From my experiences in non-traditional healing modalities, I think that there is a healing aspect to having an entire community believe a person is going to get better, and there is an important aspect of positive thinking in the individual that helps the healing process. Negativity and hopelessness are hard on the physical body.
There are also serious problems with the medical industry. I know someone who has had surgeries on his lungs after being assaulted. One side-effect has been excruciating pain and doctors were going to give him 100 injections to kill the nerve sensitivity around his ribs. He worked with an Alexander Technique body expert who realized he had muscles stuck between a couple of ribs. She popped them out, the pain has gone away, and he doesn't have to kill all of his nerves. There is a level of idiocy in the medical field that goes directly to pharmaceuticals and surgery.
The body can naturally heal itself on many levels, but it needs to be taken for what it is and not assumed to be the entire cure. Faith healing can become unethical when it makes assumptions about absolute cures based on a ritual or an idea without any accountability or measurements to verify its success. I support positive thinking about healing, support from one's family and community, but reject the arrogance of assuming a word or a ritual from someone can heal anything.
Taking a wholistic, comprehensive approach that leaves no stone unturned, while maintaining humility of thought and assumption, is the best philosophy I know to approach healing.
I think this mostly reflects what I believe.
I don't believe at all in faith healing, but I do believe in psychology and how incredibly powerful our own minds are in impacting our health. And having friends and loved ones. It's known that stress wreaks havoc on the body and immune system. And lack of sleep. And other such things. And completely anecdotally and from personal experience, I know how impactful my own emotional state is on how I feel physically and also how much strength, willpower, and frankly confidence I have in my ability to heal. For many, I think having a faith can create those mental elements but I don't think faith is required to have this framework.
I think one of the main issues with modern medicine is how isolated each field is; thus there's definitely little holistic knowledge, and though I don't think it's their fault, specialists are going to have lots of ignorance of much that's outside their specific field. I think doctors are great, absolutely, but there's also vast knowledge in indigenous cultures remaining on this planet, in terms of herbs, and other more holistic connections. I imagine more of that will be incorporated with time.
Edit: But we are also no different from any other lifeform on this planet in terms of aging, illness, disease, and pain -- our bodies are subject to the same ills everything else on the planet is subject to. So there's that, too. Sometimes it's just time to go, and nothing biologically/medically can be done to arrest that process. I think some cultures, now and past, much better recognized this and were more.. accepting? .. of it. We try to prolong so much these days.... which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, yeah.
Edit 2: Also, my father got a kidney transplant several years ago, which prevented him from having to start dialysis fairly 'young' as those things go. So modern medicine is super amazing in so many ways, too.
No amount of positivity would have reversed his shrunken kidneys.
