Faith helps patients, MDs say

Most physicians in the United States believe that religion and spirituality have a positive effect on patients' health, according to a survey published last week, and that God at least occasionally intervenes on their behalf.

Researchers questioned 1,144 doctors about how religion influences health care and found that their responses varied with their religious beliefs. Fewer than 10 percent of doctors interviewed said they were not affiliated with a religion. A little more than a third said their intrinsic religious faith was high, a similar number said they were not very religious and the rest called themselves moderately devout. The paper appears in the April 9 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine.

Overall, only 1 percent believed that religion has a negative effect on health, and 2 percent said it has no influence one way or the other. But 54 percent said God sometimes affects a patient's health, and 33 percent said religion and spirituality help prevent specific medical events like heart attacks, infections and death.

Physicians with high levels of belief were more than seven times as likely as those with low levels to believe that religion has a large influence on health. While more than 90 percent of very religious doctors believed that religion and spirituality can often help patients cope with their problems, 38 percent of them nevertheless held that religious belief can sometimes lead to negative emotions.

"The most telling part of this outcome," said Farr A. Curlin, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, "is that it shows that what doctors bring to the data, whether religious or secular, seems to have as much to do with their interpretations of the data as the data itself."

He and his co-authors noted that few topics in medicine cause more disagreement than the relationship between religion and health.

Jerome E. Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard who was not involved in the study, said he was surprised how many doctors believe in divine intervention.

"The most striking finding is the perception that God is micromanaging clinical outcomes at the bedside," said Groopman, the author of the new book "How Doctors Think" (Houghton Mifflin). He added that "this is one of the really great tensions" in Judaism.

"Maimonides," he went on, "rails againstthe idea that you can expect miracles, which is really what this boils down to.""