Saturday, October 3, 1998

Doctors increasingly find introducing prayer helps calm patients and speeds recovery

By Raymond McCaffrey

The Gazette

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Back when Dr. Arnold Ahnfeldt was serving his residency, he was confronted with a difficult case involving a hairdresser who faced amputation of her severely infected thumb.

After neither medication nor surgery had stemmed the infection, Ahnfeldt posed a somewhat novel alternative.

"We've reached the limits of our abilities," Ahnfeldt recalls telling the attending physician. "I think we ought to include God here."

Though the older doctor was skeptical, he agreed to join Ahnfeldt and pray with the patient the night before the scheduled amputation. The next morning, doctors found that the infection had dramatically improved. Amputation was no longer necessary -- a development Ahnfeldt considered "a miracle."

Today, roughly 25 years after Ahnfeldt served his residency at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, he is an orthopedic surgeon in his hometown, Colorado Springs, and prayer remains as much of a professional tool to him as the scalpel.

"It's very easy for physicians to get the God complex," Ahnfeldt said. "I don't heal people. God heals people."

Ahnfeldt's philosophy is apparently being shared by more and more doctors. Not only are physicians praying with patients, but researchers studying how prayer affects healing have also found -- somewhat amazingly -- that in most cases it helps people get better.

Those developments are part of what could be called a spiritual awakening in the nation's medical profession. Even the esteemed Harvard Medical School holds a regular conference on spirituality and medicine, and many more teaching hospitals are falling in step.

"This is a major new movement bringing back concepts of religious practice and spirituality into the medical schools," said Dr. Larry Dossey, the New Mexico-based author of several books on prayer and healing. "Three years ago, there were only three medical schools that have courses looking at these issues."

Currently, Dossey, said there are around 40.

Indeed, research has shown that religion is, in essence, good medicine. Hundreds of studies have shown religious devotion is statistically correlated with greater longevity and health, Dossey said.

Those findings could be explained away as merely a matter of positive thinking: Religious people simply feel better about themselves and that makes them healthier. Harder to dismiss are the studies suggesting the positive impact of prayer.

A ground-breaking study published in 1988 drew the profession's attention, according to Dossey. Nearly 400 patients in the coronary care unit at a San Francisco hospital received the same standard medical treatment with one difference: Half were prayed for by an assigned group, half weren't.

Ultimately, researchers discovered that there were fewer deaths and fewer medical complications among those who had been the recipients of prayer.

Those findings -namely, that prayer has a positive effect -- have been replicated many times over the years, Dossey said. In fact, even plants and fungi have been found to grow faster when they were prayed for.

"Prayer works," said Dossey, who practiced internal medicine for about 20 years before becoming a full-time writer and eventually began praying for his patients as a matter of course.

"The skeptics always say the prayer didn't do anything; the people suspect that they were being prayed for and got better because of positive thinking. This doesn't hold in studies for nonhumans.

"It cannot be explained away by positive thinking is my bottom line.

"We can't say how prayer works. We just say it works ... For most people there will be evidence for them that there is a God who answers prayers."

Certainly, prayer research deserves credit for forcing the medical profession to focus on patients' spiritual needs. However, the movement apparently also has been fueled by consumer demand.

"People are hungry for a respiritualization of health care," Dossey said. "You could almost predict that this would happen. People want more than treatment as if they were a machine."

Indeed, one reason Colorado Springs resident Dave Gaw, a commercial airline pilot, chose Ahnfeldt to repair a damaged knee was because the surgeon is a Christian.

"A doctor who knows where his talent comes from ... and who's the true healer," Gaw said.

The movement to integrate the spiritual and the medical is bigger than individual doctors praying with their patients.

For example, Denver-based Centura Health has a committee devoted solely to spirituality and health. At the beginning of this year, Centura-operated Penrose-St.Francis Health Services decided to formally include chaplains on all case-management teams. It was part of an initiative to put spirituality "more on the front burner," said Dr. Ted Lewis, medical director of care management services.

Though Lewis said he personally would like to see more evidence about the effect of prayer on healing, he certainly is open to the concept.

In "modern Western high-tech medicine," spirituality has become "a forgotten factor," he said.

"It is the one thing that we have ignored, that is part of every human being. If we can tap into that part of a person's being and use that in a positive fashion, we probably will see significant changes in the way that people respond to treatment and how they heal and how they get over an illness."

In a certain sense, the movement is as much a step backward as a step forward.

"The physician as a healer was not uncommonly the priest in ancient civilizations," Lewis said. "There's been obviously in more modern times a real division of that."

Some are concerned that physicians continue to respect the division between religion and medicine. A malpractice carrier, Englewood-based Copic Insurance Co., even asked psychiatrist David Wahl for guidelines for integrating religion with medicine.

Writing in the July issue of Copic's regular newsletter, Wahl cautioned physicians to "ensure that the doctor role is not confused with the clergy role." He added, "It can be very confusing for patients to actively participate in religious practice (e.g., pray) with their doctor. No matter how well-trained the doctor is within a faith, the doctor is seen as the expert in medical science."

Wahl also advised doctors to "develop a clear understanding of the patient's current belief system" and to "assess the patient's comfort level" with such discussions about spirituality.

Wahl's guidelines mirror precautions some physicians already have taken. Dr. R. Michael Sherwin, who in the late 1970s was a founding member of an interdenominational Bible study group for Colorado Springs area physicians, said that back then, doctors were concerned about how their spirituality should impact their practices. More specifically, how should they let patients know they were open to discussing such matters?

One doctor suggested placing Bibles on their office desks. Though Sherwin, a pathologist for Penrose-St. Francis, didn't see patients, he took up the practice.

Today, Sherwin's faith is more obvious: His office is adorned by numerous signs with spiritual sayings, such as: "Work for the Lord. The pay isn't much, but the retirement plan is out of this world."

Ahnfeldt has a Bible and religious pictures in his office, too. However, sometimes if he knows the patient is open to it, he is a little more forthright about introducing faith.

In the case of one patient, Lt. Col. James Polo, Ahnfeldt asked him if he wanted to pray moments before he was to be wheeled in for surgery on his right knee last year.

"When we finished talking about everything he said, 'Would you like me to pray for you?' ... I said, 'Sure,' " recalled Polo, senior psychiatrist at Fort Carson's Evans Army Community Hospital.

"He prayed ... just asked for guidance from the Lord, that the surgery went well, that the recuperation following it went well."

"Actually it was kind of a nice moment of peace before all the medical stuff starts," Polo said.

"He was very respectful about the way he offered. I think in my personal situation it did calm me down a bit. It certainly didn't harm me in any way."

In fact, the operation was a success, and the patient was up and around on crutches in two days.

"Would I say that I had a good result because of prayer? Well, I had a good result. I don't know why I had a good result. I think part of it was I had a good surgeon.' "

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(c) 1998, The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.).

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