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Can Spirituality Affect Health?

by Kevin Sharpe and Rebecca Bryant

Reprinted by permission of Science and Spirit Magazine

http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=41

Printed 2002: July 1998-Eighty-seven percent of adults believe that God sometimes answers their prayers, according to a recent Newsweek magazine poll. Forty percent of surveyed biologists, physicists and mathematicians believe in a God who answers prayers, adds a Nature study.

Word of spiritual healing appears everywhere. Newspapers regularly report the sensations – cancer victim miraculously recovers from sure death after 24-hour bedside prayer ritual. "It must be the work of the Lord." Several studies suggest that regular churchgoers have better clinical outcomes than do atheists. Some football teams even gather together before important matches to pray for divine aid in winning the game.

Professional reactions are more guarded. "The person in me says 'Of course, I believe emotions have something to do with disease,' but the scientist in me says 'Prove it to me,''' explains rheumatologist and mind-body researcher Esther Sternberg of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Many intellectual problems exist with the very concept of spiritual healing. One is replication. Universal laws of nature and repeatable experiments anchor science – the most powerful explanatory tool currently available to us – and pharmacologists test their drugs according to these two axioms. They run complex trials, and, once they show that a new compound has the same effects and properties over a number of tests, they release it for general use. The key: universal characteristics and repeatable results.

What of the healing power of spirituality? One thing's for sure – spirituality connects intimately with unpredictability. Not every religious believer will be relieved of his or her ailment. Even those who pray don't always receive the answer they wish for. According to science, if prayer heals one terminally ill patient, it should heal them all. Science has no time for miracles. Single inexplicable events only go to show nature's "misbehavior," quips physicist Paul Davies of the University of Adelaide, Australia. Perhaps the concern with replication is one of science's hang ups – maybe it should broaden its horizons. But it works. Spirituality needs to demonstrate a similar success rate to convince the sceptics.

Spiritual healing puts God to the test. Mimi Rumpp prayed that her sister Miki would find an urgently needed kidney donor. Within the year, her prayers were answered and her sister had a new kidney. God came up trumps on that occasion. But what about the others? Terrible things happen to innocent people all the time, many of whom actively believe, pray and are prayed for. Why doesn't God intervene on their behalf? All sorts of academic explanations obtain. We need to understand suffering in order to appreciate contrasting goodness. Suffering provides a means through which we can express moral qualities of caring, kindness, and patience, and so move closer to God. None of these convinces. If God prepares to help one of his devotees, he should help them all. Otherwise we become pawns in a divine game of favorites. Broad-brush explanations involving God's mysterious movements simply don't help.

What kind of spiritual faith must we hold to ensure a divine response to our cries? Diverse spiritual traditions exist the world over, all involving different belief systems, images, and preconceptions. Christianity teaches that God loves us and hears our prayers, as demonstrated by Jesus' miraculous healing of the sick and crippled. The bodhisattva has abandoned the final peace of nirvana in favor of participating in our suffering and leading us toward release from the cycle of rebirth, according to Buddhist thought. Should we pray to the Christian God or the bodhisattva? Who has the highest success rate? Just how many deities or entities work toward alleviation of human pain? Perhaps a belief in Satan could be good for our health. Surely Satan wants the best for his own, just as much as the next deity?

These kinds of questions become relevant in relation to the "relaxation response," pioneered by Herbert Benson of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School. The "relaxation response" invokes meditation techniques to cure all kinds of physiological complaints, from headaches to hypertension. Benson advises patients to breathe deeply, and, on the out breath, to chant a phrase with significant personal meaning. This could be a religious expression – Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, the denomination makes no difference – or it could even be non-religious, but in some way important to the patient. The relaxation response works: 60% of U.S. medical schools train their students in the technique and many major hospitals offer the treatment. Natural, yes. But a case of divine intervention, no. As one letter writer to Science magazine puts it: "whether an individual copes . . . by using prayer, exercise, a walk in the countryside, or the enjoyment of higher math and astrophysics, the end result can be the same."

Many people agree, then, that natural, wholistic methods can influence our health and well-being. This represents spirituality in its broadest sense. How should we understand this kind of healing? Psychologist Joseph F. Rychlak of Loyola University (Chicago) gives us clues. Three types of explanatory account exist, he believes: deity, natural, and human. We tend to link spiritual healing with deity explanations (or divine actions), but this needn't be so. Human explanations (or our personal choices) can also account for spiritual healing. The crucial question becomes: how does spiritual healing work? How can an immaterial entity (the mind) influence a material entity (the body)? The good old Cartesian mind-body problem. "What is physical and what is not physical is an arbitrary . . . distinction,'' and we have inherited a material concept of causation, according to Rychlak. We see a cause as a physical force acting on physical objects to produce observable physical effects. Yet things might have gone differently. Had we inherited Kepler's understanding of a cause as a (theoretical) mathematical law, our notion of causation would lack the materialist stance. The idea of mind-body interaction wouldn't prove anomalous.

Having broken down the mind-body barrier, our thoughts can determine and alter our bodily states, Rychlak suggests. These states manifest physically, yet they are initiated mentally. By praying, or wishing for, our well-being, we may bring about recovery and renewal. Spiritual healing need not depend on divine intervention. Others can influence our well-being too, according to Rychlak. When others pray for us, they express an intention toward us, and this may result in our renewed health.

The link between spirituality and health need not depend on the existence or actions of a divine figure. Spirituality spreads much broader than that. The spiritual, in its most general sense, involves positive, directed thinking by and for human beings. This kind of thinking may well be the key to a healthier, happier lifestyle.

Rebecca Bryant holds a doctorate in philosophy from Edinburgh University, Scotland, and lives in Oxford, England. She can be reached at . Kevin Sharpe is editor of Science & Spirit. He holds doctorates in mathematics from La Trobe University, Australia, and religious studies, from Boston University, USA. His email address: .