And third, there is an "expanding health-care emergency," but counting on spirituality to address it is bound to lead to disappointment.

Don't you know - this is a "faith-based" initiative in action? Lost your job, can't pay COBRA - just send $50 to RobertsonPerkinsWarren or your favorite TV preacher and you'll have the best universal healthcare coverage prayer can buy.

Hmmm. Aside from the troubling lack of any kind of actual proof, what is the outcome if one believes in no god at all?

Still, if the U.S.'s expanding health-care emergency has taught us anything, it's that we can't afford to be choosy about where we look for answers.

WTF, did the CEO of Time Ragazine just buy controlling interest in Dr. Marvelous' Patented CureAll and Elixir of Life?

Jesus, I can't believe anyone could type that without vomiting all over their keyboard. Why didn't he (she or it) just say beggars can't be choosers?

Man, I can hardly wait for the response from the medical community. Whoever ever wrote that is going to be the proud owner of several new assholes.

People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God.

Is this another freaking Rasmussen Poll? Of people who survived the epidemic, 37% said they were cured because God loved them, 34% said it they overcame God's wrath, and 29% had no opinion or hung up.

Ah, the weakness of the human mind, so very pathetic.

Nice post, Steve.

"My general concerns here go beyond bizarre journalism"

Times are tough, they're trying to sell copies and ad space. They're pandering to an audience. Journalism doesn't factor into this at all.

This stuff might actually have some use if what were being analyzed were positive or hopeful thinking (which, as we know, may or may not equate with faith, religious beliefs or various perspectives on the "loving" or "vengeful" nature of god[s]).

Not that that can be scientifically addressed, either, so never mind.

Why are "miracle cures," and miracles generally, always attributed to God? Just because someone prays a lot couldn't a reversal of a bad disease be chalked up just as easily to physical randomness? I've heard that doctors frequently cure disease as well.

Also, if God is the only explanation for a cure, how do we know which God caused the miracle? Could Allah ever intervene in a Christian family? Should Saudis pray to Buddah?

I think there is a role for miracles in health care but not the way Time Magazine portrays it. I think, for example, that it's a miracle an imaginative and compassionate potter thought to invent a pot mixing clay with plant debris and colloidal silver that can filter dirty water for pennies and cure diahrrea in poverty-stricken countries 80 percent of the time.

God is in the process, which can lead to results that seem miraculous.

Next up, Time explains why God gives children cancer. Key finding: Because some poeple just don't pray enough.

Time ≠ Journal of the American Medical Association (or any other scientific journal for that matter)

Mitochlorians?

Dating an imaginary Salma Hayek also means that she can be imagined taller that she is in real life. In other words, the imaginary faith-based belief system is in every respect better than reality (for as long as the delusion can be sustained). How can the reality-based community ever hope to compete?

"Hmmm. Aside from the troubling lack of any kind of actual proof, what is the outcome if one believes in no god at all?"

It's pretty stark, man. Everyone who doesn't believe in God eventually dies.

Numi: "Aside from the troubling lack of any kind of actual proof, what is the outcome if one believes in no god at all?"

Well, one dies. And if one does believe in a god? Well, one dies.

I suppose there is "something" to what this no-nothing journo is writing about. The mental stress relief of "belief" the reason it works in 12-step programs.

Nevertheless, a belief in God & a good Doctor works MUCH better than a belief in God alone.

People who are healthy enough to attend church live longer than those who aren't healthy enough to go to church for an entire year?

Correlation is not causation.

This should then mean that saints would live longer than mere preachers and priests, but that preachers and priests would live longer than heretics. Sign me up brother!

Silly. All of the MSM runs this sort of tripe from time to time. Remember when that guy shot and killed two people in a courtroom and took a woman hostage? She happened to have the book "the purpose-driven life" in her handbag and she started reading it to him and he let her go. This was hailed by many in the media as an act of God. Where the hell was God for the two people that were shot and killed? No discussion of that. People who are saved in disasters where many others are killed commonly attribute their being saved to God but few ever blames God for allowing everyone else to die!

I can see where people having a positive outlook would help them recover from an illness more quickly than those who have a more negative or depressed outlook. There are plenty of optimistic atheists and plenty of pessimistic theists. But to be an real optimist in the face of the world's problems today probably would take an at least slightly deluded person so there may be a slightly higher percentage of theists with a generally positive outlook about life. I think this difference in temperament could probably explain any difference (assuming one could demonstrate that there was an actual difference). In other words, maybe religious faith isn't the critical difference or even a relevant difference in the rate of recovery.

I don't believe in an omniscient God that sits up there somewhere and judges and decides what happens to all of us, However, I do believe in the power of the mind and the bodies remarkable ability to heal itself.

i also believe if you have hope and faith in something, even if it's your doctor, it helps. Also, knowing others are thinking about you and praying for you can be very comforting.

Read Bruce K. Lipton's book "Biology of Belief" if you want an interesting take on the power of our cells.

Tthere is a growing body of evidence that a positive attitude can benefit health (just as depression can harm health). However those effects can be linked to specific chemical reactions in the brain. People with a strong religious believe that 'God' will cure them tend to have a positive outlook towards their illness, hence they can show the same benefits as those who have a positive outlook for non-religious reasons. But NOBODY says that attitude can take the place of good quality care, only that attitude is a supplement to that care.

The article simply takes a known and documented medical phenomenon and says 'God' did it.

Belonging, having a supportive group of friends and family and having a positive outlook all impact the progress of disease. This may well be the case for all social animals. "Faith" in the study groups may well track this broader, and less political phenomenon. The potshot at socialized medicine reads like something from a fanatic or a foot soldier. Makes me think of the neocon vision of society-a vision at odds with that of the founding fathers of the United States. In this ideal society the overclass of philosophers understands and accepts the material, and deeply un-spiritual nature of the world. The underclass is only confused by the truth so they need to be given harmless mysticism. To enlighten the underclass means instability and revolution and probably socialist redistribution of power and wealth.

Prayin' in a whole lot less expensive to the haves than national bargaining for drug prices.

There's e a lot of research on placebo affects prolonging the lives of terminally ill, and boosting the confidence of the practitioner, but obviously that was not the point of the article. The same results could probably be gained by having faith in one's magic stick. Ultimately making crutches for yourself like this inevitably create handicaps.

Atheists, agnostics, scientists, rationalists should have no time left for TIME. With bad times here, and worse times probable, could it be that corporate TIME is doing a little opium peddling? We wouldn't want the rabble to get roused now, would we?

science and faith are not competitive systems explaining human existence, they are complimentary.

By definition science and faith are at odds. Not only do they propose profoundly different types of forces acting in the physical world- these forces have, we are told, bearing on human morality- but they propose two entirely different types of metaphysics. Stephen Jay Gould was wrong when he said science and religion were "non-overlapping magisteria". A universe in which there is a god-like force with human-like intentions and emotions- love, wrath, and a plan- is a very different place than a universe filled with dark matter and plan-less natural selection. In the latter human life and the lives of individual East African Plains Apes has no cosmological meaning.

People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend.

People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God.

Pluege--tell that to the people who believe that the Bible is literally true.

To those of us who don't suffer that particular delusion, it's a lot like claiming that the characters in a movie are as real as the people who sell you popcorn in the lobby. The people who are crazy enough to believe that are dismissed easily enough.

What's really irritating are the people who claim that the belief that a projection on a movie screen is a real person is somehow compatible with the belief that character in movie is not a real person.　"A" cannot both be equivalent to "A" and not equivalent to "A."

This isn't to say that there aren't some religious/spiritual insights aren't worthwhile. Of course they are, but most of those are kind of just common sense anyway. The problem comes in when people start claiming that the religious view is ever the best explanation of a phenomenon in the material, observable world. I can't think of a single case in which it's true that a religious explanation of anything for which science also purports to have an explanation where the religious explanation is superior. Not a single case. Can you? 　

Journalism doesn't factor into this at all.
Posted by: Saint Zak on February 14, 2009 at 10:37 AM

This is Time magazine. Journalism never is a factor.

I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on the idea of dating Salma Hayek and everything else just whizzes past me. If I pray hard enough, will God set me up with her?

Gummitch, you might want to consider Sarah Shahi of 'Life' as an alternative.

This is very disturbing indeed. Their so-called research is of course bullshit. What if you get cancer or AIDS? This is just another way the religious right nutjobs can condemn you...If the prayers don't work, you just didn't have enough faith.
I watched one of my clients, whose daughter had liver cancer, give almost every bit of her money to Benny Hinn. He sent her letters asking for more. She gave him more....and her daughter died. When she called them to see why God didn't come thru, what happend, the "prayer counselor" told her she her faith wasn't strong enough. So as far as Benny Hinn was concerned, she killed her own daughter through her lack of faith. I hope there IS a Hell and a special little corner of it should be reserved for televangelists.

Time is irresponsible rag for the right as far as I'm concerned.

It is fruitless, of course, to pray that Time will one day become a news magazine again. Perhaps, in the interest of reason and reality, it is time for Time to liberate its readership from absurdities such as this report, and to just fold quietly and depart from our midst.

Even if it's true that there's a correlation between religious faith and health, what kind of good does knowing this really do anyone? Those who have faith would have had it even if they had never heard about this. And if someone doesn't believe in God, are they really supposed to tell themself: "Well, I've never believed there's a God, but I'm now going to choose to believe God exists so I can be healthier"? The idea is absurd. You can't force yourself to believe something you don't just to get some perceived benefit.

Dude! Exactly zero worshipers of Zeus have died from any reason in this country for at least a thousand years. Therefore, the worship of Zeus confers eternal life. QED.

Christian Science has long held that illnesses are manifestations of spiritual disorders that can only be healed through prayer.

However, the most insidious thing about the TIME mag article is its complete failure to make it clear that this is a RELIGIOUS belief and not a substitute for appropriate medical care.

Of course, in a nation in a growing population of paupers, maybe the "elite" are trying to foist a belief in faith healing so the US doesn't have to consider a universal health care plan.

We are quickly sliding backwards into feudal times.

WTG USA

For anyone interested, I once wrote about a study that might be what they were referring to about people attending religious services living longer. And assuming the study is the same one, the big joke is that their raw data showed no link between religious attendance and longer life. It was only after they "adjusted" the data did they find a link, and even that was seriously lacking in causation. And needless to say, the study was conducted by a religious college that was dedicated to linking science and religion. The only thing the study told us is that researchers can find what they're looking for when they want to.

Here's more:
When Good Religion Makes Bad Science

I can't take time to read all the comments right now, as I usually do. But I still wanted to throw something in.

I retired in 06 from a 33-year career as a medical librarian. I have read countless books and journal articles on various aspects of health, as well as doing countless database searches in Medline and other health databases on behalf of physicians, nurses, and medical researchers. I learned a LOT about medicine and can attend CME lectures and understand them.

There is a tendency in modern medicine, and Steve just exhibited it, to dismiss the placebo effect. I call it "the much-maligned placebo effect". While I can understand wanting to rule it out of double-blind controlled clinical trials, nonetheless it is an interesting phenomenon. Some research is being done into it, but more needs to be done.

Why do some people improve due to the placebo effect? Somehow, the fact that they believe that they will get better indeed results in improvement. The connection between positive belief and how it affects hormone and peptide levels needs to be studied much more extensively. There's a term for it--psychoneuroendocrinology. Clearly this is what's involved in reports of "faith" healings. If this happens to some people, rather than dismissing it, we should be trying to replicate it, and to find the "scientific" explanation behind it.

"People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend."

Has anyone ever looked to see if weekly participation in a non-religious group activity (book group, stitch-n-bitch, Elks Club, etc.) is also correlated with a lower risk of death?

I know they've found multiple times that people with strong social ties are generally healthier, so I doubt there's something extra special and magical about specifically religious ties over other social groups. We are, after all, social animals -- we're really not meant to be spending all of our time alone.

Pluege--tell that to the people who believe that the Bible is literally true.
　
Posted by: Crabgrass on February 14, 2009 at 12:04 PM | PERMALINK

I didn't comment on the idiocy and insidiousness of organized religion, nor the dumbassery of the many people who describe themselves as people of faith that are imbeciles.

"People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. "

This in NO WAY shows that "people of faith" have better medical outcomes.

This compares two groups of people WITH faith.

Sheesh.

If it shows anything, it shows that people with optimism do better than people with pessimism.

I thought it had been shown many times before that healing is helped by having a good attitude.

"People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend."

Save for all the Southern church goers who get wiped out by tornadoes, fires, lightning, and myriad other acts of God each year.

Steve Benen's post is based on a profound ignorance of the subject matter.

There is plenty of scientific evidence that prayer, meditation, visualization, and other so-called "spiritual" practices can and do have positive effects on health -- including treatment of and recovery from disease.

This is simply an empirically observed fact.

The problem is that religious institutions have claimed this territory as their own, and proclaimed it "supernatural". And all too many scientists obligingly accept the religionists' classification of such phenomena as "supernatural", and then conclude a priori that since such phenomena are "supernatural" they cannot exist, no matter what the empirical evidence shows.

In effect, the religionists have been permitted to close off entire categories of human experience from scientific investigation.

If the practices that we call "prayer" or "mediation" are empirically observed to have health benefits -- which they have, in repeated studies -- then that is a natural phenomenon like any other natural phenomenon. We may not understand the mechanism involved, but developing such an understanding is the job of science, after all. But there is no more need to invoke a "supernatural" explanation for these phenomena than to invoke a "supernatural" explanation for the origin of species, the movement of the planets, ball lightning, or ESP.

Pluege,

No, you didn't comment on the things you say you didn't comment. But what you did say was that "A is equivalent to A" and "A is not equivalent to A" are somehow complimentary (sic). And that, friend, is nonsense, because religions make propositions about the nature of observable phenomena that are either not demonstrably not true, or not able to meet the standards of rigor that the scientific method requires of scientific statements.

"...Somehow, the fact that they believe that they will get better indeed results in improvement." Wolfdaughter @ 1:40 PM.
But did the belief cause the improvement? Or was the improvement caused simply by that person's body managing to overcome a medical condition, by means not yet determined by science, that most other people would succumb to?
The results would be the same but, obviously, because of vastly different reasons.

Doug wrote: "But did the belief cause the improvement? Or was the improvement caused simply by that person's body managing to overcome a medical condition, by means not yet determined by science, that most other people would succumb to?
The results would be the same but, obviously, because of vastly different reasons."

Why would the reasons "obviously" be "vastly different" ?

"Belief" is an activity of the brain. So if "belief" is responsible for an improvement in health, then "that person's body" -- i.e. that person's brain -- managed to "overcome a medical condition, by means not yet determined by science", namely, by means of the as yet poorly understood effect that the activity of the brain that we call "belief" has on the rest of the body.

Where is the "obvious vast difference"? It exists only in the arbitrary dualistic categorization of some aspects of human experience as "mental", "spiritual" or "supernatural" and other aspects as "physical". But that's a distinction that exists only in our categories of thought, not in reality itself.

Yes, Steve's take on this seems, well, anti-scientific. Wolfdaughter and SecularAnimist both wrote excellent comments and they are quite right that there's a large body of research indicating that a positive attitude and peace of mind make strong contributions to recovery from illness, as well as supporting the placebo effect generally.

Assuming the claim that belief in a loving god correlates to better outcomes in illness than belief in a punitive god is true, I think that's a big clue to what's going on here. It's not that religious faith per se is producing better health, it's the mental benefits that particular kinds of religious belief create that are producing better health. This isn't supernatural—Steve need not dismiss it as supernatural and Time ought not to rush to conclude that it's supernatural.

Also, bellumregio is also spot-on with his debunking of the oft-asserted claim that science and religion/faith are complementary and/or entirely independent from each other. Most religious beliefs make claims about natural reality—there is no such thing as the "supernatural". Only a strong agnostic view (that is, that the status of the existence of god is unknowable in principle) combined with the concept of a non-effectual god (other than, perhaps, creation of the universe) is a view that would be outside the domain of science.

Otherwise, the complementary view is a cop-out. It's an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance on the part of believers, and it's an attempt to avoid conflict on the part of non-believers. Most Christians, especially, make a great many claims about the world we actually live in and their god they believe who affects it. These are empirical claims which can be, in principle, proven or disproven. I say this as an atheist who is very tolerant, even respectful, of believers. Indeed, I think that religious belief is often unfairly maligned by many atheists. I'm open to the possibility that religious belief has both personal and social benefits that outweigh its costs. But let's dispose of this shibboleth that science has nothing to say about religious belief. It has exactly as much to say about religious belief as it does about belief in other supposedly "supernatural" phenomena like ESP, ghosts, vampires, or Santa Claus.

this is just another backdoor way of saying: "we don't need no stinking universal healthcare."

if you can't afford to see a doctor, get on your knees and pray.

if you're still sick after you and all your friends pray, then clearly you're not worthy and deserve to die.

yeah, that's the ticket.

I am always amazed when the left wing makes a litmus test out of a belief in God.

Have you ever wondered why the public likes Democratic positions over Repbulican positions by huge numbers? No, because you (we) are convinced that most Democratic positions are far more reasonable than Republican positions.

Have you ever wondered why the Republicans get 40+% of the votes even after the disasters of the last 8 years? You probably do.

However, I think the reason is that so many reasonable liberal become absolutely intolerant concerning religion.

Think about it and then scream that I am completely wrong.

the funny part?

the people pushing this crap all have good healthcare and the money to pay for it.

COBRA is a complete joke. i was offered COBRA once -- the premium they wanted was $1000/month for a single person.

Time should do a follow-up article on how religion creates medical problems. Polio could easily be cured in India. We have the vaccines, the government knows how to distribute them, there should be no problem. Yet polio persists. The problem is that Muslim Imams tell their followers to not take the vaccine. And it's not just polio, and it's not just India. Belief in faith healing over medicine kills millions of people across the world. Simple rule: when you need spiritual advice, go to a priest; when you're sick, go to a doctor. But in a time when people seek out a plumber for economic policy advice, it's no surprise that people can't follow that rule.

There have been a couple double blind studies done on the power of prayer in healing. One that found positive results was run by a scam artist with no scientific background, who is now in jail, and the only way that study found positive results was by doing a lot of correlations until they found some that were positive. (When you say something is significant at the 0.05 level, it means that out of a hundred repetitions, 5 of them will be positive just by accident. If you then publish just those 5, you can pretend that your treatment worked.)

The other found that there was no effect if the person being prayed for didn't know about it.

For a good discussion on the placebo effect, which in fact does cause significant and measurable physiological effects, see the book Snake Oil Science.

Something else along the lines of did God decide that this person should be saved by missing his connection to Buffalo but the other 49 should die. Think about how often we see in the news parents of some kid who has just died of something like type I diabetes, easily controlled with insulin, because the only treatment the kid got was prayer. The thing that just drives me up the wall is that these parents then get sympathy instead of a jail term. They let that kid die just like parents who shut a kid in a closet and starved him to death! Those of us in the Bible Belt read about situations like this on a regular basis.

It's worth reading Victor Stenger's "God: The Failed Hypothesis". There's a section on scientific studies of prayer (pp94-102 in my copy).

He points out that one can certainly scientifically test the efficacy of prayer - after all, it's supposed to have a material effect on some outcome in the physical world.

He states that his earlier book "Has Science Found God?" (pp237-55) details why he finds unconvincing various popular books & articles claiming prayer is effective - they all fail at least one good science methodological requirement (but that doesn't stop the press trumpeting them...). In this book he details a number of very serious concerns (including "researchers" convicted of financial fraud) for the so-called "Columbia 'Miracle' Study".

In the earlier book two highly-publicised studies of the effects of prayer on the recovery of coronary patients are (apparently) shown to be severely flawed and not statistically significant.

However, in this book, Duke University conducted a very interesting double-blind trial. Twelve prayer groups (from various religions including Christians, Sufi Muslims, Buddhists) were set up, and other prayers were e-mailed to Jerusalem and placed on the Wailing Wall. Patients were selected at random by a computer and sent to the twelve prayer groups who prayed for complete recovery of the patients. Neither the hospital staff nor the patients knew who was being prayed for. No significant differences were detected. The researchers were reported to be of religious faith themselves. One of the study authors is reported to agree with Stenger that any health benefits of prayer "...that may be currently indicated can be understood in terms of physical processes alone."

Perhaps the most interesting is the Study for the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (known as the STEP Project). Patients were randomly divided into three groups. One was told they would be prayed for (and they were), the other two were told they might or might not (and one group was, one was not). Intercessory prayer did not significantly reduce post-surgery complications, but those who KNEW they would be prayed for were more likely to have complications compared to those who weren't sure (59% vs 52%). Once again, at least some of the investigators were believers, and in this case some of the funding came from a group that seeks to find connections between religion and science, so investigative bias is not a skewing factor.

So a person having weak faith in a loving god will be healed of ALS, but a person with very strong and encompassing faith in a punitive god will die of a cold?
Does Time have any kind of science editor?

Shouldn't someone have mentioned by now that God doesn't seem to heal amputees, no matter how hard you pray and believe? Conclusions left as an exercise to the reader...

You should try taking a medical anthropology course, and reading some of the literature from it. There is more fuzziness to supposedly empirical western biomedicine than you might realize.