TruthBook Religious News Blog

Science looks at the role faith plays in maintaining good health

For thousands of years, spiritual leaders and healers were one and the same. Religious orders founded the first hospitals, and it wasn't until the 1800s that medical science finally broke free of faith. But the separation of body and spirit was pursued vigorously by medical science as it advanced. Sigmund Freud went so far as to compare religion to a neurosis.

Now the pendulum is swinging back ... a bit. Scientific evidence that prayer and faith can protect health has been building slowly over the past few decades. This controversial inquiry divides into two major questions: Can a person's spiritual faith and practice affect his or her health? And can religious or spiritual practice — particularly intercessory prayer — affect the health of those being prayed for?

The first is a complicated puzzle; scientists must try to tease out the benefits of religious participation from other health factors such as diet, exercise and family history. As for the second, intercessory prayer suggests divine intervention at work, and there's no lab test for that.

RELIGION AND RELAXATION

To make a case for the health benefits of faith, prayer would have to activate a healing mechanism in the body. Herbert Benson, MD, of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston and Harvard Medical School has discovered one possible mechanism. In 1970, Benson and colleagues at Harvard described the relaxation response, a simple technique where, through rest, deep breathing and repetition of a word, people can change their physical and emotional reactions to stress — reactions that can lead to high blood pressure, heart trouble and insomnia. He also found that prayer could elicit the relaxation response.

"We can effectively treat any disorder —to the extent that stress is contributing to it — by a once- or twice-daily elicitation of the relaxation response," he says.

But this isn't strictly a religious phenomenon. Recent research shows that stress-management tools, exercise or transcendental meditation can have similar heart benefits.

* "It doesn't matter where the relaxation comes from. The mechanism is within us," says Benson. "Your own belief system will determine whether you believe it's God-given or whether it's evolution-derived."

Harold G. Koenig, M.D., agrees, but he also believes that religion offers benefits beyond those of meditation and exercise. As co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, Koenig has produced dozens of journal articles on spirituality's role in healing and has edited the Handbook of Religion and Health, a scholarly volume that makes the case that religious people live longer, healthier lives.

Koenig has been searching for biological evidence that prayer or religious practice tacks on years. In 1997, he found that regular churchgoers had low levels of interleukin-6, a protein linked to inflammation. Research has shown that chronically high levels of the protein can indicate increased risk of many types of disease, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Another kind of prayer

When most people think about prayer and healing, they think of asking for good health or relief from disease.

But another type of prayer asks for nothing, but gives thanks for what has been received. And though gratitude hasn't received as much research attention, there are hints that thankfulness — whether or not it's expressed in prayer — may have its own power.

In one study, psychologists Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., of the University of California, Davis, and Michael E. McCullough, Ph.D., of the University of Miami, found that volunteers who kept weekly "gratitude journals" exercised more regularly and reported fewer aches and pains than people asked to record hassles or neutral events. In another study, the volunteers were people with debilitating neuromuscular disease. This time, Emmons and McCullough found, keeping a gratitude log didn't reduce physical symptoms, but it did increase the amount of sleep the participants reported getting (by half an hour) and improve its quality.

Gratitude has surprising force, says psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D., former president of the American Psychological Association. Seligman is the guru of positive psychology, which focuses on bolstering emotional strengths. One of the exercises he's developed is the "gratitude visit," which requires you to think of someone who made an important difference in your life, write up the story of how he or she helped shape you, then visit that person to share the story. Expressing thanks in this way has a lasting impact, Seligman says: A full year later, tests show, you're likely to be happier and less depressed than before the visit.

BY ERIK NESS