tried because this practice actually was in the decline because the previous owner at that time came down with Alzheimer's and was, you know, doing things that were not right in the office.

And so at the time they were just trying to get by with you know just Dennis coming in temp Dennis you know coming in to just fill in the time.

And so obviously that practice was really going down.

Not very many patients in the office anymore and they were desperate to keep it alive.

And so they were trying hard to get a hold of this doctor but he wasn't being able to be contacted.

And so she said, okay, we just decided that we're going to cut our contract with this dentist and we're going to put it back on the market just yesterday.

And so, you know, it was just amazing to us when we heard that because we thought, God, there's no doubt in our minds that you were saving this practice for us, you know?

On top of all that, because the practice was on the decline, we were able to get it for a really low cost, and it included the building and also an apartment in the back of that, which we needed, because we needed a home to live in at that time.

So it was just the perfect situation for us.

So now, on top of our student loan debt and our house, now we had our practice debt, right?

So we're feeling like, OK, God, I know that you have a plan for us.

And we were feeling anxious at that time, which we were still a baby in our faith in God, right?

And we failed to recognize that he had a plan for us.

And so we're trying to fix the solution in our own hands.

And so I thought, OK, maybe I need to start going back to work, you know?

But then like our kids were like 6 months old and 1 year old and 3 years old, you know?

But I'm like trying to fix this on my own and we're like, okay, well, I'll just try the best I can, you know, to work part time.

But very soon after that, just after a couple of months, you know, God strongly convicted me, you need to stay home with your children.

And so ever since, I've been home with them and never looked back.

And you know, it's just an amazing story of God's, anyway, you know, God's redemption and, you know, something that's so negative, like a negative balance, right?

Because, you know, after we purchased that practice, Like I said, it was very much struggling, you know?

And so, Fred had to put a lot of work into building it back up again.

But, you know, it's all by the mercy and grace of God and I just praise his name, you know, because he knows our hearts desire was to just do his work, you know, and to just go where he called us.

And in a matter of 3 and a half years of the purchase of that practice, we were able to pay off all that debt.

Let me just show you a picture of how beautiful Pikeville is.

It's in the Sequatchie Valley, of the Cumberland Plateau, and it's just a piece of heaven on earth.

It's very lush, as you can see, but the city of Pikeville and the residents within that town are so destitute in their lives because they're struggling with a low income, with low education, with, you know, they have just because the combination of inadequate education and heredity, they have a lot of struggles with, you know, broken homes.

It's just incredible how many homes there are just from a broken home.

They have, you know, they're struggling with the typical, you know, drugs and alcohol and unemployment is just incredible and so, you know, God, I believe, took us here and as a mission field and that's what he was preparing us for this whole time.

So I'm going to share a little bit about kind of what it was like for me and also give some practical examples of how we've been able to reflect Christ in our practice.

So when I started work in Pikeville, I felt really inadequate.

You know, as Jane mentioned, it was never in my plans to be a practice owner.

If you know me, leadership was not 1 of my gifts and still is, God is growing that in me, let's just say.

Little did I know that leaders are made and not born and God had many lessons to teach me and through that experience, God has been teaching me many, many things.

And so, you know, at that time, I still wanted to just live in my comfort zone, just do my own thing, work under somebody else.

I have no problems taking orders from somebody.

But, you know, it's often through our greatest trials that God teaches us humility and the necessary lessons for us to truly grow.

And through my experience unbeknownst to me God was teaching me to trust in him and that his ways are always higher than our ways.

Lyndi Schwartz

Food As Medicine

I'm a physician and those of us that went to medical school, I realize that there are others here that didn't go to medical school, but those of us that went to medical school spent a lot of time in medical school learning things that we no longer remember.

Small is here, he's a surgeon, but if you ask me any anatomical question, I think I'd be hard pressed to give an answer.

But certainly we have to study, you know, things like beriberi, biochemistry and so forth.

And we don't remember anything like that.

Has anybody ever seen a case of beriberi?

Must have been in the mission field someplace.

Alabama, okay, well that would be possible.

But you know, we do treat things like hypertension and diabetes and coronary artery disease and stroke and gout and those kinds of things.

And that's what we really need to look at.

The reason that's significant is that if you look at this data, In the United States, if the 10 most common causes of death, and this was actually reported from up to 2016, but beyond it's the same, if you look at that, the top 10 causes, 5 of them at least are related to our dietary and food choices.

And then if you look for risk factors for chronic disease and deaths, it is dietary risk factors.

The magnitude of our food choices is really hardly realized.

It's not tobacco use, high blood pressure, or anything like that.

And this other slide brings it home even further.

And what you see here actually is that it's not genetics or anything like that.

People say it's my genes that I have all these diseases, but we realize that overall it is related to suboptimal dietary choices.

So I think that's why this is really important.

The majority of practitioners, we spend a lot of our time mopping up the floor instead of shutting off the faucet.

And I get really frustrated when I see physicians who don't agree or believe that somehow turning off the faucet is really important.

What we're going to talk about this afternoon is how to shut off the faucet.

This paper was published in May of this year.

In May of this year in the Lancet, this is actually done every year, the Global Burden of Health, this Global Burden of Disease Study.

This was published in May, but the data was from 1990 to 2017.

The collaborators on this particular project are from all over the world, And included places in the United States, like the Mayo Clinic and Harvard School of Public Health, some of the collaborators on this.

In the paper that they published in JAMA, excuse me, in The Lancet in 2019, what we aren't eating is killing us.

Dietary risks are responsible for 11 million deaths, 255 million disability adjusted life years, cardiovascular disease deaths were followed by cancers and type 2 diabetes mellitus.

These are diseases related to dietary choices.

And then what aren't we eating that's killing us?

Whole grains, fruit, and nuts in moderation.

I list those 3 things first, 1, 2, and 3, because those 2 are not the most significant dietary absences that are the cause of or associated with these diseases.

Additionally vegetables and seeds and too much salt.

So far as looking at a diet related deaths by country, in terms of the lowest death rates, the United Kingdom ranked 23rd above Ireland, which was 24th, and Sweden, which was 25.

The United States ranked 43rd behind Rwanda and Nigeria.

Now, how many of you were aware of the study that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in October just this month, right?

And I write this, I said This is a contrary view.

The Analyst of Internal Medicine, for those who don't know, is really the signature journal in internal medicine, and it's actually also the publication from the American College of Physicians.

How many of you belong to the American College of Physicians, the ACP?

That is the premier organization for internists, and so I belong to that organization.

Unprocessed—I'll just tell you the title, go over this really quickly— unprocessed red meat and processed meat consumption, dietary guideline recommendations from Nutri-Rex Consortium.

What this recommended is that the panel suggests that adults continue current unprocessed red meat consumption.

It got a weak recommendation with low certainty evidence.

It also recommended that they continue current processed meat consumption, again, a weak recommendation, low certainty evidence.

What is significant about that is that the major thing that they looked at was preferences of people in terms of diet.

That was a major factor in these recommendations.

Additionally, They said that people don't change anyway, so let them go ahead and eat their stuff.

So this is the challenges in nutrition science that we face.

The challenges in nutrition science are several.

I just want to read these quickly because we have so much interesting material to go over today.

The totality of the evidence includes randomized controlled trials, epidemiologic studies, cohort studies, case control studies, and case series and reports, as well as systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

So this is the type of data involved in nutrition science.

And when we go over the stuff today, all the studies we go over will fit under 1 of these categories.

Additionally, the prospective cohort studies are the strongest observational evidence because the intervention, which is the dietary exposure, precedes the development of disease.

So that's the reason that prospective studies are best.

Every year, patients are bombarded with the latest new miracle diet book that claims to promote health, affect weight loss, and reduce disease risks.

How many of you have to hear your patient say, I've got this thing, what do you think, doc?

And so clinicians must have an understanding of the specific common attributes of healthy dietary patterns to appropriately assess the literature in this area.

If you don't really appreciate what the common dietary recommendations are, then we're going to kind of not do a very good job.

The last thing that's significant when you look at challenges in nutrition science is the funding source.

Oftentimes it's the private sector and that is significant.

You know, a lot of you guys are on the right continent, but this is Bangkok.

And I show this picture just because this actually in the middle here is a river.

I wish I had a light and everything too, but This is the river that goes through the city of Bangkok.

For our 29th wedding anniversary, my husband and I went to Thailand last year.

You can't have a better time, anytime, anywhere.

Now, I show you this, and my husband planned the whole trips.

He plans everything and he planned a first class trip that could not be reproduced by anybody.

But I show you that city because I want to show you this.

Whenever you look at nutrition studies, what you're looking at is what does the overall skyline show.

You notice that some of the buildings are short, some of them are medium height, some of them are skyscrapers, right?

Mark Finley

Brian Schwartz

Team Building: Praying With Patients

Well, Father in heaven, we just again thank you for the opportunity to be here for the Amen Conference.

And as we specifically study your word and talk about examples of the power of prayer, just pray that this could be effective to encourage each of us to do this better, more consistently, and in an effective way in our practices.

Teach us Jesus' method of reaching the heart, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

It's always nice to teach when people are in the audience.

If you didn't have anybody, it would be more difficult.

Twenty-five years ago, I was flying to an appointment, and my son was sitting next to me.

And he turned to me and he said, Dad, you're going to be really interested in this article.

And He handed me USA Today and there was a front page article that was titled, Does Prayer Make a Difference?

It talked about studies that were done in intercessory prayer and the impact that that was having on patients.

I became really interested in that, so I contacted Larry Dorsey.

I was with it as written television at the time and I said, Dr.

Dorsey, I've always been interested in prayer.

You were featured on CNN, you were featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, you were making the news circuits, the Sunday morning shows.

I'm a Christian, I'm a Seventh-day Adventist.

Adventists have a large medical facilities all around the world.

Now what I didn't know was something about his Eastern mysticism leanings at the time, which I discovered quite a bit later.

Dorsey believed that when you prayed, there was a kind of an energy that left you and entered into the other person to promote healing.

He also believed that you could pray for petri dishes and the bacteria would grow more rapidly.

So I began to learn a lot about Dorsey, but he is the 1 that at least opened the door for me to begin to study intercessory prayer, and certainly not Eastern mysticism, so don't get nervous.

It was really interesting to navigate that TV interview that I had with him and to keep us on the biblical track.

Why does intercessory prayer work or does it?

Does it make any difference if you pray for your patients or if you don't pray for your patients?

There are 3 things I think about intercessory prayer for our patients that really we need to consider.

Number 1, when patients are prayed for, they themselves feel more confidence in the practitioner that prays for them, and with that positive mental attitude it releases positive chemical endorphins that help the healing process.

I think that when a patient has confidence in the provider, it makes a dramatic difference, and so God creates a spiritual atmosphere.

Secondly, when patients pray, when they pray for themselves, there is very good scientific evidence.

There is about 208, the last I checked, studies that have been done on religion and healing, faith and healing, And the evidence I think is overwhelming that people who have spiritual leanings, people that pray, people that study the Word of God, people that attend church, tend to have better health outcomes than those that don't.

And I think when a person prays and they have confidence in God, it gives them a sense of divine interaction in their life.

But there's a third area, and that's the area that I want to spend most of my time with you on, and that's this.

That God works through intercession in ways that the human mind may not fully comprehend or understand, in ways that he would not work or didn't work if we didn't pray.

That God intervenes, that as Christians we believe that God moves powerfully and He intervenes in life because of prayer.

I want to look at the theological basis for that before Dr.

Schwartz comes on and gives us some practical examples of intercessory prayer.

So the question is this, does God interact with human beings in a process of healing in ways that the human mind may not fully comprehend or understand when we pray, and if we didn't pray would those same outcomes take place?

Is God doing everything he can to work the process of healing with your patience whether you pray or not?

And if indeed he is, what difference does intercessory prayer make?

Or maybe God is doing everything he can, but our prayers enable God to do more than he could have done otherwise.

Let's look first at the biblical theology of intercessory prayer.

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Series

Breakout Session C

Team Building: Praying With Patients

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Reflecting Christ to Your Community as a Healthcare Provider

1h 7m

Food As Medicine

57m

Team Building: Praying With Patients

1h 9m

The Glymphatic System, Glaucoma, and Outer Space

1h 11m

Christianity in the Workplace

1h

Sound Doctrine