December 2005

Katonah Study Group For Integrative Medicine Newsletter

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In this issue we bring you an excerpt of Dr. Anne Harrington's recent lecture at NIH in Bethesda, MD.

Is spirituality Good for Health?

Historical reflections on Emerging Research Enterprise

Presenter: Anne Harrington, Ph.D. Professor of History of Science at Harvard University; October 28, 2005

In her presentation at NIH, Dr. Harrington's examined the proposition that spirituality is good for health through an historical perspective.

Although research has been directed to answering the question: Is spirituality good for your health, it is misleading to look at the issue in that way. There are actually four separate claims associated with this issue, according to Dr. Harrington. Each has a different history and a different take on the matter.

Popular books: Prayer is good medicine, by Larry Sokoloff The healing Power of Faith, by Harold Koenig Is religion good for your health, by Harold Koenig

First claim: Church activity is correlated with increase longevity and/or better health.

The origin of this claim is in post- war era, when several studies tried to determine the factors affecting heart disease. One research study examined was the low rate of hearth disease among the residents of Roseto, Pennsylvania. The population of Roseto consisted of mainly Italian Americans. Although their diet was rich in fat and smoking was wide spread, there was never a reported death from heart disease below the age of 65.

Stuart Wolf, the psychiatrist who studied Roseto, thought that the low heart disease incident was related to the fact that the people of Roseto lived a communal life organized around the church. He predicted that if the residents of Roseto abandoned their life style they would lose their advantage. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened in the 1970’s, when the offspring of Roseto residents married out, bought big houses outside the community and changed their life style; the rate of heart disease started to rise.

Other studies confirmed that a greater amount of social ties, especially those centered around religious organizations, seemed to protect against heart disease and various other problems such as hypertension among the elderly, and to prolong life.

The upshot from all these findings was that if you attended church at least once a week you were likely to live to 83; if you didn't, you were likely to live to 75. These rates are similar to giving up smoking.

Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam In this book Putnam makes the point that the fact that Americans stopped going to bowling leagues had a major effect on their health.

A study demonstrating that going to church is different than just belonging to a social network was conducted in 1996 by an Israeli epidemiologist--Jeremy Kark. He investigated mortality rates in religious and secular kibbutzim. He found that people died at twice the rate in the secular kibbutzim as in the religious ones, even though there was no difference in the social support network.

Second claim: Meditation affects health

The second claim focuses on the effect of meditation on health. Some studies have shown that meditation reduces stress and enhances health. Historically this claim originated in the 60’s counter-culture, especially the followers of the Maharishi Mahesh.

Books about the effects of relaxation: The Relaxation Response, by Robert Benson, 1975 Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Herbert Benson is a cardiologist who explored the relationship between stress and heart disease. He found that Transcendental Meditation lowered blood pressure and reversed the effects of stress. However, he claimed that there was nothing stress-reducing about TM per-se. All it did was induce a physiological response that can be produced by other relaxation technique.

It was Jon Kabat-Zinn who connected the benefits of relaxation to Tibetan Buddhism, which brought the conversation back to religion.

Third claim: Faith heals

The origin of this claim is in 19th century Protestant claim that faith itself heals. It is also

Books on Faith and healing: The Power of Positive Thinking, by Reverend Norman Vincent Peale Anatomy of an Illness, by Norman Cousin Faith and the Placebo Effect, by Lolette Kuby

a legacy of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale advocacy of the power of positive thinking. Although he was a minister, he detached the benefits of positive thinking from religion.

In the 1970’s Norman Cousin wrote about his miraculous recovery from cancer. He was diagnosed with a fatal disease, but refused to believe his doctors' prognosis. He got well against all odds by using laughter as an agent of healing. To heal himself, he watched Marx Brothers movies and episodes of candid camera; however, he also employed positive thinking systematically. His claims were acceptable to doctors because he related his recovery to chemistry rather than to anything spiritual.

Another effect that is connected to the positive thinking effect is the placebo effect, which is a form of faith healing, and has been shown to work.

Fourth claim: Prayer works

Prayer itself affects people's physiology, independent of any placebo effects. The origin of this claim can be traced to Francis Galton, who in the late 19 century used statistical tools to find out if God still answers prayers. He surmised that since Anglicans are instructed to pray for the royal family, and assuming that prayer works, the royals must be the healthiest people in England. However, he found out that the royal family actually lived less than anyone else on his list.

In the late 80’s , Randolph Beard conducted a study on the efficacy of prayer (Positive Therapeutic effects of intercessory Prayer in Coronary Care Unit Population, 1988). In this study, patients were randomly assigned to two groups; one group was prayed for, and the other was not prayed for. The intercessors were Born Again Christians, who prayed daily. They prayed for the speedy recovery without complications of the patients.

Beard found that there was no difference in the speed of recovery but there were differences in the complications that the patients experienced on 6 different measures. His study came under a lot of criticism and the results of other studies that attempted to replicate his study were mixed. However, the idea of the efficacy of prayer has taken root among some people. And since all of the studies of this nature, used Christian prayer, naturally this became fodder for Christian groups, who claim that only Christian prayer heals.

Dr. Harrington concluded that since “the spirituality-health research enterprise is not a single enterprise but a set of loosely connected endeavors," we do not need to accept or reject the entire proposition of spirituality and health, but rather, we can evaluate each claim on its own merit. In addition, to evaluate these claims one needs to be not only a good scientist, but also a good social scientist. We need to understand how the research results are going to be perceived and used by different groups, for instance for religious apologetics or religious debunking.

As a final thought, Dr. Harrington asked, Given the variety of experience within the spirituality and health claim, “why do so many scientific researches persist in pushing the global proposition, namely that there is a link between spirituality and health?”

The answer according to Dr. Harrington is to be found in the need to dissolve the distinction between mind and body. People think it would be a good thing to have a medicine that treats people as whole, as spiritual and emotional as well as physical beings, rather than a broken machine that needs fixing.

To see the complete video cast please click here: Videocast.

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