24
He asked that I not use his real name, to protect his reputation.
25
Naturally, William James recognized this phenomenon a century ago. Mystical states, he wrote in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, allow the mystic to become one with the Absolute, and be aware of that oneness—a tradition that defied “clime or creed.” “In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land.” James,
Varieties
, p. 324.
CHAPTER 3. THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF
1
Norman Cousins also took massive doses of vitamin C. But his case seemed to demonstrate that positive emotions are good for your health. See his
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
2
A study conducted in fifty-two countries found that psychosocial stress accounted for about 40 percent of heart attacks. Salim Yusuf et al., “Effect of Potentially Modifiable Risk Factors Associated with Myocardial Infarction in 52 Countries (The INTERHEART Study): Case-Control Study,”
The Lancet
364, no. 9348 (September 11-17, 2004): 937-52.
3
Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues found that chronic stress altered the immune response to a flu virus vaccine in older adults. They looked at the responses of “caregivers” (who took care of spouses with Alzheimer’s disease for at least three years) and compared them with a control group of less stressed people. In the control group, 70 percent responded to the flu vaccine, contrasted with 35 percent of caregivers. This suggests that stress reduced the number of people who produced the protective antibody to the virus by 50 percent. Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., “Chronic Stress Alters the Immune Response to Influenza Virus Vaccine in Older Adults,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
93 (1996): 3043-47.
4
J. K. Kiecolt-Glaser and R. Glaser, “Psychoneuroimmunology and Cancer: Fact or Fiction?”
European Journal of Cancer
35 (1999): 1603-7.
5
In one study, British researchers followed the cases of 578 women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Five years after diagnosis, those women who scored high on an anxiety and depression scale had a significantly increased risk of death. Those scoring high on the helplessness/hopelessness scale had a higher risk of relapse and death. M. Watson et al., “Influence of Psychological Response on Survival in Breast Cancer: A Population-Base Cohort Study,”
The Lancet
354 (1999): 1331-36. In another study, researchers followed sixty-two breast cancer patients over five, ten, and fifteen years. They found that women who responded with a “fighting spirit” or with denial (what the researchers called “positive avoidance”) were significantly more likely to be alive and well for at least fifteen years. By contrast, women with fatalistic or helpless outlooks fared far more poorly. S. Greer et al., “Psychological Response to Breast Cancer and 15-Year Outcome,”
The Lancet
335 (1990): 49-50.
6
J. Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues studied psoriasis, which is an uncontrolled cell proliferation of a layer of the skin and can cover the whole body. Stress makes it worse. The researchers found that those who consciously reduced their stress levels through meditation healed more quickly than those who used only mainstream treatments. For those who meditated, the condition cleared in 100 days, compared with 125 days for those who did not meditate. J. Kabat-Zinn et al., “Influence of a Mindfulness Meditation-Based Stress Reduction Intervention on Rates of Skin Clearing in Patients with Moderate to Severe Psoriasis Undergoing Phototherapy (UVB) and Photochemotherapy (PUVA),”
Psychosomatic Medicine
60 (1998): 625-32.
7
G. Ironson, R. Stuetzle, and M. A. Fletcher, “An Increase in Religiousness/Spirituality Occurs After HIV Diagnosis and Predicts Slower Disease Progression Over 4 Years in People with HIV,”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
21 (supplement; 2006): S62-68.
8
G. Ironson et al., “View of God Is Associated with Disease Progression in HIV.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, March 22-25, 2006, San Francisco. Abstract published in
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
31 (supplement): S074.
9
G. Ironson at al., “The Ironson-Woods Spirituality/Religiousness Index Is Associated with Long Survival, Health Behaviors, Less Stress, and Low Cortisol in People with HIV/ AIDS,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
24, no. 1: 34-38 (special issue on religion and health).
10
R. C. Byrd, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit,”
Southern Medical Journal
81 (1988): 826-29.
11
F. Sicher and colleagues followed forty patients with advanced AIDS. Half received different types of prayer and psychic healing for ten weeks; the other half did not. The patients receiving prayer developed fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, experienced less severe illness when they were sick, made fewer trips to the hospital or their doctors, and spent less time in the hospital. However, there were no significant differences in CD4 cell counts, a biological measure that charts the progression of the disease. F. Sicher et al., “A Randomized, Double-Blind Study of the Effects of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS,”
Western Journal of Medicine
169, no. 6 (1998): 356-63.
12
W. S. Harris studied 990 patients admitted to a coronary care unit at a private hospital. Prayer intercessors were each given the first name of one patient (and it was guaranteed that each did not know the patient) and prayed for that patient every day for four weeks. Half of the patients received no prayer. The group receiving prayer did better overall. W. S. Harris et al., “A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit,”
Archives of Internal Medicine
159 (1999): 22-78.
13
The 219 women were in Seoul, while the prayer groups lived in the United States, Canada, and Australia. K. Y. Cha, D. P. Wirth, and R. A. Lobo, “Does Prayer Influence the Success of In Vitro Fertilization-Embryo Transfer? Report of a Masked, Randomized Trial,”
Journal of Reproductive Medicine
46 (2001): 781-87. Later, one of the researchers was found guilty of fraud in an unrelated study, which cast doubt on these findings in the minds of many researchers.
14
I love this study. Twenty-two bush babies (
Otolemur garnettii
) with “chronically self-injurious behavior” were monitored over four weeks. Half received prayer and medication on their wounds each day; the other half received only medication. The bush babies receiving prayer healed more quickly, for both biological reasons (a greater increase in red blood cells, for example) and behavioral reasons (they didn’t lick their wounds as much, which allowed them to heal). K. T. Lesniak, “The Effect of Intercessory Prayer on Wound Healing in Nonhuman Primates,”
Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine
12 (2006): 42-48.
15
L. Leibovici, “Effects of Remote, Retroactive Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients with Bloodstream Infection: Randomized, Controlled Trial,”
British Medical Journal
323: 1450-51.
16
J. M. Aviles and colleagues monitored 799 coronary care unit patients between 1997 and 1999. Half were prayed for by five different intercessors once a week for twenty-six weeks. At the end, the group receiving prayer scored slightly better (but not in a statistically significant measure) in areas such as death, cardiac arrest, rehospitalization for cardiovascular disease, coronary revascularization, and emergency department visits for cardiovascular disease. J. M. Aviles et al., “Intercessory Prayer and Cardiovascular Disease Progression in a Coronary Care Unit Population: A Randomized, Controlled Trial,”
Mayo Clinic Proceedings
76 (2001): 1192-98.
17
The researchers measured not just prayer among the 748 patients but also an alternative therapy of music, imagery, and touch. Neither prayer nor the alternative therapies seemed to affect the outcomes as measured by death or major cardiovascular events. M. W. Krukoff et al., “Music, Imagery, Touch, and Prayer as Adjuncts to Interventional Cardiac Care: The Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II Randomized Study,”
The Lancet
366 (2005): 211-17.
18
Researchers at California Pacific Medical Center split 156 patients into roughly three categories: those who received prayer or distant healing from professional healers for ten weeks; those who received prayer or distant healing from nurses who had no prior training in healing (also ten weeks); and those who received nothing. No significant effects were observed for those who received prayer from trained healers or nurses. J. A. Astin et al., “The Efficacy of Distant Healing for Human Immunodeficiency Virus: Results of a Randomized Trial,”
Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine
12 (2006): 36-41. However, there was what I consider a fatal flaw in this study, something the authors called a “limitation.” Namely, they lost much of their data: 40 percent of the prayer groups and 24 percent of the control group never showed up at the end of the ten-week period to be analyzed. This made me wonder about the robust nature of other studies. And it prompted Dr. Larry Dossey, who sent me the article, to note: “I don’t know why people publish stuff like this. It just pollutes the literature. Now people will cite this study as evidence that prayer is worthless in HIV/AIDS, a wholly unjustified conclusion based on this experiment.”
19
Researchers studied forty (mostly female) patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Some received in-person intercessory prayer; others received prayer from people far away as well as in person. Patients who received prayer in person were found to improve significantly, but the distant prayer did not add any benefit. D. A. Matthews, S. M. Marlowe, and F. S. Mac-Nutt, “Effects of Intercessory Prayer on Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis,”
Southern Medical Journal
93 (2000): 1177-86.
20
The study looked at ninety-five patients with end-stage renal disease. The upshot was that the people who expected to be prayed for
said
they felt significantly better than did those who expected to receive another mental treatment (positive visualization). But on every other measure, prayer made no difference. W. J. Matthew, J. M. Conti, and S. G. Sireci, “The Effects of Intercessory Prayer, Positive Visualization, and Expectancy on the Well-being of Kidney Dialysis Patients,”
Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine
7 (2001): 42-52.
21
E. Harkness, N. Abbot, and E. Ernst, “A Randomized Trial of Distant Healing for Skin Warts,”
American Journal of Medicine
10 (2000): 448-52.
22
H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessory Prayer,”
American Heart Journal
151 (2006): 934-42.
23
Richard P. Sloan,
Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
24
One of the more remarkable involved my own infant ears. When I was a few months old, I developed an excruciating ear infection. I shrieked for several days straight to announce the problem. After days of intense prayer by my mother and our Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Wooden, I grew quiet. Gratified by the silence, my mother tiptoed into my room. Lying on either side of my head, next to my ears, were two pieces of a hard yellow substance in the shape of honeycombs—double mastoids that had somehow emerged from my ears on their own. Of course, a skeptic would say that my mother did not document this “healing” by getting a doctor to confirm it, or that if such a “healing” did occur, you could say it was the natural course of events. Everything depends on how you read the “evidence.”
25
See Astin et al., “The Efficacy of Distant Healing.”
CHAPTER 4. THE TRIGGERS FOR GOD
1
Granqvist found that people who experience sudden religious conversions more often have “insecure attachment histories” (distant relationship with parents, creating a need to compensate, which prompted them to see God as surrogate parent). These people are nearly twice as likely to have sudden conversions as do people who have secure relationships with their parents. They tend to be more religious if their parents are less so, and vice versa (a sort of “I’ll show you” phenomenon). People who have secure relationships with their parents tend to experience gradual conversions and religious changes. These children develop a similar relationship with “God” as their parents did, and also tend to adopt their parents’ religious or nonreligious standards. P. Granqvist and L. Kirkpatrick, “Religious Conversion and Perceived Childhood Attachment: A Meta-analysis,”
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
14 (2004): 223-50.
2
Jerome Kagan, a Harvard child psychologist, told me in an interview that he’s found a link between religiousness and children who are “high reactive.” He has been following five hundred white middle-class adolescents (now sixteen years old) since they were four months old. Infants who were high-reactive—that is, they squirmed and waved their legs and arms at the smallest stimulus, such as a mobile over their cribs—tended to show greater cortical arousal throughout the years. They were more anxious and tense. By the time the children reached adolescence, twice as many of those who were high-reactive as infants had become religious, as compared with the low-reactive kids. Kagan theorized that the children were using religiousness as a coping mechanism to help them reduce tension. (He notes that the adolescents who were high-reactive and
not
religious—all three of them—were in therapy and on drugs.) “A spiritual outlook is helpful,” Kagan told me, “because it says, ‘Things are going to be okay, you’re in good hands, there is a supernatural force, and this supernatural force will take care of you. You just be good, be kind to others, believe in some sort of supernatural force.’ ”