I was asked: How do you reconcile the fact that doctors have to spend a lot of time and effort to physically cure patients when they can be cured by just a touch from God? Is medical treatment a form of healing that God provides? To begin to answer these questions, I recount a night when I tried removing a giant wasp from my dining room so as to protect my kids. The attempt failed and I was stung. The burning sensation began in seconds and in minutes I had a throbbing pain that had no equal. My wife and girls prayed for me as my swollen thumb was iced. It was not working. I emptied my medicine box and swallowed the maximal doses of the strongest pain killers. Prayer and pain killers brought me relief – seven hours later.

I have no doubt that our God is a healing God (Ex 15:26). I am also aware that He intends to heal every brokenness and ailment (Ps 103:3). The problem for me is that He does not heal every time we ask for healing and He does not always heal in a supernatural way every time we ask for a miracle. For me as a follower of Christ, I am comforted that there will come a time on the other side of eternity where there will not be any disease and thus suffering as we know it will cease (Rev 21:4). Until then, I have to work with the reality and the mystery of healing as I go about my every day vocation as a medical practitioner.

Christians are fond of asking Christian doctors if they believe in miraculous healings and if they had witnessed a bona fide one themselves. It appears that most of us have heard of many reports but few of us are privileged enough to verify any. In my two decades since graduating from medical school, I can recount two cases where the healing was close to amazing. Neither of which came about through prayer though. One was a woman in her mid-fifties who had severe hand eczema that made her palms look like wax. The thickened skin cracked and bled often, causing her much misery. Despite many consultations with skin specialists and general practitioners, none of us offered her sustained relief. She finally met a traditional Chinese physician who gave her a secret concoction taken for seven days straight. The thickened skin fell off and baby smooth skin was the result until now. The other was a man in his sixties who had smoked all his life and was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer with metastases to his brain. He was given only three months to live and told not to bother to quit smoking. That was in 2001. He is still alive and smoking! His MRI scans showed no evidence of his cancer after his healing by a combination of different alternative medicine.

While it is difficult to understand the mechanism underpinning miraculous healing, it is not hard to appreciate the miracle that is already designed and built into our body. Every day I prescribe antibiotics for infections of all sorts and know for certain that unless the God-designed immunity works in the patients, the drugs are not effective. A wound does not heal and close unless there is the intrinsic cellular repair process busy at work, faithfully and predictably every time we get injured. Most of us take for granted this miracle until this healing capacity fails, like in the case of immune compromise due to cancer, diabetes or HIV.

One of my heroes is Dr Paul Brand (1914-2003) who devoted his life to the healing of leprosy patients. Dr Brand was an orthopedic surgeon who had worked hard to reverse the ravages of the debilitating disease. It took two to three years of successive surgeries and painstaking rehabilitation to release a diseased leper’s hand from a frozen state into a more functional form. Not once did a finger suddenly grow back. Dr Paul Brand had remarked, “If all that the television evangelists claim is true, then I am in the wrong business. Have I wasted my life doing slowly and painstakingly what could be done in a twinkling of an eye?”

I am certain that God does heal in ways that defy the natural laws He has set in motion for our world to function. I am also convinced that we ought to pray for our sick brothers and sisters that they may be healed with or without medical intervention (Jas 5:14-15). What I am concerned about is the harm we do when we misrepresent the truth about healing. When we communicate that everyone will be healed if they are prayed for, we are raising unrealistic expectations. Even worse, when healing does not take place after prayers are offered, some suggest that it may be due to the lack of faith or the presence of unconfessed sins.

Philip Yancey received nearly a thousand letters after his book Disappointment with God was published. Most of these letters described the pain of unanswered prayers dealing with diseases. Almost all contained the hurt inflicted by the church who had accused them of lack of faith or that they were being punished for their sins. Yancey reflected, “I would never want to dampen someone’s faith, because bold faith surely impressed Jesus. Yet the stack of letters from my filing cabinet convinces me that we can do equal harm by holding out false hope of physical healing. Believe me, there is nothing I would rather say to parents of a Down’s syndrome child or to families waiting on the edge for Huntington’s chorea to manifest itself than, ‘Just believe, and you will be healed.’ But I know of no miraculous healings of those conditions, and to offer false hope would be even more cruel.”

One of the first things I had learned as a medical student is this truism: “To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always,” which originated in the 1800s with Dr. Edward Trudeau, founder of a tuberculosis sanatorium. This dictum serves as my working philosophy as I help my patients cope with the physical brokenness while we wait to get to a better place in heaven. Our God is a God of comfort (Ps 23:4). It is no coincidence that this reassuring message about God comes right after an earlier Psalm when the psalmist cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1) I have learned that God may not always offer us total protection but He always offers maximum support.

I continue to hope that many who suffer diseases can be cured by a touch from the Hand of God. I also know that the Hand of God comforts those who suffer physical ailments and relieves their symptoms through the hands of physicians like me. St. Paul makes clear the modus operandi in 2 Cor 1:3-5 when he describes: “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”

The New International Version of the Bible has been referenced.

Poh Kiang is a family doctor by vocation and is privileged to serve the low-income families living in government housing in Singapore. He is blessed with a loyal soul mate, Lie Joan and two precious daughters, Ella and Alexandra. He is a member of Pentecost Methodist Church.