According to a lawsuit recently filed by his children, country music songwriter Wayne Perry died because his sister, Darlene Bishop, a television preacher and co-minister of the Solid Rock Church of Monroe, Ohio, convinced him to rely on religion instead of seeking standard medical care for his cancer. He did and he died.

Although Bishop had claimed in her book Your Life Follows Your Words to have cured her own breast cancer through faith and prayer, her deposition in the case made it clear that she never had received a breast cancer diagnosis from a physician. The controversy over Perry’s death is only one episode in the longstanding fascination, persisting centuries after the scientific revolution, with the use of religious ritual to treat disease, either alone or supplemented by conventional medical care.

 

In 2004, CBS News reported on a Colorado orthopedic surgeon who “requests” that patients pray with him while they are gowned and supine on the gurney, ready to be wheeled into surgery. In a 2007 report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 54 percent of 1,144 physicians surveyed indicated they believed that God or another supernatural being intervenes in the health of their patients. The Christian Medical and Dental Association, a professional society half as large as the American College of Cardiology, publishes a handbook that instructs physicians on how to use their practices to evangelize. According to an article published this summer in the Des Moines Register, staff members at the Iowa City VA Medical Center repeatedly attempted to convert a Jewish veteran to Christianity during hospitalizations over a two-year period. 

 

The intrusion of religion into medicine is not limited to the Corn Belt or the Bible Belt. More than half of U.S. medical schools now offer some kind of training in religion and health. Each December, Harvard Medical School offers a continuing medical education course on religion and medicine. George Washington University has established an institute on spirituality and health. Duke University sponsors a Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health. Even the U.S. National Institutes of Health established a commission to generate papers on this matter without any effort to include skeptical perspectives. In a 2001 issue of Hospital Physician, doctors were encouraged to take a “spiritual history,” in much the same way that they take a medical history.

 

Proponents of bringing religion into medicine cite research showing that religious devotion is associated with better health outcomes. But overwhelmingly, the evidence is weak and inconclusive, marred by serious flaws in research methods. Even the best review article in the field, published by Lynda Powell in the American Psychologist in 2003, found that in all but 43 of the hundreds of studies examined, the research methods were so flawed that they couldn’t definitively determine that religion and not other factors, including chance, was responsible for the outcomes.

 

Of all the studies that attempt to establish a connection between religion and health, those finding an association between attendance at religious services and life expectancy are, without question, the strongest. In one of the best studies, a survey of more than 21,000 subjects, R. A. Hummer and colleagues found that frequency of religious attendance was inversely associated with mortality. However, the protective effect was entirely absent for patients with cancer, and only marginally significant for patients with heart disease, the two leading causes of death in the United States.

 

A report published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1998 showed that, in a community sample of 2,023 affluent, largely white adults over age 55 in Marin County, California, religious attendance was associated with reduced mortality. However, the magnitude and significance of the effect varied depending upon the definition of attendance, and whether the model included other indices of social engagement. So while the data suggest some health benefits from social engagement, they are anything but a ringing endorsement of the health benefits of religion or religious faith, per se.