Sun, 18. March 2012
Medical Science v God
After 41 minutes I found myself horrorstruck, watching a Bolton player, Fabrice Muamba, having a serious heart attack on the pitch and undergoing resuscitation. His heart and his breathing stopped. Not a nice experience for him, his family, the players, the 36,000 crowd or the millions watching it on tv around the world.
Whilst the tv images were restricted to wide angle shots of the incident, the close-up shots of the crowd were disturbing enough to show the seriousness of the situation. I hope Muamba pulls through.
I have often wondered about professional footballers and other athletes. Do they push their bodies so close to the limit - to get that physical edge over their opponents - that they are putting themselves at risk of collapse like this?
What bugged me after this event was the avalanche on Twitter to a new hashtag topic called #pray4muamba - they always have to bring their stupid imaginary friend into everything don't they? As if there is any 'supernatural being' listening to people's thoughts and reading their tweets. Football is a uniting force in this strife ridden world and an event like this should unite football fans everywhere, especially Spurs and Bolton fans. So what do they do? They start demanding our prayers, something which will divide not unite. One idiot even said "doesn't matter if you're not religious, pray for the lad." They just don't get it.
The implied assumption is that their loving god is waiting to see how many people pray and how hard they do it. The belief that their wishes will be granted once the pray-o-meter passes a critical preset level of intensity is insane.
Some of the players were the first to tweet #pray4muamba and they should have more sense, although it should not surprise me after watching so many of them giving their insidious religious signs at the start of every match.
FOR THE RECORD: Praying will achieve absolutely nothing and devalues the work of the highly trained medical professionals working to save their patient.
There are too many stories of parents who lost children after refusing medical treatment for their children, preferring to rely on prayer. What many people do, though, is hedge their bets and take them to hospital AND pray as well. After the medical professionals save the patient, they then go home and thank god. Bizarre.
The difference between medical assistance in 2012 compared with say 1812 is years of scientific advances, a buildup of medical knowledge and advancement of intervention techniques. People can be saved in 2012 whilst in previous times they would have died.
So, whilst resuscitation and intensive care techniques have improved and the "god factor" has not changed, it doesn't require too much intelligence to work out that human intervention trumps god every time. So stuff your puerile public prayers.
My very best wishes to Fabrice Muamba of Bolton Wanderers for a full recovery.
The match was abandoned at 1-1 and will have to be replayed within the next 2-3 weeks, which will be emotional for everybody.