If medical miracles exist, why don’t they happen with all diseases and types of injury, rather than just a select few such as cancer and coming out of a coma?
Why don’t we see amputees growing limbs back, Alzheimer’s disease disappearing, ALS reversing and severely burned skin turning normal?
This isn’t about whether or not one believes in a creator, God or Christ. It’s about believing just how interventional your creator is in the day-to-day lives of people.
Many people believe in medical miracles.
But did you ever wonder why medical miracles pertain only to the same very limited list of conditions?
Examples of Medical Miracles Limited to the Same Conditions
• Cancer: The disease suddenly goes into remission without explanation. In these cases the patient is rarely end-stage and days from death.
• Coma: Patient emerges with full awareness after doctors said he’d never regain consciousness.
But the patient never just hops out of bed and walks about; this can take weeks to occur, sometimes months.
• Cardiac arrest: Patient’s heart suddenly resumes beating moments after the resuscitation team gives up. Patient never pops his eyes open at that point and speaks.
• Premature birth: Two-pound baby hangs in there and eventually gains enough weight to go home. But the weight gain is never instant; takes weeks.
• Sepsis: Patient is expected to die, but slowly improves and eventually recovers—with the help of antibiotics, of course.
• Pregnancy: Woman who’s told “you can’t get pregnant” finally conceives.
A true, undeniable medical miracle would be the following:
• Someone with ALS fully recovers without medical intervention.
• Someone with rabies fully recovers without medical intervention.
• Same with anyone with Alzheimer’s disease or Huntington’s disease.
There has never been a “medical miracle” reported with these conditions.
People recover from rabies only with medical intervention—which must be administered within a time window to be effective.
ALS is also fatal, but there are rare exceptions in which the patient lives for decades, such as famed physicist Stephen Hawking.
However, in 100 percent of these cases, the disease never reverses; it’s always progressive to the point where the patient, like Hawking, requires full-time nursing care and is nearly completely paralyzed, unable to speak.
There are other conditions that have never spontaneously remitted, reversed or disappeared, such as:
• Type I diabetes. Some people with type II have reversed it with lifestyle changes; type II reversal cases are never spontaneous.
• Down syndrome or any genetic form of mental retardation such as Angelman syndrome, cri du chat syndrome and Williams syndrome.
• Prader-Willi syndrome. This genetic disease is characterized by nonstop brutal hunger that preoccupies the patient with constant food seeking.
If left unattended with enough food, the patient will likely eat him/herself to death via ruptured stomach.
There is not one case of Prader-Willi syndrome in which the patient has ever felt satiated.
As for Angelman syndrome, the high end of this disorder is a patient, in adulthood, having a vocabulary of 40 words.
A true medical miracle would be an Angelman patient acquiring conversational abilities; none ever has.
How about a repair of cleft lip and cleft palate without surgery? Now THAT would be a medical miracle.
How about someone with third-degree burns over 80% of their body awakening one day with perfectly normal skin? Will never happen.
Here’s another true medical miracle: An elderly person with bone-on-bone osteoporosis in their knees one day awakens with a thick slab of cartilage between the bones — just like they had when they were 25. Why haven’t we seen this if medical miracles truly exist?
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I can go on and on with a huge assortment of diseases and conditions that have never vanished on their own, without medical intervention.
Every single genetic syndrome falls under this category. This includes sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis. All three are fatal 100 percent of the time.
Some patients with sickle cell disease have lived into their 60s—but not without aggressive medical intervention.
There is not one case of a sickle cell patient whose red blood cells magically all became normal shaped.
Lifespan can be significantly extended for cystic fibrotic patients if they receive a lung transplant—which means someone else has to die!
- Is it possible, then, that God, Christ or whomever the creator is in your faith, has not been producing any medical miracles at all?
- Or is it probable that God for some crazy reason is intervening only on a select small number of conditions like cancer, comas and heart attacks?
And if divine intervention indeed is what makes a patient “pull through,” why does the recovery in many cases take months on end?
Traumatic Brain Injury: Where Most Medical Miracles Seem to Occur
Such would be the case of a person with a traumatic brain injury whom doctors said would probably be a vegetable.
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But the patient eventually is walking, talking and taking college classes—but only after 12 months of aggressive therapies taking up hours every day.
Why wouldn’t God just instantly zap this person to recovery—from deep coma to walking and talking within the span of five minutes?
Remarkable recoveries from severe traumatic brain injuries are often deemed medical miracles, but 100 percent of these cases require months of intense therapies of different sorts.
Recovering, over a period of six months, with five hours a day of speech, physical and cognitive therapy does not sound like a miracle.
I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here. But you have to admit, I’ve posed some extremely provocative questions. These are all very fair reflections.
And whenever my parents have surgery, I DO pray! You just never know if medical miracles really do exist—even if the conditions are only that select handful.
