Diabetes Points to Faith Healing at the Heart of MAHA
Writer Sarah Jones faces a vivid personal need to reconcile the appealing creed of MAHA with her own recent diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Confronting a diagnosis she clearly did not want, she found herself blaming herself. She did this despite knowing that the disease is more complicated than a simple blame game. This led her to explore the ethos of the MAHA movement that pervades the current administration’s health policy and to find that faith healing is at the heart of it.
Medical and Spiritual
To Jones, the medicines – metformin and tirzepatide – her doctor prescribes are good news. She takes comfort from the scientific literature that documents their value and from seeing her blood glucose coming down.
But she finds the MAHA ethos playing down the value of medicine and favoring personal, mental, and spiritual disciplines:
“MAHA prefers a commonplace American myth, and so does my inner scold: Fix your mind, make better choices, and health will follow. Self-mastery is free-market logic in another guise, and it won’t make Americans healthy at all.
“If the key to health lies in the mind, our ‘chronic disease’ crisis is more spiritual than material. We are making ourselves sick, so we must heal ourselves. When MAHA attempts any structural diagnosis, it complains of big pharma and big agriculture, but individual choices are still the principal focus. Industry is bad because it encourages bad decision-making; it provides shortcuts, like antidepressants or GLP-1s, so we can avoid the hard work of good health.”
A False Choice
Faith healing promotes a false choice between medical and spiritual needs. Spiritual needs are real and important. But meeting those needs is not a valid alternative to facing the medical needs that a serious disease like diabetes or cancer presents. The apocryphal book of Sirach identifies this false choice in religious terms:
“When you are sick do not be negligent, but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you. And give the physician his place, for the Lord created him; let him not leave you, for there is need of him. There is a time when success lies in the hands of physicians, for they too will pray to the Lord, that he should grant them success in diagnosis and in healing, for the sake of preserving life.”
While the ethos of MAHA has elements that appeal to Jones, ultimately she concludes that its deepest conviction is offensive: “People who get sick deserve to be punished for it.”
We will not be signing on to faith healing in the place of medicine.
Click here for the essay by Sarah Jones on her personal journey and here for a further exploration of faith healing.
Haemoptysis and Faith Healing, anonymous Italian ex-voto painting / Wikimedia Commons
Subscribe by email to follow the accumulating evidence and observations that shape our view of health, obesity, and policy.
October 27, 2025
