Peggy Munro tried the usual remedies for her chronic back pain -- hot baths, pain relievers, even weekly physical therapy. But the 61-year-old interior designer says she finally found relief in some truly alternative medicine: prayer.
Every Sunday for a month, at the otherwise traditional Episcopal church she attends on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the minister placed his hands on her head and prayed for her back to heal. "I was skeptical," says Ms. Munro, who believes prayer relieved some stress and helped her feel more in control. "But I thought I'd try it because nothing else was working."
Faith healing, long the province of TV evangelists, has gone mainstream. Across the country, churches and synagogues are giving renewed attention to an ancient belief -- that worship can fight disease. While the effort is stirring debate within the clergy, it is getting surprising support from new research on the subject and from doctors themselves. The result has been an array of new rituals, from daily devotions for dieters (including a special prayer "for people everywhere who are overeating") to entire services devoted to healing.
This Sunday, Ms. Munro's church will offer a Christmas Eve healing service with readings on Jesus' work with the sick. About 300 Methodist churches in the United States have launched "healing ministries," aimed at "reclaiming Jesus Christ's mandate to heal." Nearly every major branch of Judaism is also involved; there are now 15 Jewish Healing Centers nationwide, with 25 more on the way. And Buddhists from the Dalai Lama on down are speaking out about the benefits Buddhist practices such as meditation can lend to modern medicine. It's "a very hot subject," says Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus of Congregation Or-Shalom in Orange, Conn.
But even as it proliferates, the mixing of faith and healing is generating controversy -- and not necessarily from predictable sources. Despite the medical profession's resistance to alternative therapies, some leading doctors have been at the forefront of the movement; during the past eight years, about 70 of the nation's 125 medical schools have begun offering courses on spirituality and health. Meanwhile, many clergy worry that viewing prayer as a fix for medical problems could harm religion and patients alike.
"I think science has to be very careful here," says the Rev. Larry VandeCreek, a co-director of pastoral research at the HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York. He and other critics worry that applying the scientific method to worship takes God out of the equation. There are more earthly concerns as well: Some clergy say it would amount to malpractice for physicians to push religion -- especially their own -- on unreceptive patients. They also say it could be tragic if patients misunderstood the evidence and substituted faith for medicine.
Still, science has made strides toward showing a link between faith and health. In a major study at Duke, researchers found that people who attended services at least once a week had stronger immune systems than those who didn't. Another study, at the University of Colorado, found that people who attend services frequently are likely to live an average of seven years longer -- about the same amount of time, coincidentally, that some studies say refraining from smoking is supposed to add.
In fact, of the 1,200 studies in a new compilation on the subject published by Oxford University Press, about two-thirds suggest some connection between religious involvement and better health. One prominent researcher in the field, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, has even argued that regular repetitive prayer, along with general stress management, can reduce visits to health-care professionals by up to 50 percent. (Much of the funding in the field has come from former mutual-fund manager Sir John Templeton, whose foundation backs scientific research of spirituality.)
As word of these studies has spread, many clergy say congregants have begun asking for healing-oriented worship. To meet such demands, religious umbrella organizations now provide guidance to local congregations. The United Methodist Church offers seven-session workshops for clergy and lay leaders on the subject. The Jewish Healing Centers are educating rabbis with lectures and literature at conferences, as well as working with individual patients. (Among the offerings: everything from spiritual psychotherapy to prayers to be said upon completion of chemotherapy.) MORE
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UNDATED: completion of chemotherapy.)
Gina Gelb, an Orthodox Jew from Fairfield, Conn., has sought help from one such center. The 51-year-old tax attorney, who was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, practices a form of Jewish meditation -- repeating "shalom," the Hebrew word for peace, in her gazebo and on four-mile walks at dawn. She has also formed a women's prayer group that reads all of Psalms on behalf of people they know who are sick. "The soul has to be healed, along with the body," says Ms. Gelb.
But the science is far from conclusive. While there is evidence that meditation helps lower blood pressure and stress, most studies in this area are inevitably subjective. It is impossible to isolate the impact of faith, for example, because religious people may well make other lifestyle choices that also affect their health. "In a nutshell, there's no good evidence," says Dr. Richard Sloan, co-author of a recent New England Journal of Medicine article that reprimands the medical community for flirting too much with religion.
Dr. Sloan is particularly dismissive of studies, including a few by major research centers, that claim to show a benefit from intercessory prayer, or prayers offered for a sick person without his or her knowledge. But there is also a deeper worry: that patients who don't recover might blame themselves for being insufficiently religious. "If you suggest that a religious act is good for one's health, you automatically imply that the opposite is true," says Dr. Sloan, a medical professor at Columbia University.
Though in modern times it has been uneasy at best, the relationship between religion and health goes back centuries, even before the times of Jesus and Mohammed. But religion and health had a dramatic parting of ways near the turn of the 20th century, sparked in part by Darwinism's assault on the idea of divine creation. Since then, spiritual healing has been largely the domain of Pentecostals, Christian Scientists and a few other groups. Indeed, in the medical world, the study of spiritual healing was known as the "antitenure track" until a decade or so ago.
More recently, the gap has begun to close again. Public fascination with the mind-body connection has helped renew interest in the palliative capacity of religion. So has frustration with medicine itself. "We're at a time when the limitations of modern health care are becoming more apparent," says Stephen Harding, an Episcopal minister and chaplain at Beth-Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. For this reason, Mr. Harding supports further exploration of faith healing, though he says he is "not so happy" that doctors, rather than clergy, are leading this movement.
But clerical, and popular, interest is rapidly growing. In Memphis, Tenn., Scott Morris, a physician and minister who runs a clinic for needy patients, has helped educate congregations about spiritual healing. Six Jewish congregations in the city will each devote a Friday in March as a "Healing Shabbat," with prayers and readings devoted to healing. Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church holds biweekly "Walk & Talk" evenings, mixing prayer and exercise. And each Wednesday, members of a local Church of God in Christ stretch and kick to gospel music as part of the church's holistic approach to health. Medicine and religion are "the yin and yang," says Micah Greenstein, rabbi at the local Temple Israel. "They complement each other."
Still, it is a delicate balance. As comforting as healing-oriented worship can be to the sick, even clergy who embrace such efforts have concerns. The Rev. Andrew Mullins, rector at The Church of the Epiphany, where Ms. Munro's back pain was treated, worries at times that the success of spiritual healing "could ruin prayer." His biggest fear: Research will convince people they can be cured simply by going to church.
"It's not like you see on TV," says Mr. Mullins. "You don't get knocked over the head once and your gall bladder's healed. Prayer takes commitment and depth."
Distributed by The Associated Press (AP)