Barbara Tezack had open-heart surgery in September but pulled through just fine. In fact, the 63-year-old widow from West Hartford, Conn., went on a cruise to the Bahamas two months later. You might chalk up her quick recovery to sound medicine and a tenacious, spry spirit. But she credits God.
"I'm just positive, really, that there was somebody right there, helping me every inch of the way," she says, adding that members of her church, the Elmwood Community Church, were praying for her and helping in other ways.It's not unusual for religious individuals to claim that their faith has carried them through a bout of illness. What's new is that a growing number of scientists are agreeing with them.
After decades in which scientific skepticism and Freudian disapproval have kept religion at a polite distance from medicine, a door between the two fields has opened. This spring, there have been several federally sponsored medical conferences on religion and health. Harvard Medical School plans to offer a continuing-education course for doctors titled "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine."
Sociologists, epidemiologists, psychologists, gerontologists and others are reviewing old surveys and designing new studies. Many of the results suggest this: Religious people seem to be healthier, mentally and physically, than non-religious people. They appear to be less susceptible to such illnesses as cancer, heart disease, hypertension and stroke. They may do better in some kinds of surgery and recover faster.
Although much of what has been studied focuses on the practice of religion - such as prayer and church attendance - some studies look at personal attitudes toward faith. The faiths under study, by and large, have been Christianity and Judaism. (These studies reveal general tendencies within the groups studied. Obviously, not everyone who practices religion is automatically healthy, any more than every cigarette smoker gets cancer.)
Religion's salubrious side effects are not news to believers. In the book of Proverbs, we read: "A glad heart makes for good health."
Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, well known for his studies of a meditative state he dubbed "The Relaxation Response," says: "This (prayer and devotion) is what people have known and used for millennia."
Even such pioneers of psychology and medicine as William James and Sir William Osler spoke of a link between physical well-being and the spirit. So why is science suddenly coming to the defense of religion in its relationship to good health?
"Now," says Benson, "a data base has been established."
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a psychiatrist and a leading researcher in the field of religion, health and aging, agrees. He says that a lot of not-too-scientific opinions about religion (like Freud's idea that religiousness is a form of neurosis) have fallen to soundly scientific studies.
"When you actually look at what's happening and study these things randomly, you find not what popular (scientific) opinion has suggested for the last half-century," he says. "This research has been accumulating."
One man who has looked closely at the accumulating research is Dr. David B. Larson, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist who was a senior researcher for more than a decade at the National Institutes of Health and who now directs the private National Institute for Healthcare Research in Rockville, Md.
Larson, who examined the impact of religion in past studies while at NIH, says he expected to find that what he was told in medical school was true: that religion is irrelevant to health. But when he looked at years of studies, he discovered something quite different.
"When you look at findings concerning religious practice or attitudes, it's very beneficial (to health). It was harmful less than 10 percent of the time; beneficial more than 70 percent of the time."
Larson and others in this field are sensitive to the criticism that religion may be a marker for socioeconomic class or education, or some other factor that may be more directly linked to health.
In other words, maybe it isn't religion that's helping people to be healthy; it's that healthier people are religious. (And, conversely, sick people might not make it to church on Sunday.) But Larson observes that the groups that are the most religious Americans - low-income, minority women - are not those best served by the medical system.
In a recently published study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, sociologists Kenneth F. Farraro of Purdue University and Jerome R. Koch of Texas Tech University found that while whites overall are healthier than blacks, the health status of blacks who attend church regularly is equal to that of whites who say they never attend church.
Larson looked at a well-established risk group - cigarette smokers - and found that church-going smokers have lower blood pressure than smokers who sleep in on Sunday.
"It (religious practice) tends to be helpful no matter how you cut it," he says.
Most researchers interviewed for this story admit to being practicing Christians or Jews. They say they aren't trying to - and couldn't hope to - "explain" God or other matters of faith and theology. Nor do they want to whitewash religion. For some, it can be unhealthful. Koenig says some unhealthy individuals are drawn to religion. Others suggest that a religious framework that is guilt-ridden and harshly punitive can be unhealthful. Such were the findings of a study of mental-health and religious attitudes by University of Rochester psychologist Richard Ryan.
Physicians, too, must appreciate the role of religion in the lives of their patients, says Dr. Diane M. Komp, a leading children's-cancer specialist at Yale University School of Medicine.
"If I choose to leave it out, if I censor it on the grounds that it doesn't belong, then I am not objective as a scientist," says Komp. "I've chosen to ignore something that a good number of patients are saying is important in the way they see their health. For me to ignore that means I'm a lousy scientist."