Some scientists believe there is growing evidence that maintaining separate spirituality in clinical practice is irresponsible.
a Saturday afternoon, Ming He, a medical student in Dallas, was found dying in a VA Hospital. The man, an Orthodox Jew who suffered from a rare cancer, was connected to an oxygen tank, I could hardly breathe. There were no friends or family at his side. When the young student went to his room, the man looked and said, "Now that I'm dying, I realize I never really learned how to live."
Ming He, 26, did not know how to respond: "I thought, my God, the chaplain does not work weekends. What do I do?". She said the man's hand in silence for a few minutes, two days later he died. And as soon as he could, he enrolled in the course "Spirituality and Medicine" in the Southwestern Medical School at the University of Texas, a course that teaches students to talk to patients about faith and illness.
More than half of U.S. medical schools offer these courses, only a decade ago were three-mainly because patients are demanding more spiritual care. According to a Newsweek poll, 72 percent of Americans say they would welcome a conversation about faith with their doctors, the same number said they believe that praying to God can heal someone even though science says that no possibilities.
in Beliefnet, a popular website frequented by people of different religions, three quarters of more than 35,000 online prayer chains are related to health: patients' loved ones and strangers can come together and send prayers via the electronic ether, hoping to cure cancers, chronic illnesses and addictions.
What happens in the mind
popular practices such as these, and the growing belief among the medical community that what happens in the mind of people (and possibly the soul) can be as important for health as what happens at the cellular level, are leading doctors to benefit from the God who banished clinical practice for scientific progress.
"There has been a tremendous change in the fairness of the medical profession to these issues," said Andrew Newberg, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is studying the biological effects of meditation and prayer on the brain.
Modern medicine, of course, still needs to be scientifically proven beyond anecdotal evidence. In the past decade, researchers have done hundreds of studies to try to scientifically measure the effects of faith and spirituality on health.
While research results have been mixed, studies are inevitably faced with the difficulty of using scientific methods to answer what are, essentially, existential questions: Can a person's prayer be stronger and more effective than another? Can we ignore that people who attend church tend to smoke less and enjoy better health?
The debate
For those who criticize the possibility of a connection between health and religion, this is the problem. In 1999, Richard Sloan, a professor at Columbia University and an opponent of such thinking, wrote an article attacking the Lancet study on faith and healing, by the weakness of their methodologies and the simplicity of his thought. Along with a second article published a year later in The New England Journal of Medicine, these attacks ignited media campaigns divided the academic and medical.
As Sloan, some scientists believe that religion has no place in medicine and to guide patients toward spiritual practices can do more harm than good. Others, such as Harold Koenig of Duke University, a pioneer in research on faith and medicine, believe that there is increasing evidence showing the positive effects of religion on health and spirituality to keep separate from clinical practice is irresponsible.
To clarify the confusion caused by information, the National Institute of Health authorized, earlier this year, the publication a series of articles in which scientists tried to assess the state of research on faith and health. Lynda H.
Powell, an epidemiologist at the Medical Center at Rush University in Chicago, reviewed about 150 articles, dozens of them throwing errors. In a sense, their findings were not surprising: while faith comforts in times of sickness, do not stop the cancer growth or speed recovery from acute illnesses. One aspect, however, greatly surprised. People who frequently attend church, have a 25 percent lower mortality than those who do not.
In an effort to understand health differences between believers and nonbelievers, scientists are beginning to analyze the individual components of religious experience. Using brain scans, researchers have discovered that meditation can change brain activity and improve immune response, other studies have shown it can reduce heart rate and blood pressure, which reduce the body's response to stress.
Even intangibles, such as the impact of forgiveness, can improve health as well. In a study of 1,500 people released this year, Neal Krause, a researcher at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, found that people who forgive easily tend to enjoy greater psychological well-being and less depression than those who hold grudges. "Not to forgive eats away at us," says Herbert Benson, director of the Institute of Mind-Body Health.
Vale pray
The controversial research topic is perhaps the use of prayer for health. In the Newsweek poll, 84 percent of Americans said they pray for others can have a positive effect on recovery, and 74 percent said it may be true even if they know the patient.
But what does science say?
> At a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, Mitchell Krucoff, a researcher at Duke University showed preliminary data from a national sample of 750 patients scheduled to undergo cardiac catheterization or angioplasty. A group of patients for whom they prayed was not better than a second group received routine care or a third party, which was given a special program of music, massage therapy and guided visualization.
But there was a curious finding: a fourth group "turbo charged", which received both prayers and the program music, presented a mortality rate 30 percent lower than other groups.
