Four hundred years before Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, a Greek Physician named Hippocrates coined the phrase, “First, Do No Harm!” I first repeated the Hippocratic Oath on the day I graduated from medical school, and try to live by that motto every day. Doctor Luke wrote in Luke 8:43, “And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone.” Seventeen hundred years later, Dr. Benjamin Rush was the only MD to sign the Declaration of Independence, and now has a medical school in Chicago named after him. But Ron Chernow writes,
In treating yellow fever, Rush adopted an approach that now sounds barbaric: he bled and purged the victim, a process frightful to behold. He emptied the patient’s bowels four or five times, using a gruesome mixture of potions and enemas, before draining off ten to twelve ounces of blood to lower the pulse. For good measure he induced mild vomiting. This regimen was repeated two or three times daily. Rush was a man of exemplary courage, but it is questionable whether he saved lives or only hastened deaths by waking the body’s natural defenses.1Ron Chernow, “A Disagreeable Trade Chapter 24,” in Alexander Hamilton (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2004), 449.
Now, in 2022, physicians and surgeons who specialize in transgender medicine, administer hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and perform “gender affirming” surgery to make a person’s body look more like their gender identity. Many believe that they relieve suffering when they do this. No one can deny there have been incredible advances in the science of medicine over the last 150 years. For thousands of years doctors have wanted to help and to heal, but when they had the wrong hypothesis, it often led to the wrong conclusion. In this essay, we will look at some of the harmful thoughts and actions that come from the transgender movement and then look at the helping and healing truths from God’s word that will bring the transformation, not the transition, that people really need.
To keep reading this essay by Dan Dionne in the Journal of Biblical Soul Care Spring Edition 2023 (page 58) click here.
