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What the Body Needs

November 2nd, 2022 | 6 min read

By Matthew Loftus

For a tech-skeptic lover of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman, as a family physician I sure picked the wrong job. Doctors have always used various technologies for treating patients, from the ancient Egyptian prescription to fumigate the womb with incense for eye pain to today’s slightly more informed but still ineffective placebo surgeries. The human body as it has been given to us by God has all sorts of vulnerabilities — to infection, to trauma, to its processes gone awry — and technology gives us power to prevent or treat a wide variety of problems that arise from those vulnerabilities.

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Matthew Loftus

Matthew grew up in a family of 15 children and completed his medical training in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2015, he and his family have lived in East Africa, where he currently teaches and practices Family Medicine at a mission hospital. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, and Mere Orthodoxy and his first book is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.matthewandmaggie.org.