We know that spirituality can help us feel connected with ourselves, others, and even a higher power, but what are the specific aspects that are associated with improved healing?
Researchers from the University of Missouri recruited men and women suffering from chronic health conditions to find out.
Participants suffered from a range of conditions including spinal cord injury, brain injury, stroke, and cancer.
Researchers found that both men and women received religious and spiritual support from a number of sources, including their congregations and spiritual interventions (such as religious counseling or practicing forgiveness), as well as assistance from religious leaders (i.e. pastors, priests, rabbis, etc.).
There was a significant difference between men and women, however. While men experienced better mental and physical health outcomes from their religious support, women only saw improvements in mental health measurements.
Researchers also studied what specific aspects seemed to provide relief.
For women, daily spiritual experiences, forgiveness, and using their religion or spirituality to cope with their conditions all helped to increase their mental well-being.
For men, the support from their spiritual community was correlated with higher self-rated health and improved mental well-being.
The study wasn’t randomized or controlled, so the correlations are only suggestive.
You can find the entire study in the Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health.
No matter what your religious affiliation or spiritual beliefs, this study suggests it might be possible to derive higher levels of well-being by connecting to your spiritual community and beliefs.
Spirituality can sometimes be the missing link in completing a patient’s healing journey.
What aspects of spirituality do you think affect your patients the most? Please leave a comment below.
Interesting – I suspect the gender differences may be due (and I am only hazarding a guess) to the fact that women express their emotions more easily (the positive and the negative) and having some awareness and control of this certainly improves one’s sense of wellbeing and coping because emotions are connected to the limbic system (the emotional rain) they notice improvements more easily with their emotions? Men may not feel any improvements are merely mental health issues – or perhaps it may be stigma with mental health that men prefer to associate any improvements with general wellbeing? This is clearly a gross generalization and I may be way off course in these assumptions! Perhaps further studies should be multi-method with a greater qualitative perspective so that one can fully understand what participants mean by these statements and then notice if there is a real gender difference.
Though retired, I still do some free-of-charge freelance counseling.
No doubt there is a connection between spirituality and (chronic) disease. I counsel connecting with the spiritual community, daily meditation and exercise (especially interval training), which is/can function as a form of meditation.
But I’d not neglect the physiology of disease. I’d attack on both fronts, the physiology first because there CAN be immediate results. Spirituality may take longer to produce improvement. But — let the two march side by side.
Take cancer. The first thing I’d advise a patient diagnosed with cancer to do would be to raise his pH level to values above 7, ideally 8 or better. With a pH on the acidic side of the scale, cancer thrives; if it is on the alkaline side of the scale, cancer has no chance.
Can’t go into the details of how to raise the pH. There are several ways. But I want to tell you about one way, a way so cheap and simple your response is likely to be, “Impossible.” It’s BAKING SODA, a teaspoon of BS once ortwice a day in a big drink of water. Don’t believe me? Do a search for “Baking soda and cancer.” And search for and read “Vernon’s Dance with Cancer.”
The best to you… alles Gute… buenaa suerte… tante belle cose… bonne chance,
Ambros
Get your pH up to 8 or any where near you’ll be a candidate for the morgue. Go do your homework.
And, by the Way, I do use baking soda. I buy it kilo bags.
Just one element in my regime to maintain remission of primary HCC. Mainly it seems to help with night cramps….
A teaspoon of BS? More like a tablespoon – best taken with a large pinch of salt.
I fully agree. i deal with terrible pain from neuroendocrinecpancreatic cancer.
I have lost control of most bodily functions. iI spent spring summer and fall in a hospital last year. Stephen Levine mentions ib his you tube Opening The Heart about hoe something happens to us and when terrible suffering comes there is a switch that goes off which changes us. Your point of view changes forever.
I fully agree. i deal with terrible pain from neuroendocrinecpancreatic cancer.
I have lost control of most bodily functions. iI spent spring summer and fall in a hospital last year. Stephen Levine mentions ib his you tube Opening The Heart about hoe something happens to us and when terrible suffering comes there is a switch that goes off which changes us. Your point of view changes forever.
As your representative nonspiritual person, I can’t comment on this ‘study’ as it is too confounded, didn’t have a nonspiritual group, and I don’t know what ‘spiritual experiences’ are. What many call spiritual, I call psychological, so that forgiveness for example, is a psychological experience. Gender differences are found easily in studies. I remember one article which showed that volunteering was great for male health, but not female, as many females had already spent time caring. Again, AA can be more helpful for males as it stresses letting go of lots of their ego, whereas women sometimes have to find it. Untying ourselves from our past hurt is a great way to free our-self to move on. One doesn’t have to believe in an god or spirit to do this. And connecting with our communities enlivens us, whether we are talking tennis or movies. Finding our existential gaps and addressing them is the best way and that takes courage training. I have read and listened to Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’, a dozen times, and he understood finding the courage of the future. I can’t imagine that I would have survived at all, however he is a secular giant that is always with me.
One doesn’t have to believe in any God, god or spirit to be “spiritual”.
Look into the origins (etymology) of the words. “Psyche” for instance refers to the ancient Greek notion of the soul.
Is that notion spiritual or not?
In German, “seelische”, depending on context, can mean either spiritual or mental, or both.
Put simply, psychology is a science of the soul. Psychology has many schools, branches and disciplines, just like any of the material sciences.
Most of these words mean what we think they mean, or want them to mean. e.g., When people claim to be Atheists they are really saying they don’t believe in an idea or ideas which they have in their own mind about who or what the “G*D” word means.
In 1948, Viktor Frankl earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. His dissertation, The Unconscious God, is an examination of the relation of psychology and religion.
To you he is a “secular giant”, to me he is a spiritual superman. Maybe have you read his Wikipedia page?
To me you seem also to be a spiritual person, but that’s merely an impression from a brief acquaintance with what you have written here. I would need to know much more about you and your daily life, your ideals and aspirations, in order to form any
real and worthwhile idea.
I am here not simply addressing you personally, but elaborating on your post for the possible benefit of any other reader. Including myself.
I have chronic pain from a pro baseball career and a triple rollover plus complex childhood PTSD. My athletic training and abuse by my father developed skills that have appeared since I healed.
I was in a chronic pain group for a year. It was a pity party of comparing who suffered the most this week. As I look back it was victim training. I walked out of there and threw away my morphine and norco and started exercising. I named my pain because it was hard to battle something like the wind invisible. it was called Mr. P. I would go out walking till the pain would almost make me cry, then I would walk for twenty more minutes. It took my best music and my focus of letting go of the pain or being in the middle of my spine without judgment.
The pain could not stop my legs from moving developed into I can compress this pain with my mind and endorphins.
I do not acknowledge my pain or recognize it has any power over me. It is only a warning signal and can not hurt me unless it reaches that critical intensity. The left brain is literal, do not give pain any power what so ever.
I have chronic pain, I do not suffer.
I have C-PTSD, I celebrate every morning with excitement and enthusiasm. My inside healed.
I had gastric lymphoma. I made significant changes in lifestyle after I found out during the PET scan that sugar we take in ACTUALLY FEEDS CANCER and makes it stronger. I focused more on my own needs during that time than I did on all the others in my sphere, I will admit. I was more focused on my own health and more dedicated to doing what I knew was good for my body to help it heal. I changed my diet drastically. I exercised more. I got more rest. I cut down my work hours while I had the radiation (to half time). I did amazingly well. The foundation of all of the changes, however, was my trust in the Lord’s plan for my life and knowledge that if 2004 was to be my last year on earth in this body, I wanted to go out with a bang and not sick and miserable! It was my spiritual relationship with the Father through Christ, my acceptance of His will, and my decision to prioritize differently that made the difference for me. I am very excited about this series because I believe that an individual’s spiritual condition is one of the, if not the, foundation of their healing. It is often spiritual dis-ease that contributes to physical disease or mental disorder or emotional dysregulation, and this aspect of our being is often the last we consider, when probably we would be better off if we started there!
It seems to me that focusing life energy (paying attention to those who are ailing) would, in and of itself, provide an overall uplift in outlook and well being as opposed to isolating them.
This would be particularly true if the attention providers were using skillful means, meaning that they didn’t make things worse.
I think if you sent in a team of trained companion dogs to accompany those in need, that the results would be even better. Their only agenda is to serve and heal.
What’s interesting as I look at what helped men versus what helped women is that I notice that opposite gender tendancies seem to be what helped. For women, it was masculine qualities that focus on the individual, though it could be argued that going inside as mentioned above is very feminine. However, women tend to go toward community, not necessarily toward self. Men on the other hand are helped by the feminine quality of being in community with others.
My interpretation of this study would actually be that spirituality was only the door. It put each person’s life in enough of a different context that they were open to receiving what they really needed, which was more opposite sexed energy to balance out their nature tendancies. In bringing a more energetic balance between masculine and feminine, people saw improvements.
Mental and spiritual healing has now become the latest endeavor pf allopathic medicine to create an illusion in the public mind as to who has the right to use spiritual healing. With that being said womens health or ways of healing has always been ov erlooked, men have been studied so much the outcomes are easily noted. However they are using tools that have never been used by those who practice spiritual healing.
Who has the power to tap into deeper reserves and heal themselves? We all do. We always have. There is no single way- each one has their own way.