Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
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Chapter 9 /Prayer and CVD 139<br />
Many measurement tools exist to gauge a person’s religiousness and<br />
spirituality. The Duke University Religion Index (DUREL) specifically<br />
addresses the dimensions of religion associated with health outcome,<br />
including organizational religiousness, nonorganizational religiousness,<br />
and intrinsic religiousness (5). Spirituality scales include the Index of<br />
Spiritual Orientation, INSPIRIT (Index of Core Spiritual Experiences),<br />
and the FACIT Spiritual Well-Being Scale. Numerous other scales exist<br />
and are discussed in depth in Koenig’s book (5).<br />
Prayer, particularly “healing prayer,” can also be characterized in<br />
many ways or practiced in a range of prayer “models,” from prayer that<br />
petitions for a specific response to prayer seeking the achievement of<br />
harmony with higher purposes, which may surpass human understanding.<br />
In the patient’s world, self-prayer and the prayers of loved ones may<br />
be ascendant as a component of spiritual consciousness. In clinical trials,<br />
specific petitionary or “intercessory prayer” is the most researched prayer<br />
model to date, presumably because it lends itself to the conceptual paradigms<br />
of “therapy.” Intercessory prayer has been defined as prayer calling<br />
“for aid to others” (6). “Distant healing,” referring to intercessory<br />
prayer “strategies that purport to heal through some exchange or channeling<br />
of supraphysical energy” (7) independent of proximity to the<br />
patient, is a model of prayer with a structure that supports the conduct of<br />
double-blind clinical trial designs. Many other descriptors, such as the<br />
language of prayer, and the content of prayer, the number of individuals<br />
or congregations praying, the timing and duration of prayer, and the<br />
intensity, passion, faith, and concentration of the intercessors, all constitute<br />
what can currently only be considered a range of qualitative descriptors<br />
of prayer methods and models.<br />
Prayer has the potential to exert effects on not only the intended<br />
recipient of the prayer but also the individual performing it, as well as<br />
possibly other unknown recipients. Patients and their families often pray<br />
for healing and recovery, for physicians and other care providers to<br />
perform their procedures successfully and without complications, for<br />
God or another Divine Being to “watch over” the patient during the<br />
illness, and with many other intentions and goals. In the absence of<br />
mechanistic insight or knowledge, it must be recognized that all of these<br />
qualitative descriptors incorporate an enormous influence of intuitive<br />
metaphor, with almost no definitive scientific evidence to support any<br />
prayer model in particular.<br />
Independent of the mechanism or mechanisms, ample evidence exists<br />
that emotional and spiritual states affect health outcomes. Studies have<br />
been conducted on the association between religion and depression,<br />
anxiety, hypertension, and cancer, as well as heart disease. Although not