Faith & Healing


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              Duke University Medical Center's Harold Koenig thinks keeping
spirituality out of the clinic is irresponsible

                  Faith & Healing

                  Can religion improve health? While the debate rages in
journals and med schools, more Americans ask for doctors’ prayers

                  By Claudia Kalb
                  NEWSWEEK



            Nov. 10 issue —  On a quiet Saturday afternoon, Ming He, a
fourth-year medical student in Dallas, came across a man dying in the VA
Hospital. Suffering from a rare cancer and hooked up to an oxygen tank, the
man, an Orthodox Jew, could barely breathe, let alone speak. There were no
friends or relatives by his bed to comfort him. When the young student
walked into his room, the man looked at her and said, “Now that I’m dying, I
realize that I never really learned how to live.” Ming He, 26, had no idea
how to respond.






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              “I THOUGHT, ‘My God, the chaplain doesn’t work on weekends,
what do I do?’ ” She held the man’s hand for a few minutes in silence; two
days later, he died. And as soon as she could, she signed up for
“Spirituality and Medicine” at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical
School, a course that teaches students how to talk to patients about faith
and illness.
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              More than half of the med schools in the country now offer
such courses—up from just three a decade ago—largely because patients are
demanding more spiritual care. According to a NEWSWEEK Poll, 72 percent of
Americans say they would welcome a conversation with their physician about
faith; the same number say they believe that praying to God can cure
someone—even if science says the person doesn’t stand a chance. On
Beliefnet, a popular interfaith Web site, fully three quarters of more than
35,000 online prayer circles are health related: patients’ loved ones—as
well as total strangers—can log on and send prayers into the electronic
ether, hoping to heal cancers, disabilities, chronic illness and addiction.
Popular practices like these, as well as the growing belief in the medical
community that what happens in a person’s mind (and, possibly, soul) can be
as important to health as what happens on the cellular level, are leading
many doctors to embrace the God they banished from the clinic long ago in
favor of technological and pharmaceutical progress.
      Read the transcript of Claudia Kalb's talk on the relationship between
faith and health.

              All over the medical establishment, legitimate scientists are
seeking the most ethical, effective ways to combine patients’ spiritual and
religious beliefs with high-tech treatment. Former mutual-fund tycoon Sir
John Templeton spends as much as $30 million a year funding scientific
projects that explore the nature of God. “The Anatomy of Hope,” a meditation
on the effects of optimism and faith on health, by New Yorker medical writer
Jerome Groopman, M.D., is coming out early next year. The National
Institutes of Health plans to spend $3.5 million over the next several years
on “mind/body” medicine. And this weekend Harvard Medical School will hold a
conference on spirituality and health, focusing on the healing effects of
forgiveness. “There’s been a tremendous shift in the medical profession’s
openness to this topic,” says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neurologist at the
University of Pennsylvania who is studying the biological effects of
meditation and prayer on the brain. “People like me are very intrigued by
what we’re seeing.”
              Modern medicine, of course, still demands scientific proof on
top of anecdotal evidence. So over the past decade, researchers have been
conducting hundreds of studies, trying to scientifically measure the effects
of faith and spirituality on health. Can religion slow cancer? Reduce
depression? Speed recovery from surgery? Lower blood pressure? Can belief in
God delay death? While the research results have been mixed, the studies
inevitably run up against the difficulty of using scientific methods to
answer what are, essentially, existential questions. How do you measure the
power of prayer? Can one person’s prayer be stronger—and more effective—than
another’s? How do you separate the health benefits of going to church or
synagogue from the fact that people who attend religious services tend to
smoke less and be less depressed than those who don’t?





                 Health: Faith and Healing
                 •  Audio: Claudia Kalb, NEWSWEEK General Editor and Dr.
Harold Koenig, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Duke
University, Director and founder of the Center for the Study of
Religion/Spirituality and Health, Author of "The Healing Power of Faith:
Science Explores Medicine's Last Great Frontier" and "The Handbook of
Religion and Health and Spirituality in Patient Care"
                        •  Audio: Listen to the complete weekly On Air show






              For critics of this trend, that’s precisely the problem. In
1999, crusading Columbia University professor Richard Sloan wrote a paper in
the medical journal The Lancet attacking the faith and healing studies for
weak methodologies and soft thinking. Along with a second paper published a
year later in The New England Journal of Medicine, the broadside ignited
furious letter-writing campaigns in the academic press and divided the
medical profession into two camps. Some scientists, like Sloan, believe that
religion has no place in medicine and that steering patients toward
spiritual practice can do more harm than good. Others, like Duke University’
s pioneering faith-and-medicine researcher Dr. Harold Koenig, believe that a
growing body of evidence points to religion’s positive effects on health and
that keeping spirituality out of the clinic is irresponsible.
              To make sense of the morass of data, the NIH commissioned a
series of papers, published earlier this year, in which scientists attempted
to definitively assess the state of the faith-and-health research. Lynda H.
Powell, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago,
reviewed about 150 papers, throwing out dozens that had flaws—those that
failed to account for age and ethnicity, for example, which usually affect
religiosity. In one respect, her findings were not surprising: while faith
provides comfort in times of illness, it does not significantly slow cancer
growth or improve recovery from acute illness.



                  Nov. 10, 2003 Issue: Faith and Health


                 •  Faith & Healing
                        •  Profile: A Millionaire's Last Vocation
                        •  The Advocate: 'Patients Want To Be Talked To'
                        •  The Critic: 'Religion Is a Private Matter'
                        •  Live Talk: Join Claudia Kalb for a Live Talk on
Thursday, Nov. 6 at noon ET to discuss your questions on the relationship
between faith and healing.






             One nugget, however, “blew my socks off,” Powell says. People
who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in mortality—that
is, they live longer—than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even
after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew,
like social support and healthy lifestyle. While the data were culled mainly
from Christian churchgoers, Powell says the findings should apply to any
organized religion. “This is really powerful,” she says.
              (Continued) PAGES 1 | 2 | 3 | of 3

             © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.






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