Can prayer protect your physical health? Is there a link between faith and the ability of a person to fight a life-threatening illness?
The answer to the question of whether there is any actual connection between belief and bodily health may just be yes, according to a study recently released by researchers at UCLA and UC San Francisco.
When a research team led by UCLA psychology graduate student Carissa Low undertook a study of how women contend with breast cancer, they weren't looking for any particular result. They wanted to explore the different ways their subjects, 23 women who had all been diagnosed with breast cancer about seven years earlier, coped with the disease.
The study participants were asked how they generally cope with stressful events and were given a range of options, including acceptance, humor, denial, distraction — and the use of prayer, meditation and faith.
“We weren't even interested in faith and prayer,” Low said. “We were really interested in how people surviving and living with cancer can catalyze positive changes. We were surprised that [the faith factor] stood alone.”
In the study, whose findings were reported last month at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting in Denver, investigators calculated an index of heart-rate variability, or beat-to-beat changes in heart rate, based on participants' resting heart rate. Higher heart-rate variability is indicative of flexibility in the body's ability to respond efficiently to stress and is considered a marker of good health.
“The coping style most strongly associated with heart-rate variability was religious coping — the use of prayer or meditation to cope with stress and find comfort,” Low said.
How does it work? Low, whose vocation is married to an avid interest in “using what we know about psychology to understand the mysteries out there in medicine that we can't explain,” won't speculate. “We don't know what the active ingredient is here. Is it belonging to a church where a lot of support is provided, or the prayer and meditativeness, or just a belief system which gives you a sense of meaning? Who knows?”
With researchers like Low on the case, however, science no longer has to take it entirely on faith.
