PRIME - The importance of faith

The importance of Faith

Last week I met up with a patient who first came onto my list around 30 years ago. He has given me permission to share his story.

At the time the patient was suffering from various problems, most of which derived from abuse of alcohol. He had spent much of his adult life in prison for crimes of violence and was reportedly “untreatable”.

Despite some initial reluctance on his part, I insisted on seeing him regularly, not just to prescribe his medication but to try to get to the bottom of his problems. He eventually got a job, but when that came to an end he became depressed and committed a minor crime that got him back to prison. I wrote him a short letter asking him not to give up and come back to see me when he was released. I had forgotten all about this until he reminded me many years later.

He did come back to my town, got a job and worked solidly in the community until being forced into a slightly early retirement by some of his medical problems that “caught up with him”. “I was hoping to have a few more years to make up to society for what I had done,” he told me. He went onto say that the thing that had changed his life was the letter I wrote to him in prison. “If someone like you could care about someone like me, then maybe I should care about myself.”

He realised he could not do it alone, but needed help from others and from God. Last week he told me that he still turns his life over to God every day.

As long ago as 1998 an article from the Archives of Family Medicine published by the American Medical Association pointed out the considerable evidence for the positive effect of religious faith on both physical and mental health.

The article represents a study of hundreds of research articles examining the relationship between religious faith (mainly Christian) and health and finds that:
In 81% of the reviewed studies, the frequency of religious attendance 1 was positively associated with health status.

This finding was consistent across an array of illnesses ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease. In the remaining 19% of studies, the authors found overall trends indicating a beneficial effect of religious attendance on health status, although these trends were not statistically significant.

A review of psychiatric research over the previous 20 years found that religious commitment was clinically beneficial in 84% of studies, while only 16% of the results suggested that religious commitment was either harmful (2.7%) or neutral (13.5%).

In recent years even more evidence has come to light of this benefit. Should we not, therefore, spend more time studying this aspect of healing our patients?

After all, if any drug company could claim such benefits it would rapidly become the richest company in the world!

In the case of my patient I could have just treated his physical problems,
or I could have stopped at tackling the psychological problem of alcohol abuse - others had tried and pronounced him untreatable.
Society could have tried criminal reform - but many years in prison had failed to change him.

Instead, a simple act that took probably less than 2 minutes and which I had totally forgotten brought about a radical change physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually.

If we confine ourselves to the physical and measurable as health care professionals we will miss out the key to many of our patients' illnesses.

1. Attendance at worship services at a church,synagogue, or mosque.

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