What about alternative medicine?

Question 11097

The phrase alternative medicine covers such an enormous range of things that treating it as one subject is the first mistake most of us make. It stretches from a cup of peppermint tea for indigestion all the way to practices that involve summoning spirit guides, and lumping those together produces either needless panic or dangerous complacency. So let us take it apart.

My aim here is to give you a way of thinking rather than a list of approved therapies, because the list would be out of date within a year and you would still need the thinking. Two questions will do most of the work: what does this actually claim to do, and where does the power come from?

Three very different categories of alternative medicine

The first category is ordinary physical treatment that happens to sit outside conventional practice. Herbal remedies, dietary approaches, massage, physiotherapy-adjacent bodywork and so on. These make physical claims about physical causes. They may work, they may not, and that is a question for evidence rather than theology. Nothing spiritual is at stake in a chamomile tea.

The second category is alternative medicine that rests on a philosophical system about invisible energies. Reiki, therapeutic touch, some forms of acupuncture as traditionally explained, crystal healing and various energy therapies belong here. The claim is not that a chemical does something to tissue. The claim is that a life force is being manipulated, and that life force is usually described in explicitly religious terms drawn from Eastern or New Age thought.

The third category is openly occult: spiritual healers, mediums, charms, and practitioners who invoke spirits or ancestors. This is not really alternative medicine at all. It is divination and sorcery presented as healthcare, and Scripture addresses it directly.

What Scripture forbids, and why

Deuteronomy 18:10-12 lists divination, fortune-telling, omens, sorcery, charmers, mediums, necromancers and those who inquire of the dead, and calls all of it an abomination to the Lord. The list is comprehensive because the underlying problem is singular: going somewhere other than God for the knowledge and power that belong to him.

In the New Testament the relevant word is pharmakeia, which appears in the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20 and in the judgements of Revelation. It carries the sense of potions and drugs used in a magical or religious context, and it is a useful reminder that the ancient world made no clean split between medicine and magic. The question was always which power was being invoked.

So when assessing any form of alternative medicine, the sharpest question is not whether it works. It is whether the practitioner is asking anything other than the living God to act. If spirits are being invoked, if a guide is being consulted, if the practice requires you to accept a rival account of what the universe is made of, then it is off limits regardless of how well anyone says they felt afterwards.

Does it work? A separate question

Christians sometimes assume that if a treatment produces results it must have real power behind it, and if the treatment is spiritually dubious then that power must be demonic. I would slow down there. Most of the time the explanation is far more ordinary. Conditions fluctuate. Many complaints resolve on their own. The placebo effect is real, well documented and rather remarkable, and a kind practitioner who listens for an hour will make almost anyone feel better.

That means a great deal of alternative medicine is neither miraculous nor sinister. It is ineffective, expensive and harmless. The Christian concern there is stewardship rather than spiritual danger, and the practical risk is that money and time go on something that does nothing while a treatable condition progresses.

Where a therapy makes claims that conflict with what we can observe, be honest about that too. A believer has no business defending a treatment against the evidence simply because it feels more natural or more wholesome than a tablet. Nature is not automatically kinder than a laboratory, as anyone who has met deadly nightshade will confirm, and the word natural on a label is a marketing term rather than a guarantee of safety. Believing an untrue thing is not made virtuous by sincerity. We are people of the truth, and that commitment does not stop at the consulting room door.

Can you separate the technique from the philosophy?

This is the genuinely difficult question, and I do not think it has a single answer. Take acupuncture. Traditionally it is explained in terms of qi flowing along meridians, which is a religious cosmology. Yet many Western practitioners treat it purely as needling that produces measurable effects on pain, with no metaphysics attached. Is the believer who visits the second sort participating in the first sort’s worldview?

My own view is that a physical technique can sometimes be lifted out of its original framework, in the way that we use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week without worshipping anything. But this needs care, and it needs honesty about whether the separation is real or simply a marketing decision. Yoga postures marketed as stretching are one thing; a class that includes chanting and instruction in emptying the mind is another.

Where the technique cannot be separated from the spirituality, as with reiki, where the practitioner is explicitly channelling a universal energy through attunement, no separation is available. That form of alternative medicine is the philosophy. There is nothing left when you take the spirituality out.

Conscience, liberty and not becoming odd

Romans 14 governs a good deal of this. Believers will land differently, and someone who cannot in conscience use a particular therapy should not use it, because Romans 14:23 says whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. Equally, the Christian with a clear conscience about a herbal supplement should not be treated as a compromiser.

I would also warn against the opposite failure, which is a kind of jumpy suspicion that sees demons in every essential oil. That posture does not honour God, it exhausts everyone nearby, and it makes the gospel look ridiculous to neighbours who are simply trying to sleep better. Discernment is calm. Paranoia is not discernment moving faster.

If you are unsure about a particular practice, ask the practitioner directly what they believe is happening and why it works. Most will tell you plainly. The answer usually resolves the question in about thirty seconds, which is quicker than a fortnight of anxious internet searching.

Do not abandon what actually helps

The most serious practical danger I see is not spiritual contamination. It is people declining effective treatment in favour of alternative medicine and losing the window in which their illness could have been dealt with. I have sat with families afterwards, and it is a bleak conversation.

Conventional medicine is one of God’s ordinary mercies, and I have set out the biblical case for that in my answer on whether Christians should use doctors. If a practitioner tells you to stop your prescribed treatment, that is the moment to walk out. See also my answers on medication and on television faith healers, who trade in much the same false hope.

Whatever you decide about any particular therapy, the frame stays the same. 1 Corinthians 10:31 tells us to do everything to the glory of God, and your health decisions are not exempt from that.

There is a further reason to be careful, and it has nothing to do with spirits. Much of the alternative medicine industry is unregulated, which means nobody is checking the qualifications, the claims or the products. Herbal preparations can interact badly with prescribed drugs, and because patients often do not mention them to their doctor, the interaction goes unnoticed until something goes wrong. If you are taking anything at all, tell whoever is treating you. Secrecy helps nobody.

And do watch the money. Desperate people are a profitable market, and there are practitioners who know exactly how to keep a frightened patient coming back for one more course of treatment. Wisdom about alternative medicine includes wisdom about who is being enriched by your hope.

So, now what?

Run your own list through the two questions. What does this claim to do, physically or spiritually? And who or what is being asked to act? Anything that involves invoking a spirit, consulting a guide or channelling an energy should be dropped without further discussion, and if you have been involved in that sort of thing, tell the Lord about it plainly and let it go.

For everything else, use your head, ask for evidence, keep your doctor informed, and hold your conclusions with a light grip. Where is your confidence actually resting when you are unwell, and would you be able to tell?

You shall be blameless before the LORD your God, for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this. (Deuteronomy 18:13-14, ESV)