Is God good for your health?

Prayer is one of the oldest ways of attempting to heal the sick, but does it work? The answer, according to the preliminary results of remarkable study just released in the States, is that indeed it does. A researcher at California Pacific Medical Centre in San Francisco arranged for 10 Aids patients to be prayed for daily by professional healers for 10 weeks while a comparable group received no prayers. The patients were randomly selected and none was told to which group they had been assigned.

"The results were amazing," says one of the healers, Eetla Soracco. "In the control group, there were six deaths during the period and none among the ones we were praying for. Our group had an increased T-cell count, their weight went up and they had far fewer problems such as night sweats." Soracco, who comes from Estonia and now lives in Santa Fe, had never met the patients for whom she was praying. Picturing each one in her mind, she spent at least an hour every day "looking at" their diseased organs, which appeared "murky", and going in there "like a white shower" to "wash it all out".

Ten years ago, such a study would have been a professional suicide note for the author Dr Elizabeth Targ, who is the clinical director of the psycho-social oncology research unit at the medical centre, and most researchers would still, for very good reasons, refuse to take it seriously. Yet there has been a run of convincing research recently suggesting that God is good for your health. More than 200 studies show that people with religious faith tend to live longer, healthier and happier lives. They use less alcohol, suffer less anxiety and depression, have lower blood pressure and a greater sense of well-being and self-esteem. So it is not entirely unreasonable to suppose that prayer may have something to do with it.

In fact, research on these lines has a venerable pedigree. The first experimental attempt to test the effectiveness of prayer was by the scientist Sir Francis Galton in 1872. He reasoned that if prayer did work, then the Royal Family (the most prayed for) and clergymen (the most diligent prayers) should benefit the most. He compared their life expectancy with other social groups but found that while the clergy came second to the gentry, the Royal Family trailed behind lawyers, doctors, the aristocracy and officers in the Royal Navy.

Of course, the difficulty with subjecting prayers to scientific scrutiny is that we have no idea about how they might work. Our materialist model of the world doesn't allow the thoughts of someone in Santa Fe to influence the organs of someone in San Francisco. Not that Soracco has a problem with this.

"In quantum physics," she says "if you make a change to one electron, separated by a great distance from another that it was connected with, the second one will immediately change in the same way. There are energy forms we don't understand yet. Prayer is a way of tapping into a cosmic energy; through your focus and intention, you can direct it."

The trouble is that without knowing the laws governing this "energy", it is hard to test it using scientific methods. For instance, even if you have two groups - one being prayed for and the other not - how do you know that someone else isn't praying for the unprayed-for lot? How do you know they aren't praying for themselves? Are some people's prayers more effective?

So subjecting the effects of prayer to scientific scrutiny is unlikely to attract much serious interest. Yet scientists are becoming convinced that religious faith can have a beneficial effect on the believer's own health and well-being. One study, published a few months ago in Israel, for example, explored the fact that the mortality in secular kibbutzim between 1970 and 1985 was nearly twice that in 11 matched religious ones. While not everything in the religious ones was rosy - young women were more dissatisfied in both types - the authors conclude that "Jewish religious observances may enhance the formation of certain protective personality characteristics".

Another 1995 study at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Centre in Massachusetts found that one of the strongest predictors of survival after open heart surgery is the degree to which patients say they draw strength and comfort from religion. Those who did not had more than three times the death rate of those who did.

Secular scientists routinely try to explain this beneficial effect by suggesting that religious belief encourages a healthy lifestyle - less smoking and drinking, more social activities based on church, less upheaval from divorce, and so on. But even when studies take account of these variables, there still seems to be some special spiritual factor at work. Strongly religious smokers, for instance, are one seventh as likely to have abnormal blood pressure as non-religious ones.

In this country, the gulf between religious faith and scientific medicine is not quite so wide as in the States. A number of GPs' practices now include a faith healer and, according to Dr Andrew Ferguson of the Christian Medical Fellowship, around 10 per cent of GPs are estimated to be committed Christians and regularly pray for their patients.

Dr Ferguson certainly did when he was a GP. "I tried to say a prayer for each one," he says. "About 10,000 a year." However, he refused to be drawn on whether his patients had a better survival rate than those of his more secular partners in the practice.

So if a belief in God offers special protection, where does that leave agnostics and atheists? Salvation for the unbelievers - estimated at 65 per cent of the population - comes in the form of a new book, Timeless Healing, from the stress and relaxation guru Dr Herbert Benson, who suggests that the beneficial effects of religious ritual may be connected with processes we are actually quite familiar with.

Doctors are now fairly certain that being regularly stressed and tense makes many illnesses, from colds to heart attacks, more likely. Everybody knows, even if they don't do it, that the way to deal with stress is to learn to relax. Dr Benson, a former cardiologist, has been teaching relaxation techniques for years at his Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. "The two things you need to trigger the relaxation response are repetition and a stilling of the mind," he says. "Exercise is a good way of relaxing - you repeat certain movements and you quieten that voice in your head so you are just concentrating on your body." Another way of inducing the relaxation response is with prayer.

"Call it what you will - prayer, meditation - whatever way people use to contact their god in any culture, the method they use is always relaxing," he points out. Prayer, he believes, operates along the same biochemical pathways as the relaxation response by lowering the levels of adrenaline and other "stress hormones" which affect heart rate and blood pressure. But he doesn't stop there. Another well-known mechanism involved is the placebo response - the tendency for people to get better because they expect to. Benson suggests that if people can get better because they believe in the doctor, there is no reason why belief in a god should not be equally effective. "I think humans are hard-wired to believe in a god,'' he says. "Like language, religion is found in every culture. I think it is an essential opiate to the knowledge that we will all die."

So for those of us for whom a cosmic mover and shaker is not appealing, we can still tap into the benefits of prayer by triggering the relaxation response and believing in our doctors. Whether praying for others is equally effective remains to be seen.

'Timeless Healing' by Herbert Benson with Marg Stark, (Simon & Schuster, pounds 9.99).