Can faith heal?

For a long time, western medicine has typically ignored matters of faith and health but now, that’s beginning to change. Studies are providing the first glimmer of evidence that the health of the spirit can indeed make a difference in the health of the body.

After decades of research at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere, experts have concluded that the mind plays a strong role in healing the body – and that belief can be powerful medicine. "Between 58 and 90 percent of all diseases can be affected by the patient’s belief," says Herbert Benson, M. D., president of the Mind/Body Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

A three-day conference last year on "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine," sponsored by Harvard Medical School and the Mind/Body Institute, brought together 600 leading researchers, psychologists, clergy, physicians, and educators active on research. Their overwhelming conclusion: Faith and the human spirit cannot be separated from clinical care and medicine. And they have data to back it up.

Over the past 10 years, there have been almost 1,500 research studies on the effects of religious involvement or spirituality (prayer or meditation), conducted by a group of researchers affiliated with Harvard, Duke and Yale Universities, studying religious service attendance in much the same way diet and drugs are studied. These studies have found that people who practice a faith have less heart disease, lower blood pressure, fewer strokes, less depression, faster recovery from illness, and may even live longer.

"At least six studies in the past two years have found a relationship between involvement in religious community and longer survival. Religious beliefs and activities are associated with better mental and physical health in the vast majority of studies," reports Harold G. Koenig, M. D., founding director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Spirituality and Health at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. For example, he says, frequent church attenders are only half as likely as non-attenders to have high levels of interleukin-6 (a blood protein indicative of immune system dysfunction), suggesting they have stronger immune systems. Researchers also find that spirituality or regular attendance at a church, mosque or synagogue helps people cope better with life’s stresses, provides crucial social supports, promotes a healthier lifestyle, lowers anxiety, and encourages optimism. On the other hand, lack of religious involvement has negative effects on health. In one study by Dr. Koenig, those negative effects were equivalent to 40 years of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day!

How Faith Affects Health

The results of these research studies have been intriguing. But how can matters of the spirit translate into improvements in health? There are several plausible explanations.

• Healthier habits. One simple reason behind the health-faith link is "sin avoidance." Religious people often have healthful lifestyles and thus are better protected against chronic disease. For instance, religious groups often discourage excessive drinking, smoking, taking drugs, and engaging in risky sexual practices. They also tend to encourage marriage, which in itself has been linked with longer life.

Treating their bodies as temples, so to speak, may also lead religious people to be more likely to follow their doctor’s advice. In one Duke study, for instance, religiously active people who knew that their blood pressure was high were more likely to be taking medication for it. The authors suggest that religious beliefs may lead people to comply with treatment by fostering more cooperative attitudes or by "promoting respect and care for the body."

• Social bonds. Another important health aspect of organized religion is that it increases one’s social circle. Being part of a congregation can provide a person with emotional support, strong friendships, and a sense of purpose, say, through volunteering or helping others via church, mosque, or temple programs. And those emotional lifts, in turn, can buffer the harmful effects of stress, anxiety, and depression.

• Stress reduction. Religiously active people appear to reap particularly strong health benefits from lower stress levels. For example, the Duke study authors theorize that religious activity helps lower blood pressure by reducing stress and anxiety in people’s lives. High blood pressure has been linked not just with stress but also with anxiety and repressed hostility, they point out. Religious practices, on the other hand, go together with a greater sense of well-being, higher life satisfaction, lower anxiety, and better coping ability.

Prayer and religious reading, in particular, can have a calming effect that works to reduce stress. According to Dr. Benson in his popular book, The Relaxation Response (Harper Torch), repeating words during prayer – and then using that repetition to quell anxious thoughts – produces a peaceful, tranquil state of mind. That peaceful state, for which Dr. Benson coined the phrase "relaxation response," helps to counter the physical effects of stress. Thus, repetitive prayers, such as when praying the rosary, can elicit the relaxation response – and that, in turn, "evokes physiological changes in the body, slowing or lowering metabolism, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing," he says.

• Better coping with adverse events. Connection to religious tradition can help people handle the unexpected upsets that life often brings. Religious beliefs "affect your whole world view, especially if you’re devoutly committed," says Dr. Koenig. "They help you to understand and interpret negative life situations, like loss or illness. They help you to cope, to get on with life and grow from the experience.

Perhaps it’s because the devout have confidence in a living God and, thus, a more positive outlook in life. In the Duke study on recovery from depression after a medical illness, religion appeared to have a particularly strong ability to lift the spirits of people whose health has worsened or failed to improve after their illness had run its course. "Religious faith may provide such persons with a sense of hope that things will turn out all right regardless of their problems and, thus, foster greater motivation to achieve emotional recovery," they wrote.

Religion may also help because it promotes self-esteem of a kind that doesn’t depend on health or money. Depression, not surprisingly, often arises from difficulties adjusting to the discomfort, disability, and loss of control brought on by an illness. But Duke’s depression study authors point out that people whose religion drives their behavior and decisions may be more able to cope with illness (or financial hardship) "because their self-esteem and sense of well-being are not as tied to their material circumstances."

Mixing Medicine And Spirituality

So, what’s next, then? Should doctors "prescribe" religion to their patients? Should people start going to church in an effort to improve their health?

Richard Sloan, Ph.D., director of the Behavioral Medicine Program at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, doesn’t think so. He argues that the science behind the research connecting religion and health is a shaky base on which to build recommendations. And even if the research findings were airtight, Dr. Sloan says, there’s still debate as to what can be done with them. Doctors’ medical expertise gives them a strong influence over their patients, he argues, and he questions whether physicians should veer off from the medical realm into the religious arena. Religion, like marital or financial matters, is too private and personal to be the object of medical intervention, he says, and doctors who dwell on a religion-health link could do harm by implying that the less devout are shortchanging themselves health-wise.

For his part, Dr. Koenig believes that the idea of doctors prescribing religion is "ridiculous." "No one says doctors should tell people to go to church more often," he notes (although he feels "doctors ought to be aware of religion’s importance to patients"). That is, you can’t plop yourself in church and expect to get healthy. "What research shows," he explains, "is that people who are, or become, religious on their own, not for health reasons, are healthier."

And the kind of faith that may prove healthful must come from within, it needs to have a deep foundation. It is the deep personal commitment and devout practice, combined with regular attendance in religious services, Dr. Koenig comments, that are most powerfully connected to health benefits. Yes, it does seem like belief is a strong and powerful medicine.