is alternative medicine Christian?

I just got an email from this website inviting me to take a look at their post on environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional medicine so I could share it with readers here. I have to admit, a year ago I would have probably ignored the invitation, because I would have been hard-pressed then to see any connection between alternative medicine and the Christian life. At least, I would have had a hard time writing about it. But I've put a lot more thought into issues of health and wellness in the past year. 

Having a baby will do that to you. 

Growing up southern Baptist, I was always taught to mistrust alternative medicines like yoga and herbs as something "eastern" and therefore "New Age." In retrospect, I'm not sure what any of us meant by those labels. I think Christians tend to be cautious about anything that's remotely spiritual or even intuitive if it doesn't happen in church. Perhaps there's wisdom in that; I'm sure there is a dangerous side to spirituality, and perhaps some of these kinds of things could be paths to getting caught in that danger. But at the same time, I think that western Christianity's tendency to avoid anything that doesn't fit in our boxes is a mistake. 

I've always hated doctors. I've always had a phobia of hospitals and everything medical--to the extent that just the smell of a hospital lobby has sometimes caused me to hyperventilate. But I never considered looking into any kind of alternative medicines until I was about 18 weeks pregnant and started to realize that, with that kind of phobia, there was no way I could give birth in a hospital. There aren't a lot of other options for giving birth in my state, but after a great deal of research and thought, I decided to have my baby at home with a midwife. It was one of the best decisions of my life (and resulted in a wonderful, amazing, beautiful 38 hours of labor with no drugs that even at the time I said was really not too painful), but it also led to my current rethinking of a great many assumptions in the medical industry. 

Even though homebirths are illegal in my state, choosing one turned out to be really easy for me, because the more I researched it, the more I realized that what traditional doctors do in hospitals is simply not the best practice for birth. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the best practice for a healthy, normal birth is simply to leave nature alone and let the mother's body do what it's designed to do. Incidentally, this is also the environmental thing to do, not just because no drugs means no pollutants, but because the core of being an environmentalist is to let nature be, to let things--humans as well as plants and animals--live and grow and develop according to their nature, just as they were designed. Much of the time, it's our interference with that that causes problems. 

But the more I learn about these issues, the more I also feel that this core principle of letting things work as they were designed is also the Christian thing to do. I hesitate to write this, because it's easy to take this too far and say that Christianity is anti-science. And we've had enough of that in our history. But I don't think it's going too far to say that science, especially medical science, has sometimes taken things too far, to become anti-health, anti-people, and anti-nature. And to be working against all those things that God created is also, in a small way, to be anti-God. 

I certainly don't want to criticize everything in modern medicine, and I don't want to undermine all that it has accomplished. But I do think that modern medicine has often been too quick to act and interfere in things that it doesn't yet understand. And I think that most branches of Christianity have often been far too accepting of everything within the mainstream of culture while being overly skeptical of anything outside it. During my months of prenatal care under a midwife, I had the opportunity to experience the effectiveness of herbs, exercises, and homeopathic remedies that have been used for thousands of years but are still mistrusted by mainstream science. And I'm pretty sure that the chiropractic care she suggested for me cured, not only my baby's posterior position, but also my chronic stomach problems and my allergies. 

Of course, such anecdotal evidence isn't really meaningful on a scientific level. But just like a spiritual event, it's evidence enough for the person who experienced it.