January 17, 2007 - Faith Heals...Online, or Anywhere Else

From time to time, I run across articles that speak of the impact of religious faith on healing. While I’ve yet to see a scientific study on this slippery subject that’s completely convincing, there’s a whole lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests that religious faith is good for our health.

Today, I come upon another one of these: an online news bulletin from iVillage Total Health, a medical information service, that summarizes a recent University of Wisconsin study. The results from this study were published in the February issue of the journal, Psycho-Oncology.

What these researchers did was to examine a group of breast-cancer patients who have been in touch with each other through online support groups. They first gave the women questionnaires, designed to assess their emotional state – both at the beginning of the study and at its conclusion. Then, they analyzed the verbal, e-mail responses of these women over a certain period of time, looking for certain religious words: “holy,” “pray,” “God,” “worship” and the like.

The researchers discovered that “women who used a higher percentage of religious words had lower levels of negative emotions. They demonstrated higher levels of self-efficacy and functional well-being, even after controlling for the pre-program religious belief levels. The participants appeared to use a number of different ways to cope with their illness. These included placing trust in God and finding blessings in their lives. Patients also expressed a belief in the afterlife resulting in a lower fear of death.”


So, it seems faith and healing are intimately related. Just about any pastor – one who’s visited a lot of hospital patients, anyway – could have told the researchers that.

They just had to find out for themselves, that’s all.