NEW YORK - When Mark Haruf was diagnosed last December with a rare form of bone cancer, he was told he had a 10 percent chance of beating the disease.
Many months and several hospitalizations later, he fights on, fortified by meditation and a newfound faith that helps him envision a healthy future. "I am focused on how I am going to live my life in a couple of years, when this is all over," says the 24-year-old actor.
Renee Flynn is battling a bowel disease that has required the removal of her large intestine and much of her small intestine. Since 1998, she has almost died on the operating table twice.
What keeps her alive, she says, is faith. "God has a plan for me," says Flynn, 52. "I just had faith that everything was going to be OK."
Stories like these have spurred some researchers to try to measure the effects faith and prayer have on illness and recovery.
An analysis of 42 studies last year found those who regularly attend some sort of religious service live longer than those who don't.
More recently, a 30-year study of 2,600 people published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine showed those who attend weekly services lead healthier lives and maintain better health habits than the less devout.
Still other studies have linked religion with lower blood pressure, faster recovery from depression or drug abuse, and stronger immune systems.
Researchers note, though, that this is not necessarily evidence for the supernatural, since the results could be due to, for example, believers' more positive attitude or greater social-support network.
More controversial is work by Dr. John Astin and Dr. William Harris on the healing power of prayer. Astin, of the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, reviewed 23 studies and found that in more than half of them, prayers offered from distant sources were correlated with a positive effect on patients' health.
Testing the power of prayer
Harris, a cardiovascular health researcher at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, devised a study in which community volunteers prayed for nearly 500 patients with life-threatening cardiac conditions without the patients' knowledge.
Another 500 patients with similar illnesses got no such spiritual attention. He found that those in whose name prayers were offered experienced 11 percent fewer adverse events while they were in the hospital.
"It was sufficiently large from a statistical point of view to give you good assurance that it was not a random finding," says Harris.
Just this month, researchers found prayer appeared to be associated with a doubled success rate of in-vitro fertilization procedures. The group of men and women who were prayed for but did not know it had a 50 percent pregnancy rate, compared with a 26 percent rate in the group that was not prayed for.
But other scientists discount those results. A recent review found only five double-blind studies of the effects of prayer in the medical literature: that is, studies in which neither the participants or researchers knew which group was receiving prayers and which was not. And only two of these studies indicated a benefit - a weak benefit, at that. Critics also found many flaws in the two studies.
Religion and its 'dark side'
As more rigorous studies explore the link between faith and health, believers are hoping physicians will consider a patient's religious background part of his health profile. Some would like physicians to refer more patients to clergy members.
Says Dr. David Larson, president of the International Center for the Integration of Health and Spirituality: "Chaplains and local clergy can help patients - and doctors - wrestle with issues like 'Why is this happening?' and what God is saying."
More conventional practitioners worry that such referrals, coming from a doctor, could be harmful. And the Rev. Raymond Lawrence Jr., director of pastoral service at New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, is concerned that tying prayer to well-being conflicts with most theology.
"The notion that you can gather 50 to 100 people and they can lobby God for action in the hope that these people die and these people live is a stunning theological claim contrary to a great many religions," he says.
"What the spirituality people are doing is creating a new religion. You might call it the religion where you view God as the U.S. Congress. The more lobbying you put in, the better chance of getting things to go through."
And when prayer fails, the disappointment can add to a patient's burden, say some medical professionals. Patients may believe their illness is a result of too little faith or a punishment from God.
This "dark side of religion," as critics call it, is just beginning to be examined. The first such study, published in August in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that of 595 hospital patients 55 or older, those who held negative religious beliefs - that God had abandoned or was punishing them - were 19 percent to 28 percent more likely to die than those with positive beliefs.
'It's good to talk to somebody'
Another reason not to bring religion into medical settings, says Dr. Richard Sloan, is that it infringes on a patient's privacy.
"There is considerable evidence that early rather than late childbearing for women reduces the risk of certain kinds of cancer," he says. "But the decision to have a family and when is intensely personal and is not the business of physicians. There are many aspects of our lives that epidemiologists could show are related to health outcomes but are out of the bounds of clinical medicine because of reasons of privacy."
For now, spirituality seems well-entrenched in some corners of the medical community - welcome news for families such as that of Margaret Fee, 79, of Brooklyn.
The Fees have relied on chaplains since Fee's visit to the emergency room for abdominal pain turned into a four-month hospital stay. "It's good to talk to somebody," says Fee's daughter Mary Fee-Greco, 42. "As far as (her mother's) healing, you have to have faith. I'm sure that's what's keeping her here."