Deserve implies retribution. One has to take emotion out of it. Diseases are things - nonfeeling and indiscriminate. All I am pointing out is that diseases can't persecute, or be unjust and they can't target - and so all the responsibility for one's sicknesses can't be placed at the door of society, etcetera. There can be no "victims" of diseases. And this is without past lives being entered into the equation at all.

I also strongly dislike the "fate" or "random" attitude that accompanies getting sick - as if the whole thing is determined by a roll of the dice. The closer one looks at any incidence of disease, one finds causes (i.e genetic, environmental and biological responses) and this "random" or "fate" belief contributes to less prevention.

The biggest hurdle is a psychological one - denial. No one wants to take responsibility for anything bad that happens to them. And this is true about everything - failed projects, marriages, etcetera - not just diseases.

Science is just at the very beginning of understanding how thought or "stress" as it is often labeled in most white papers, influences the various functions of the body. I, for one, during the exceptionally rare times in the past when I have gotten very angry, could actually feel my body malfunctioning as if the thoughts in my brain disrupted the whole proper functioning of everything. Unlike fear which just sets off the adrenaline and other physiological reactions, extreme hate and anger seem to literally start killing the body.

These are things that are hard to reproduce in labs and study and that's why we're still in the dark ages of understanding the power of thoughts to heal ourselves - and possibly others too. Jesus healed others who came to him - who is to say he didn't know how to psychologically trigger healing in those who came to him?

Doctors, and the patients belief in their abilities, do much the same thing. They trigger healing because the patient believes in it. I suspect Jesus was indeed a healer and he understood what science will understand perhaps a thousand years from now - that healing begins in the mind.

And yeah my belief in reincarnation complicates things. You point out that evil people live ripe long lives and, as can be expected, I have a theory about that one too. I suspect that evil is more at home on this world than good and so good is actually drawn away from this world while evil has no such magnetics at work. So two people might get into an accident the 'good' person dies and the 'evil' one lives to a ripe old age, perhaps crippled or paralyzed. Of course this implies a belief in other worlds than this one that are even more positive and I believe that there are such places. If we could see from a broader perspective we might see that often the 'good' person is better off - able to be born again without any extreme baggage the 'evil' person now will carry. And perhaps they need to go through this to balance something 'evil' they did in another life. And now their slate is clean again. The 'evil' person may in a future life as he/she becomes more 'good' have to make amends for this act and in turn he/she dies young as a 'good' person of some apparently inexplicable event.

I know this makes many assumptions, but for me anyways, it fits the cause and effect, action and reaction of all these things that make no sense if people lived only one life.