Our hospitals would no longer bother with medications, MRIs or IVs. They would be refining the proper incantations for each illness. We would have managed care committees trying to determine if beginning a prayer with “O Glorious and Great God” yields a more cost-effective treatment than “O God, the Great and Glorious.” 

But this is obviously not the case, and even “people of Faith” call their MD when they are sick, not their priest. This is such common knowledge in this culture that when serious claims for the efficacy of faith healing do surface, we take notice. Thus it was quite remarkable to find an American Agenda segment entitled “Faith and Healing” on the ABC evening news with Peter Jennings. The thrust of the entire segment was that praying and religiosity have a powerful healing effect on you. The tone for the piece was set by the opening scene: the camera pans over a large group of people, with eyes closed, praying in a church; the voice-over explaining, “This [praying] may play a critical role in healing.” This assertion was buttressed by such totally irrelevant facts as “80% [of the American public] pray when they are sick – and a majority of those believe god helps heal them.” Is this news? Do they expect the American public to believe this is somehow “scientific” simply because there is a percent sign in the sentence? 

Several people then gave testimonials that they believed god had healed them. Unfortunately, the reporter lacked the nerve to ask why their belief in god hadn’t simply prevented them from getting sick in the first place. The report concluded with statements from Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University, who claimed his research showed that “belief in god helped fight off depression and anxiety.”

Now this was indeed of interest. Here was a professional researcher claiming that he had data to support the efficacy of belief in god as a cure or even a preventative for depression. As a psychiatric nurse and an Atheist, I was very curious about how one would structure such a study. Depression is notoriously difficult to measure, and one can easily be misled by self-reports of mental status. However, after reading several of Koenig’s published papers, I found I did not have to delve into a rigorous analysis of Koenig’s research protocols to find fault with his conclusions that a belief in god can constitute a prophylactic against depression. Dr. Koenig’s own research tended to show exactly the opposite was true. Koenig himself stated in the study cited in the ABC report, “Whether religious beliefs and behavior actually help to prevent or relieve emotional distress is far from clear. Psychiatric illness may be even more common among the religious, perhaps predisposing them to greater problems in later life…”¹ 

Indeed. A more objective review of the data from this 1992 study reveals that people who expressed strong religious beliefs were hospitalized with acute illnesses (such as cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, respiratory disease, and neurological dysfunction) at rates two to four times higher than those who expressed “no religious preference”!²  This study also noted that previous research had found that conservative, fundamentalist, or evangelical Protestants were, as a group, more likely to have “chronic health problems and physical disabilities.”³ In a subsequent study, Koenig confirmed that, “Several studies have reported an association between psychiatric disorder and religious affiliation, with rates of disorder highest among non-mainline Protestant groups.”⁴ In fact the study showed that this highly religious group had psychiatric disorders at a rate 50% higher than that of the general public.⁵ In yet another 1992 study, Koenig’s data showed that the likelihood of major depression among Pentecostals was three times greater than among persons who said they had no religious preference.⁶ 

This ABC report would be innocuous pandering, except that it encourages people to use prayer, rather than modern medicine, to “heal” themselves. It encourages the type of behavior that resulted in the death of six kids in Pennsylvania from measles in 1991 because parents in a faith-healing congregation refused to allow them to be immunized. Dozens more would have died if the state hadn’t used a court order to immunize the remaining children in the church.

We are left with the question of why a respected researcher would prostitute himself by giving an extremely skewed version of his research on national TV. Perhaps he was taken out of context. Perhaps ABC, in its rush to trot out a feel-good piece of religious tripe during the Christmas season, played fast and loose with the facts. Perhaps it is time to call for an American Agenda segment detailing how people with strong religious beliefs are more apt to have chronic illnesses and disabilities, and far more likely to have psychiatric disorders. But such a report would no doubt conflict with the values of the new owners of ABC, the Walt Disney Company. If it is true that “more people get their news from ABC,” and if this report is any indication of future trends, we are in for some troubling journalistic times.

Not to be outdone by their TV competitors, local newspapers and even national magazines are now jumping on the “prayer, faith and god” bandwagon. The unquestioning, adulatory tone of these articles is intended, according to one remarkably honest editor, to increase readership by attracting aging baby-boomers who are, according to recent surveys, returning to the traditional religious faith of their childhood.

A review of much of the literature concerning the “power of prayer” suggests that many studies seem artificially manipulated to support the researcher’s fundamental biases. For example, one frequently cited study was conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, in which he looks at the effect of “intercessory prayer” on a group of cardiac in-patients.⁷ Since Byrd wants to give his study the best possible chance for success, he invited only “born-again” Christians to pray for the cardiac patients. Predictably enough, Byrd claimed that the prayed-for patients fared significantly better than the control group. However, when one examines this study more closely, it becomes clear that the patients assigned to the “control” group were significantly more ill to begin with. Their admission diagnoses indicated more acute MIs, more unstable angina, more cardiomyopathy (structural degradation of the heart tissue), more cardiac arrhythmias, more heart valve disease, more hypertension; even 50% more admit diagnoses of cardiac arrest! What are the chances that patients with all these serious cardiac conditions would have, by chance alone, been over-represented in the control group?

Perhaps it explains why Byrd submitted this study to the Southern Medical Journal (and a follow-up study to the oxymoronic Journal of Christian Nursing rather than to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A less biased researcher would look at this study and accurately note that the prayed-over group required more medication for angina pain, had more unstable angina, had a higher percentage of re-admissions to the Coronary Care Unit, needed 4 times the number of temporary pacemakers as the control group, and three times the number of permanent pacemakers. This is clearly not an omnipotent God-like showing. Admittedly, it must be difficult for a theist who is convinced of the efficacy of prayer to see such puny results from putting his God to the test. Byrd concedes as much when he attempts to rationalize God’s less than miraculous performance by explaining that someone probably prayed for the control group as well.

Even the new-age oriented Utne Reader is partaking of this pabulum. In the April ’97 edition, the Reader proclaims “God and Health: The Latest Findings” on its cover. The corresponding article, entitled “The Greatest Story Never Told,” explains that “Researcher Dave Larson says that finding God can improve your health -- and he has the numbers to prove it. So why aren’t more people listening?” Mr. Larson, a former senior policy analyst for the Bush administration, makes many claims in the article, all of which go unquestioned by the reporter. One assertion is that faith and prayer have a magical power to make people healthier and less likely to abuse drugs. Curiously, in order to bolster this claim, Larson focuses on the blood-pressure readings of cigarette smoking church attendees as compared to non-attendees. Perhaps he just momentarily forgot that nicotine is a drug. Of course, if I were a researcher, I’d really be more interested in religious smokers’ cancer rates, not their blood pressure; but Larson has to take success where he can find it. He also claims that religious people are happier, less likely to be depressed. However, as I mentioned above, this question has been extensively researched by Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University, whose data supports the opposite conclusion.

Maybe that is “why more people aren’t listening” to Dave Larson’s cheerleading for blind faith. He claims to be merely “a numbers man,” but he is apparently quite selective about the numbers he looks at. Unfortunately, Mr. Larson has a virtually unlimited budget for his religiously focused “National Institute for Healthcare Research.” It is currently being funded by multi-millionaire Sir John Templeton, who is interested in promoting research on religion. It is chilling to think that Christian millionaires, pouring money into religious medical “research” in an attempt to justify their own theistic delusions, have the power to jeopardize the health care we all receive by distracting medical professionals from the practice of efficacious medicine. We should confront such research not with fawning adulation, but with skepticism, critical thinking, and an unwavering reliance on the scientific method at every turn.

Footnotes: 

¹ Koenig, Harold, et al. “Religious Coping and Depression  Among Elderly, Hospitalized Medically Ill Men.” Am. J. Psychiatry (1992) 149: 1693-1700. 

² Ibid. 

³ Koenig, Harold, et al. “The Relationship Between Religion and Anxiety in a Sample of Community-Dwelling Older Adults.” J. Geriatr. Psychiatry (in press). 

⁴ Koenig, Harold, et al. “Religious Affiliation and  Psychiatric Disorder Among Protestant Baby Boomers.” Hospital and Community Psychiatry (1994) 45, 6: 586-596. 

⁵ National Institutes of Mental Health, Update on Mental Disorders, 1993. 

⁶ Koenig, Harold, et al. “Religious Affiliation and Major Depression.” Hospital and Community Psychiatry (1992) 43, 12: 1204. 

⁷ Byrd, Randolph C., MD: Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population. Southern Medical Journal, July 1988, Vol. 81, No. 7, 826-829.