c. 1997 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Lucia Aguglia considers herself a success story. A regular regimen of aspirin complemented by a daily reading of the Bible has somehow alleviated years of chronic lower-back pain.”Thank God for the therapy,”she said.”And thank Dr. Zucchi. I’m feeling considerably better.” Pierluigi Zucchi is the director of the Florence-based Institute for the Study and Treatment of Pain. He’s met hundreds of people like Aguglia for whom a passage of Scripture taken regularly with a dose of aspirin offers blessed relief from acute aches.”It works because it produces an ethical effect that raises the pain threshold,”Zucchi said.

In a recently published study of 120 people tormented by chronic pain, including Aguglia, Zucchi and moral theologian the Rev. Bonifacio Honings found that aspirin and prayer, when combined, reduce pain. The study was conducted for the Roman Catholic Church.

All of the patients in the 10-day study received regular doses of aspirin. Half of them also read a passage from the biblical First Letter of John. The epistle includes this advice:”In love there is no room for fear, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear implies punishment, and whoever is afraid has not come to perfection in love”(1 John 4:18).

Those who took both”therapies”reported a higher pain threshold than those who did not. This was true of believers and agnostics alike, though the benefits were greater for those who considered themselves religious.

The results are not likely to alter the church’s teaching on healing and medicine. Faith healing, after all, is nothing new. The laying on of hands and the use of oil date to ancient Jewish traditions and have been part of Christian tradition for all of its nearly 2000-year existence.

But because religion requires faith, not proof, the new study has sparked a debate about the church’s proper role in promoting the medical benefits of prayer.

In addition to challenges to the study’s methodology, scientists and health professionals say the experiment raises troubling questions about expectations among the sick, the role of doctors and the message imparted to people of differing faiths and to non-believers.

Said William Jarvis, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at Loma Linda University in California,”If you’re really imploring the almighty, you expect something pretty dramatic. We’re not talking about an ordinary piker here. What happens when there’s no response?” A Seventh-day Adventist, Jarvis added, only partly in jest,”Do we start comparing our prayers with Catholic prayers to see who’s the best? And then do we market it? That opens up the question of holy war.””No church has anything to say about medicine inasmuch as medicine has nothing to say about religion,”said Jose Manuel Bertolote, a psychiatrist and director of the Department of Mental Disease Control at the World Health Organization.”No church can determine what medicine can do.” The study comes as church officials are showing increasing frustration that their message of salvation and prayer is being drowned out by godless medical advances promising prescriptive cures.

In February, Pope John Paul II, who has referred to God as the”divine physician,”complained people are leaning too heavily on medical solutions in their quest to alleviate illness.”In a society like the present one, which is seeking to build its future on well-being and consumerism and measures everything in terms of efficiency and profit, illness and suffering, which cannot be denied, are either removed or emptied of their meaning in the illusion of their being overcome exclusively through the means offered by the progress of science and technology,”he said in a message to mark the church’s fifth annual”World Day of the Sick.” But Jarvis said the church has a case of sour grapes because it cannot offer the remedies medical technology and medication can. “Do they feel a need to validate themselves because of the advances in science?”he asked.”It’s almost like hope and the hereafter aren’t enough.” Jarvis said in his experience,”Nobody calls for priests first. They call for a physician first.” Honings said he has no problem with that, and noted the pope was merely trying to put medicine in the proper context, not debase its achievements.”In no way are we saying that prayer is a substitute for medicine,”he said of his study.”God would not say, get rid of medicine. We are only saying that prayer provokes in the human soul a power that has repercussions on the whole being. Science has to accept that people are more than a body.” Scientists and physicians have long agreed medical treatment is not the sole arbiter of a person’s health or recovery. They cite emotional, physical and social factors that can alleviate or worsen pain.

Bertolote said”faith is at the root of any changes brought about by psychotherapy. To say that prayer can alleviate pain is very much in line with that.” But he said the”efficacy of prayer has not been proven.” Perhaps not definitively, but some studies have shown a correlation between prayer and improved health, or less pain.

The most widely quoted study suggesting the benefits of prayer on illness was conducted in 1988 by cardiologist Randolph Byrd in San Francisco. He commissioned born-again Christians to pray for about half of the 393 patients in the coronary care unit at the city’s General Hospital.

Although none who were prayed for were aware of the test, they showed markedly improved health over the patients who were not prayed for.

By contrast, Zucchi’s study was less airtight because the 60 patients who were asked to pray knew the purpose of the exercise was to evaluate the therapy of prayer.

In their conclusion, the authors wrote that”daily meditative reading resulted in both raising the pain threshold and improving therapy among believers as well as agnostics.” But do they in fact know that?

Jeffrey Levin, an epidemiologist and gerontologist at Eastern Virginia Medical School who has reviewed the physical health effects of religious devotion, said that”prayer, like any other intervention, can be studied if the methodology is correct.” Studies involving prayer or drugs, he said, are more reliable when neither the patient nor the doctor knows who in the trial tests is receiving the therapy and who isn’t.

He said the Zucchi results are”not a real surprising finding”because”it doesn’t necessarily tell us prayer was meaningful at all. We know, for example, that people’s expectations can influence their recovery. If people have a positive frame of mind and positive expectations, it might also influence their reporting of symptoms.” Zucchi conceded a margin of uncertainty due to the expectations of the people who reported their results. But he said those who studied the biblical passage showed a”consistently higher pain threshold,”even after accounting for reporting errors.

Jarvis said that explanation may still fall short of proving the efficacy of prayer.”Prayer is for comfort, emotional support, compassion,”he said.”It reaches a person on an emotional level and encourages a person to do what needs to be done. As soon as you begin to put the aura of scientific effect on it, you open a Pandora’s box. Prayer shouldn’t be marketed like a drug because it will turn the church into a merchandising outfit.” MJP END HEILBRONNER