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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? |
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