AMEN 2011: Center of Influence

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

AMEN 2011 Breakout Seminars

Allan Handysides

Relationships: the Secret Flavor in Freedom from Addictions

And I want to explain why you're seeing handicides here and not Landless.

A lot of you don't know the difference between the 2 of us, because you call us Dr.

And he is the handsome, younger edition, and I'm the older 1.

But I'm always very flattered when they think that I'm Dr.

Landless couldn't be here today because of an urgent change in his itinerary and his booking.

I virtually volunteered to take his place because he was doing something that's very, very important for us.

He is, as you know, the executive director of the International Commission for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Other Addictions.

That's a United Nations organization front, and so he is working in the Emirates under that particular heading.

Now he is engineering something that is very dear to my heart for many reasons.

He is trying to set up a relationship between Loma Linda University, School of Public Health, and Dr.

Penny Cook, the dean is here, and the University of the Emirates, a relationship that will involve an ICPA lectureship.

You saw my letters, MBCHB, that means I'm a British trained person.

But of course I suppose we would call it in America a professorship.

But he's only an assistant professor that we're sending over there, who would be a lecturer in the British system.

And he's going to go over and be a liaison officer.

And we're hoping that we will be able to establish in the area of health, because we all know that health is a place that we begin our work in many, many places.

So Loma Linda School of Public Health will have a presence, and ICPA will have a presence, in the Emirates, in Abu Dhabi.

And that is a wonderful thing for us to have.

We're hoping that that particular entity will be able to bring in lecturers to the university and set up special academic days and so forth, and we'll bring in speakers from Loma Linda, we will bring in Adventist speakers from some of our other universities.

Albert Reese, who's the Dean of the School of Medicine in Maryland, for instance, to go and give some lectures.

Gilbert Burnham from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and Dr.

David Williams, who's in the School of Public Health at Harvard.

And it will sort of look like they're from all these different places, as they indeed are, But we will know that they are all Adventists and they're all representing the church.

And it's very important that we do that because what we are establishing there are these relationships.

We're not going to go in there and proselytize.

Just for a background, I'm an obstetrician and gynecologist.

So I trained in pediatrics in Toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children, graduated from Edinburgh in Scotland, the UK first, and then went to Toronto.

Found that I really wasn't too enamored of runny noses and diarrhea and all the little things that children have.

So I changed specialty and went into OBGYN because the mothers are much more appreciative and tolerant of things than they are for themselves, than they are for their children.

Can we just maybe turn it down a little bit?

Landless also is not a British trained, but a South African trained physician.

And so he and I have been working together.

We Both of us have not MDs, but we have MBCHB.

We get a double bachelor's degree at the end of our training in medicine.

But when I took it, which is in the olden days, because I was born in BC before computers.

So I got a degree as FRCP, which was an academic degree.

So I'm hoping that we will be able to establish in the Emirates some relationships.

The phone rang in my practice 1 day and it was a young lady who said to my wife, She said, Mrs.

She said, the guy I'm living with's got AIDS.

So my wife said, well, Gail, you'd better come and see the doctor.

I'd first met Gail when I found her coming into the practice in a, you know, with a suit that had millions of these studs in it and she looked really well-dressed but in a different sort of style.

And I said, what's your occupation, Gail?

You know how you'd go, oh, yeah, a hooker.

And she says, well, I'm a cocaine addict.

But she says, I don't touch it when I'm pregnant.

I said, you know, I'm going to be testing you.

But she said, I won't touch it when I'm pregnant.

Well, she didn't, and after the pregnancy, I found her, she went back to the cocaine, she was positive again.

She got pregnant a second time, And again, she went off the cocaine.

So I knew that she could sort of go off it for something very important, like a baby, but she was addicted.

So she calls and she says, my partner's got HIV.

I was actually delighted that she would call our office.

She called our office, and she wanted to speak to my wife, Janet.

She had a relationship that she could trust my wife.

Don Bovell

The Power of Influence in the Emergency Room, Office & Beyond

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, we thank you for this conference, we thank you for all the wisdom, all the knowledge that is being imparted.

May it help to serve us so that we may be better servants to you and serve others.

So I'm going to call this gentleman's name Bob.

I was working in Zanesville, Ohio, which was recently in the news.

The guy who had the wild animals that escape?

And so I was working in Zanesville, Ohio.

Zanesville, Ohio back then was, it's a rural community.

And I've noticed certain things about rural communities.

People really tend not to come into the ER until they really have a serious concern.

If you're working in the suburbs, you'll see, I can't sleep.

You'll see, you know, I was at Walmart, so I decided to have you come check out this bump I had on my toe, but in Zanesville, people came in, they were concerned about something.

So it's the end of my shift, and at the end of any ER physician's shift, they always want to leave, but they also want to leave everything clean, wrapped up, everybody admitted, everybody dispositioned.

You don't want the guy coming on to inherit any really bad cases.

And a nurse runs up to me, grabs me by the arm, and says, this guy doesn't look too good.

So my pulse rate goes up every time I see an ER nurse run, especially an experienced 1.

And so she dragged me to, I believe it was bed 2, and there's Bob in bed 2, perfectly still.

There's a lady sitting next to him in a chair and she's nervously tapping her foot.

And I look at his EKG and he is having a heart attack.

So he's definitely having a heart attack.

And so the wife, as I arrive there, I don't even think I introduced myself, the wife just spontaneously gives the history.

You know, my husband Bob, he's a trucker, and he was just woke up about 3 hours ago, and he had some indigestion, he complained about it, and he wanted to see his doctor later that day.

But he broke out into a sweat and he just didn't look good.

So I told him, no, we've got to go to the emergency room.

And she wanted to call an ambulance, but Bob said, no, you know, I really don't want to go to the ER, can we just go to the doctor later on?

And so he refused an ambulance, but she drove him into the emergency room.

So I lean over Bob's bed and I say, hey Bob, are you having any chest pain now?

And as he says that, the monitor goes up, goes off, I see squiggly lines and his eyes roll in the back of his head and he goes into what we physicians call ventricular fibrillation as a consequence of the heart attack he's having right now.

So back then we had the paddles that you actually applied to the chest, you know, now we have the pads you put on, you don't even have to make contact with the patient.

And so we put him on, we shocked him, applied some electricity to the heart, boom, first shock he comes back.

So I go, Bob, are you having chest pain now?

And you know, he continued to just sort of deny that he was having any pain.

He said he just had a little bit of indigestion.

Bob asked me a question, And the question that he asked me was, why is this happening to me?

And at that point, I knew a little bit about what we would call the health message.

I hadn't, I'd been educated at the University of Michigan where their motto was knowledge heals.

We have all the medications in the world.

We have all the therapeutic modalities in the world that can cure you.

So I thought about Bob's question and I started saying some things.

And the things that I said, well, Bob, you're a trucker, right?

I said, they don't have really good food at those truck stops, do they?

I said, they're pretty greasy, aren't they?

I said, well, start eating more fruit and vegetables, OK?

So I up the lidocaine drip, give him Rebolosome, and I say, Bob, you remember what we were talking about?

And so throughout that morning, for the maybe 30, 40 minutes that I was with Bob, we talked about what I would call healthcare management, lifestyle changes.

I said, well, why don't you go to church with her every week?

I said, I'm fine going to church every week.

I had called a physician in Columbus, Ohio.

I got him transferred to a tertiary care facility.

They did a cardiac catheterization on him, I suppose, I don't know.

Bob got lost, as all my other patients that I've seen, until 6 months later, 7 months later, I'm working in the ER, And the ER secretary says, hey, we've got a patient who wants to talk to you.

And I'm thinking, well, you know, in the emergency room, you see all types of patients.

And you see intoxicated patients, angry patients.

And I'm thinking, I don't live in Zanesville.

And I walk out and I look at this guy like, boy, this guy looks familiar.

And he says, hey, doc, I just had to stop by and thank you.

I was picking up my medical records and I just had to tell you thanks.

He started going to church with his wife every week.

And he came back at that point a changed person based on an extremely brief encounter that I had with him.

I still have ZKGs to prove it if any of you guys want to see them.

So, the point is, Do you think what happened to Bob that night changed his life?

But I'd submit to you Bob's experience actually changed my life a lot more than it changed his.

Because after that I realized the importance of what I would call healthcare management versus disaster management.

You know, healthcare management is what I would call our health message, health reform message.

Ernestine Finley

Mark Finley

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 1

This afternoon we're gonna talk about how your church can become a dynamic health evangelistic center.

In the first part, I'm going to present the foundations, the biblical foundations of the Adventist health message.

And we're gonna look at that from the perspective of Genesis, from the perspective of Exodus, and on through the New Testament, and look at it through the Book of Revelation.

Here's my thesis in 1 sentence that summarizes the first presentation.

I am convinced that Seventh-day Adventist churches often do health programming, but they do not have health as part of their DNA.

You can do a scattered health program and have a nutrition class or have a stress management class.

But if you really understand the biblical foundation of health and see it as physical, mental, and spiritual wholeness, it influences everything your church does.

And so in the first presentation, we're gonna look at the biblical foundations of health.

And when I use the word health, I'm not simply using it to define physical health.

But we're looking at physical health, emotional health, we're looking at spiritual health and mental health.

We're looking at health as the holistic philosophy of life and health.

And then in the second presentation, my wife is gonna take what I've said in this foundation and say, how do you apply that to a local congregation?

How can the church become a dynamic outreach center for health and healing?

And then in the third presentation, we're gonna look at the interrelationship between the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions.

And so with the first presentation is rather technical, We look at the biblical foundations.

The second 1 we apply them and the third 1 is we look at physical, mental, and spiritual linkages.

Father in heaven, we're so thankful today for the great opportunity to explore again the message of health that you have for your people.

We're thankful that you're a God that's concerned about every aspect of our life.

Not simply what we believe, but you're concerned about our entire lifestyle.

So bless us as we study that in Christ's name, amen.

Our topic is your church, a health evangelistic center.

Have you ever sat in church, either on a Sabbath morning or a Wednesday night in church, asking yourself the question, shouldn't church be much more than this?

Have you ever sat in church and thought to yourself, Why isn't our church making the impact on the community that the New Testament church made?

Why does the church seem so anemic, so powerless to touch people and touch their real lives?

If you look at the book of Acts and the New Testament, you see God moving powerfully and lives are being transformed.

But yet at times we wonder, why is it that the church today is not making that kind of an impact?

Deep within the fabric of our society, men and women are asking questions, questions like these, who can bear our burdens?

Our life seems to be falling apart physically, mentally, spiritually, and who can bear those burdens?

Who can help me with the mental stress and anxiety that's just racking my brain and mind.

Where can I find security and direction for the future?

Men and women throughout society are asking these probing questions, like this man that possibly just came back from his physician's office.

And the physician said, I'm sorry to tell you, but you've got cancer.

And my best estimates are that you have about 3 months, maybe 4 months to live.

The cancer has progressed so rapidly that chemotherapy will not touch it.

And so he's perplexed and he's asking, why me?

And what kind of answers can I find in the meaning of life?

And then think about the relationship of guilt to disease.

Often in your office as a medical practitioner, people come in, and as you begin to talk to them, they begin to share with you the guilt that's eating out their heart and their life.

And it's almost as if you are a psychological counselor and you see the relationship of that guilt to their coronary heart disease, or the relationship of that guilt to the headaches or to the sleeplessness.

And so people are asking questions, who will bear my burdens and where can I find security and who'll handle our guilt?

And like this girl who's raising the question, what's the purpose of the future?

God has given us great health insights in his word.

And when we use the word health, we're using physical, mental, spiritual, emotional wholeness.

People that are looking for answers in their life.

But when we use the word health, we're talking about this abundant life that God has designed for every human being.

This living life to the fullness and living life through all of its meaning and purpose and all of its abundance.

And so when God created us, he created us to live.

He created us to live life to the abundance, the fullness.

God did not create us originally to be devastated by sickness and disease.

And these principles of health are throughout the Bible.

They're throughout the Old and New Testament.

Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health are linked.

In scripture, we never see the separation between physical health and mental health, or physical health and emotional health, or physical health and spiritual health.

There are some churches that have that idea.

They say that we are spiritual beings, and what we do physically does not impact us spiritually.

And that really is Greek dualism, the whole concept that the soul and the body are 2 separate things, that whatever you do to the body is not gonna touch or affect the soul.

That's a total different concept in Greek dualism than the Hebraic thought.

Hebraic thought was that human beings were an integrated unit, that we are physical, mental, and spiritual beings.

That what we do physically impacts us mentally.

What happens, what we do mentally and our thought processes that impact us physically.

And the spiritual is interconnected with all of them.

So health is part of God's plan for abundant living in the Bible's first book, Genesis.

And so let's go back to Genesis, we're gonna look at Genesis, we're gonna look at Exodus, We'll look at the Old Testament.

We'll see this basic foundation of health and how health and the message of health can be part of the DNA and the fabric of the life of a local congregation.

When you go back to creation, God did it right the first time.

And Psalm 33 verse 8 says, let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him." I love that expression, all the inhabitants of the earth.

When we consider creation, because the next text says, for He spoke and it was done.

God spoke and it was done, not in the process of being done for a hundred billion years.

So the scripture says, let all the earth stand in awe of him.

When you consider creation, God created the world with the concept of preparing it as a home for those whom he would create.

And when you go back to Genesis and you look at creation, God creates the firmament, air for us to breathe.

God creates the environment with marvelous pure water for us to drink, and God creates an environment that's pleasant for the eyes.

And when you look at all of creation and you consider it, creation speaks of health with fresh air, pure water, sunshine to give us adequate vitamin D.

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Series

AMEN 2011 Breakout Seminars

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Relationships: the Secret Flavor in Freedom from Addictions

49m

The Power of Influence in the Emergency Room, Office & Beyond

42m

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 1

45m

Reaching the Cities with Centers of Influence

51m

Sanitariums Thrive as Centers of Influence, Part 1

45m

Pain Management as an Opportunity for Lifestyle Change

52m

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 2

57m

Changing Lives Through Neuromuscular Dentistry

56m

Sanitariums Thrive as Centers of Influence, Part 2

1h

Spiritual Mission and Medical Institutions

1h

Making Your Church a Health Evangelism Center, Part 3

1h

Where is God When I Suffer? - The Role of Health Ministries in Disasters

53m

Sound Doctrine