More on Christian health care and the connection between faith and healing

Whether you call it spiritual, religious, Jewish or Christian health care there is a connection between faith and healing. That connection is currently being explored not just by the traditional medical establishment but also by the mainstream media. This is what national news magazine Newsweek is saying about the connection.

The following excerpt from a Newsweek article written by Claudia Kalb explores the current research, thinking and trends in mainstream medicine regarding faith, religious practice and medicine. Though it provides no conclusive answers about this powerful and mysterious relationship, it begins to ask some important questions.

Visit our Online Holistic Pharmacy for...
Toxi HMF Toxi HMF™ along with companion products such as Metal Cleanse and our line of Functional Food products such as BioCleanse or BioInflammatory, provide all the essential components for a successful and safe detoxification program.	Intestinal Repair Complex Intestinal Repair Complex™ (powder and capsules) is designed to assist in the repair and restoration of a normal, healthy GI mucosal lining.
Visit our holistic medicine pharmacy

"Modern medicine, of course, still demands scientific proof on top of anecdotal evidence. So over the past decade, researchers have been conducting hundreds of studies, trying to scientifically measure the effects of faith and spirituality on health. Can religion slow cancer? Reduce depression? Speed recovery from surgery? Lower blood pressure? Can belief in God delay death?"

"While the research results have been mixed, the studies inevitably run up against the difficulty of using scientific methods to answer what are, essentially, existential questions. How do you measure the power of prayer? Can one person's prayer be stronger.and more effective.than another.s? How do you separate the health benefits of going to church or synagogue from the fact that people who attend religious services tend to smoke less and be less depressed than those who don't?"

"For critics of this trend, that's precisely the problem. In 1999, crusading Columbia University professor Richard Sloan wrote a paper in the medical journal The Lancet attacking the faith and healing studies for weak methodologies and soft thinking. Along with a second paper published a year later in The New England Journal of Medicine, the broadside ignited furious letter-writing campaigns in the academic press and divided the medical profession into two camps."

"Some scientists, like Sloan, believe that religion has no place in medicine and that steering patients toward spiritual practice can do more harm than good. Others, like Duke University's pioneering faith-and-medicine researcher Dr. Harold Koenig, believe that a growing body of evidence points to religion's positive effects on health and that keeping spirituality out of the clinic is irresponsible."

Learn more about Holistic Medicine at our Seattle Pharmacy.

"To make sense of the morass of data, the NIH commissioned a series of papers, published earlier this year, in which scientists attempted to definitively assess the state of the faith-and-health research. Lynda H. Powell, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, reviewed about 150 papers, throwing out dozens that had flaws-those that failed to account for age and ethnicity, for example, which usually affect religiosity."

"In one respect, her findings were not surprising: while faith provides comfort in times of illness, it does not significantly slow cancer growth or improve recovery from acute illness. One nugget, however, 'blew my socks off,' Powell says. People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in mortality-that is, they live longer-than people who are not churchgoers."

"This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle. While the data were culled mainly from Christian churchgoers, Powell says the findings should apply to any organized religion. 'This is really powerful,' she says."

"In an effort to understand the health differences between believers and nonbelievers, scientists are beginning to parse the individual components that compose religious experience. Using brain scans, researchers have discovered that meditation can change brain activity and improve immune response; other studies have shown it can lower heart rate and blood pressure, both of which reduce the body's stress response. (Most religions incorporate meditative practices, like chanting or prayer, into their traditions.)"

"Even intangibles, such as the impact shtml"rgiveness, may boost health as well. In a survey of 1,500 people published earlier this year, Neal Krause, a researcher at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, found that people who forgive easily tend to enjoy greater psychological well-being and have less depression than those who hold grudges. "There's a physiology of forgiveness," says Dr. Herbert Benson, head of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, and a host of the upcoming Harvard conference. 'When you do not forgive, it will chew you up.' "

"Using prayer to effect health is perhaps the most controversial subject of research. In the Newsweek poll, 84 percent of Americans said praying for others can have a positive effect on their recovery, and 74 percent said that would be true even if they didn't know the patient. But what does the science say? At a meeting of the American College of Cardiology last month, Duke researcher Dr. Mitchell Krucoff reported preliminary data on a national trial of 750 patients undergoing heart catheterization or angioplasty."

"A group of patients who were prayed for (by, among others, Roman Catholics and Sufi Muslims in the United States, Buddhist monks in Nepal and Jews at the Western Wall) did no better than a second group that received standard care or a third, which was given a special program of music, therapeutic touch and guided imagery. But there was one intriguing finding: a fourth "turbocharged" group, which received both prayers and the music program, had death rates 30 percent lower than any of the other patients. "Despite all the attention modern medicine has paid to new technology, it has neglected to ask what happens if you pay attention to the rest of the patient," says Krucoff."

"Overall, the prayer studies have not shown clear effects, and even religious proponents are skeptical that it can ever-or should ever-be tested. So many people already pray for the sick that scientists cannot establish a control group; when the prescription is prayer, patients often get it whether doctors want them to or not."

" This "noise"-the extra prayers of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, church members-may taint trial results. And the studies prompt questions that no one, not even the best scientists, will ever be able to answer: Can one extra prayer mean the difference between life and death? Can prayer be dosed, the way medicines are? Does harder praying mean better treatment by God? In the minds of many, especially theologians, those questions border on the sacrilegious. Still, prayer can be an enormous source of comfort to patients and their families." (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3339654/)

Are you looking for a Seattle Physician? Do you need a Seattle Pharmacy? Trinity Clinic is your source for Seattle Alternative Medicine.