Faith-based worldviews can drive fatal refusal of treatable medical care
Evidence
People who value modern medicine as part of their worldview embrace such views more ardently and behave in accord with them in response to unconscious death thoughts. But what about people who rely more on religious faith than modern medicine when they are ill? For some groups, such as Christian Scientists, all physical maladies result from fear, ignorance, or sin, and only God has the power to cure them. Consequently, believers are urged to refuse medical treatment for themselves and their families, resulting in fatalities from conditions that, when treated, have survival rates of over 90 percent. In one highly publicized case, a two-year-old boy choked on a piece of banana for an hour while his parents gathered other church members in a circle to pray as he expired. Eleven-year-old Madeline Neumann couldn’t walk, talk, eat, or drink due to undiagnosed diabetes; she died on the floor of her home as people surrounded her and prayed. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 665
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader mortality-awareness research and to cases of ideological noncompliance in the H1N1 section.