Prayer camps are not clinics!

On the front page of Today newspaper today is a worrying story that indigenes of Nkwanta South District in the Volta region are resorting to prayer camps to seek medicare.
The story suggests that instead of the locals visiting hospitals for proper healthcare they rather prefer to seek divine healing at prayer camps. It is not bad for one to seek divine healing at prayer camps.
For after all we all agree with the biblical fact that God is our healer. The worry of Today is the fact that these prayer camps have become the hospitals of the people.
Today holds the conviction that God can heal and deliver a person from his or her illness, but it is also important that we seek proper healthcare from professional doctors at our hospitals and clinics.
Whenever we are sick we need to ensure that we visit hospitals for proper medical attention from professional health workers.
Pastors, bishops and archbishops who have strong faith in God and observe fasting and prayers even have professional medical doctors who treat them when they are taken ill.
The public should also know that just as there are quack persons in all fields of endeavour, there are quack pastors who operate using the name of God for dubious activities.
These quack pastors with their charlatan skills at play establish those so-called ‘prayer camps’ and end up deceiving, defrauding and maltreating unsuspecting patients.
Against this background, we at Today seize this opportunity to reiterate the clarion call by Rev. Sister Lucy Dumenu of the St. Joseph Hospital, to avoid using prayer camps as medical centres and seek proper health care from medical doctors.
At the end of the day, we will be doing ourselves a great deal of good since doctors will recommend and prescribe the right drugs for patients to be cured.
Today is aware of the vitriolic attacks some prayer camps would launch on the newspaper, but we would not perturbed at all, since we believe that we have a responsibility to serve the larger Ghanaian population.
On that score, we would like to call on all well-meaning Ghanaians to rally behind us as we set the records right and face the facts when it comes to physical and spiritual treatment of diseases.