Earlier today, one of our nurses came up to me and mentioned that an insurance company denied a patient a PET scan because they only approve so many PET scans per year, and this particular patient (not one of mine) was not on their list.  Nevermind if it’s a medically necessary study, or the fact that the patient hasn’t had one before.  “We gave a PET scan to “Frank,” so “Bill” will be unable to have one.”  What kind of policy is that?  Assuming that you are an insurance company and you have 100 patients and you only approve 5 PET scans a year, how do you determine who gets one?  Alphabetically?  Certainly they do not have the kind of information to be able to know who is worse off from a medical perspective, especially if a PET can tell you about the extent of the disease, and that’s precisely what they are limiting.

But then, she said the best thing of all.  Apparently the insurance representative told her that it was okay to deny the authorization for the PET scan, since, “The pancreas is an experimental organ anyway.”

Really?  Huh.  And here I thought that God had been making people with pancreases since Adam and Eve.  Apparently not.  Since when did people start becoming equipped with a pancreas? 

So, they are saying that God is experimenting with the human body??  (Obviously, they cannot be arguing from a Darwinian model, since random mutation and evolutionary processes can hardly qualify as an “experiment.”  You kinda need sentience for that, in order to evaluate results.)

What?  To see if people with pancreases sinned less than people without pancreases?  But, God is all-knowing.  He doesn’t need to conduct experiments.  If we are truly free-willed, then the presence or absence of a pancreas (assuming that a pancreas affects the decisions that we make, morally speaking) would have to have no affect on our decisions, or then God would be skewing things either in His favor, or out of His favor, as it comes to our choosing to be obedient or not.

So what type of experiment could God be running that He wouldn’t know the answer to already, and that wouldn’t influence our will?

And more to the point, how is it that this insurance company is privy to God’s experiments?  If they have some sort of direct pipe to know His mind on things — I want in on that!  It would save me a lot of grief if I already knew the correct answer/response to things, instead of trying to discern on my own, because I *know* that *my* thinking is flawed.

But okay, let’s examine this pancreas issue for just a moment.  My vote is that the pancreas would increase our tendency to sin.  Why do I say this?  Well, if your blood sugar is either too high or too low, then you are more prone to mood swings, and behaving poorly because your emotions may be erratic and you are irritable.  This of course supposes that the previous system (in the non-pancreas people) worked perfectly.

 Of course, the other option is that the pancreas is *not* an experimental organ, and is an integral part of God’s design for the body.