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Researchers: Doctors Premature to Recommend Prayer

By Gene Emery

B O S T O N, June 22 "?Medical schools are offering courses in spirituality, religion and health after studies saying prayer can help people feel better and live longer. But prescribing prayer is probably premature, researchers say.
   “We are troubled by the uncritical embrace of this trend by the general public, individual physicians, and American medical schools,"?said the group of nine researchers and chaplains, led by Richard Sloan of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.
   The trend, they said in an article in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is based on “limited, narrowly focused, and methodologically flawed studies of the place of religion in medical practice."?br />   Past Prayer Studies Poor
  Sloan’s team said the idea that religious activities make people healthier comes from studies that have not been well designed, produce vague conclusions, and generate sometimes conflicting results.
   For example, some researchers use church attendance as a measure of religiousness, making no distinction between Quaker meetings and Roman Catholic masses.
   “Do advocates of the connection between religion and health propose that such differences are unimportant?"they asked.
   Nor do such studies account for the stresses people feel when they change their denomination, sometimes over their family’s objections, said Sloan and his colleagues. “Religious practices can be disruptive as well as healing."?/p>

Doctors Should Not Prescribe Religion
  The nine also said that because there is no evidence of “a solid link between religious activity and health,"?doctors have no business prescribing religion.
   Studies have consistently shown that married people live longer, “but physicians do not dispense advice regarding marriage,"?they said.
   “There is evidence that early rather than late childbearing may reduce the risk of various cancers, but we would recoil at a physician’s recommendation that a young woman, either married or single, have a child to reduce her risk of cancer."?br />    The Sloan group said people should recognize that studies attempting to link religious experience to health are sometimes an attempt to validate religion. But, they said, “Religion does not need science to justify its existence or appeal."?/p>


  (From ABCNEWS)
  

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