Is Religion Good for Your Health: The Effects of Religion on Physical and Mental Health by Harold Koenig (Editor), Koenig

Product Details

Synopsis

Is Religion Good for Your Health? takes you deep into the heart of the ageless debate on the importance of religion and faith to physical and mental health. On the one hand, you will learn about important research findings from cross-sectional, longitudinal, and intervention studies that have demonstrated positive effects of religious belief on both mental and physical health. On the other hand, you will learn how the vast clinical experiences of leading health experts suggest that religion can have negative effects on health.

Integral to the book’s exploration of the relationship between health and religion are the trends that have occurred in society over the last century. You will learn about significant demographic changes, changes in health and health care, and shifts in values, attitudes, and religious conviction, all of which have direct implications for health care providers, the clergy, the “baby boomers,” and older adults. From Author Harold Koenig, a leading expert on religion and health who has frequently been interviewed by major broadcasting networks such as ABC, National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, NBC, CBS, and “Ivanhoe Broadcast News,” you will also learn about:

• pathological uses of religion
  
• the need for cooperation and collaboration between health and religious professionals
  
• studies on the relationship of religious beliefs and practice to physical conditions such as blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and cancer
  
• links between religious behavior and depression, anxiety, and drug use
  
• the waning of religion’s influence in America
  
• first-hand accountsfrom patients who have faced painful and/or life-threatening illness
  
  As Is Religion Good for Your Health? analyzes the pathological aspects of religion, you will begin to understand how religious beliefs have the capacity to strongly influence people’s lives and their health, whether positively or negatively. Health care providers, public policy experts, religious professionals, medical researchers, and medical students will find the book’s overview of the issues at stake, particularly the implications for our public health care system, crucial to the advancement of health care practice into the next century.

Annotation

Societal trends in the twentieth & twenty-first centuries, negative effects of religion on health, etc.

Publishers Weekly

While folk wisdom has always taught that physical health is intimately connected to spiritual health, in the past year or so there have appeared books by doctors, notable among them Larry Dossey's Prayer is Good Medicine (1996), which have used scientific methods to measure and quantify the effects of Christian religious practice on health. Using a variety of polls and surveys, Koenig attempts to measure the effect that such religious practices as church attendance and spiritually based programs like Twelve Step programs have on the mental and physical health of their practitioners. In the first chapters of the book, Koenig proposes to offer an examination of the often mysterious relationship between religion and health. However, the book soon descends into a miasma of poorly applied statistics. For example, Koenig cites a number of polls whose scientific basis is lightly touched upon and which reduce the concept of religiosity to regular church attendance. Koenig's conclusions are often plagued by generalization, as when he cites on one page spiritual recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous as evidence of the benefits of religion and decries them on the next page as evidence of the simplistic character of New Age spirituality. While the book raises an important issue, it fails to do the issue justice. (Mar.)