Religion and Health

                                                                                                                                                                  Vol. VII, No. 9, November 1994

[Reprinted from Family Research Report, July-August 1994. The FRR is published every other month by the Family Research Institute, Inc., P.O. Box 2091, Washington, DC 20013, 703-690-8536. $20 per year.]

How important is faith? One of the deans of modern medicine, Sir William Osler opined in 1910 that "faith is the most precious commodity without which we should be very badly off." An article in the Journal of Chronic Disease (1) revealed that infrequent church attendance is a risk factor for several causes of mortality. People are at lower risk in more behaviorally strict religions or denominations. This is true for cardiovascular disease, hypertension, stroke, uterine and cervical cancer, numerous other cancer sites, colitis and enteritis, general health status indicators, and overall cause-specific mortality.

Jeffry Levin (2) notes that "a positive association between religion and health has been observed in hundreds of studies of various designs, conducted by scores of researchers in different countries, at different times throughout this century, using a multiplicity of independent and dependent variables, and including subjects exhibiting great diversity by race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class, nationality, religious affiliation, and disease status."

Twenty-two of 27 studies of the effects of frequency of religious attendance, "revealed a positive and statistically significant relationship with health. Outcomes included hypertension, trichomoniasis, cervical cancer incidence, tuberculosis case rate, atherosclerotic and degenerative heart disease, neonatal mortality, subjective health, overall mortality, and many other disease entities."

References:

1. Comstock & Partridge. Church Attendance and Health. 1972;25:665-72.

2. Religion and Health. Social Sci & Medicine 1994;28:1475-82.