Podcast: A Christian Doctor’s Guide to Thinking about Coronavirus (Bob Cutillo, MD)
***This is lengthy. You can read or listen if you follow the link.
EXCERPT: Can We Really Control Our Health?
Matt Tully
This makes me think of a line that I found really, really provocative in your book. You write, “modern medicine looks increasingly more like the pursuit of happiness and control of the future than the cure of sickness and the care of health.” What do you mean by that?
Bob Cutillo
Well, I think that’s one of the themes that I explored a lot in the book and I think that’s where I see this anxiety come from. People have often believed and somehow convinced themselves—and it’s clearly a delusion—but we have convinced ourselves that we are in control of our lives. There are many things that make us think that we are in the driver’s seat and that we have control of our lives because, for most of us, we have food and we have clothing. It’s only when there’s a threat to our health in societies like ours do we actually begin to wonder if we have control, and then for the most part we become very dependent on the medical system to deliver us from those uncertainties. We have great capacity, but the hardest thing for us to realize is that we are still limited people. We are still creaturely people who have to deal with suffering, still have to deal with disease, and still have to deal with death. And even though we have much less than in prior societies—we have so many more tools to respond to it in positive ways—the idea that we don’t have to deal with death is a delusion that has caused us to be increasingly anxious whenever that sense of security is threatened. And when I wrote the book a few years ago, I could see it from all kinds of activities that I saw already in society, and so I guess when this happened it didn’t surprise me that we became so anxious because the program was set for us to be anxious because it was just there underneath it—a very thin veneer, a sense that we are controlling everything.
Trusting God in Uncertain Times
In this episode, Bob Cutillo, MD, author of Pursuing Health in an Anxious Age, discusses the current coronavirus pandemic.
He explains what’s currently happening in the US and around the world; offers a broader perspective on how we should think about this virus in light of history and our Christian faith; and shares godly, practical advice to all Christians as we seek to trust God and love others well in these uncertain times.