Recent medical evidence supports the belief that spiritual Atness acts as a preventive medicine against illness, both physical and mental, and aids in the healing process if and when the body or mind is stricken by illness. Some medical experts tenn this phenomenon the "faith factor." 'We are not talking about miraculous healing, but known psycholOgical and physiological mechanisms and their effect on health," said Dr. Harold Koenig, director of the program on religion, aging and health at Duke Hospital in North Carolina. He noted that many studies have shown how hormones released during depression can affect health. Results from a study of 1,000 armed setVices veterans to investigate the relationship between religion and mental health, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, showed that the degree of religious belief correlates with future depression or mental well-being. In an earlier study of 800 elderly Americans, Koenig found that the more religious a person was, the greater was his or her well-being. A study of 4,000 randomly selected people in North Carolina, also conducted by Koenig, found older people who attended religious services were less depressed and physically healthier. And he found that the rate of depression among those who attended church at least once a week was about half that of those who attended less frequently. The effect of spiritual Atness thus goes beyond mental health to include physical health as well. "Ignoring religion is crazy," said Dr. Dale Matthews, professor of medicine at Georgetown University in Washington. He showed by studying 91,000 people that regular attendance at a place of worship lowered the risk of death from coronary artery disease by so percent.
And a study of 232 people over 60 at a New Hampshire medical centre who underwent open-heart surgery, showed that while nine per cent died, only Ave per cent of the regular church-goers died and none of those described as "deeply religious" died in the six months after surgety. But he says physicians often ignore religion's effects, partly because they are personally less religious than the general population and because some doctors have lost their licenses to practice as a result of using spiritual therapies. Matthews isn't the only one to research the effects of spirituality on healing. One of the best-known studies is that of Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist who worked with 393 patients at the San Francisco General Medical Center Hospital in 1984. He randomly divided them into two groups, with one group receiving prayer, and the other receiving no extra help. Neither the medical profeSSionals nor the patients knew who was being prayed for, and those praying never met the patients. Yet the results were dramatic.
Those who were prayed for had less congestive heart failure (eight, versus 20); cardiopulmonaty arrest and pneumonia. Recently, health care groups have been paying more attention to the connection between body and spirit. For them, it is simply a matter of dollars and cents. Spiritual healing reduces the length of a patienf s stay in hospital and spiritual fitness, above all, reduces the chances that people get sick in the Arst place.
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