Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: religious density, private religious behavior, distant intercessory prayer, Harold Koenig, Dale Matthews, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thanks to some studies and to accounts by physicians, patients and theologians, it has become popular to believe that prayer can heal the sick and that attending religious services regularly can extend one's life. But does the evidence for a link between religion and health hold up? Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia, probes the matter in this sometimes provocative but often prosaic book. Reports of the relationship between religion and medicine, he says, are greatly exaggerated and detrimental to both. He writes that dissatisfaction with contemporary medicine, uncritical media stories about religion and health, and advocacy groups that promote a link between religion and health have encouraged patients to seek alternative treatments that exploit that connection. Sloan examines the thousands of reports that prayer has been the key element in healing and finds many are based on anecdotes rather than systematic data collection. Even scientific studies on the healing capacities of faith and prayer do not always prove what they are purported to prove; some, for instance, touch only peripherally on the role of religion in health. For Sloan, attempts to connect religion and medicine can jeopardize patients' lives by giving false hope. Although repetitious, Sloan's book offers clear challenges to patients and medical professionals who embrace prayer as a means of healing. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

Sloan contends that the recent upsurge of allegations that prayer and religious affiliation can cure or prevent illness dishonors both religion and medicine. The claims--indeed, the majority of so-called studies most often cited--are at best of dubious validity; at worst, blatantly misleading. Despite which, of course, the reports and anecdotes persist, perpetuating misinformation that Sloan feels is dangerous because it fosters relationships between doctor and patient, and between good health and illness, that disrespect the unique qualities of science and faith. God and faith shouldn't have to endure scientific scrutiny, and to remain viable, science mustn't be compromised to prove religious points. Doctors shouldn't inquire about patients' religious beliefs, Sloan says, for then they may be tempted to abuse their authority to influence them. Sloan's argument is good as far as it goes but overlooks the need for physicians to know patients' religious beliefs to address possible faith-based impediments to such procedures as, for example, blood transfusion. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1 edition (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312348819
• ISBN-13: 978-0312348816
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #807,726 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shoddy Work Done By These "Researchers", November 11, 2006

By	The Spinozanator (Waco, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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Does the practice of religion bring health benefits to the faithful? Not likely, says Richard Sloan. He has been simmering for years about the poor research that says otherwise, prompting him to co-author a literature review for "Lancet" in 1999 and now this book. Much of the research reviewed in "Blind Faith" has been supported by advocacy foundations that think religion is good for your health and don't mind using the tools of science to prove it. Relentlessly, they misuse these tools and an uncritical media propagates their invalid conclusions.

Suppose you want to see if religion influences health. Since it's not feasible to randomly assign half your group to be religious and half irreligious, the groups are "self-selected" by church attendance surveys. Never mind that church attendance is known to be over-estimated in face-to-face interviews and that attendance doesn't necessarily measure devoutness - those details are routine hazards of epidemiological research.

In five years your data shows the mortality rate to be higher for non-church-goers. Should that be proof of a health benefit or is it more likely that people too sick to attend are also the ones more likely to die. What about the influence religion might have on smoking, drinking, drug usage, and a hazardous life-style? Is resultant better health the direct effect of religion or is a byproduct of a healthier lifestyle - called a "confounder"? Observational studies of this type are all that's available in much of epidemiology. Confounding is a serious problem, subject to biased interpretation. A randomized, double-blind experiment is much preferred.

Ideally, all studies would be randomized and double-blinded - you take a group of people, randomly divide them into 2 groups, apply the variable to one group and a give placebo to the other, without the researchers or either test group knowing which group is which. Then you compile and evaluate the results. Standard methods are used to minimize bias and statistics are applied to see if the differences are significant.

Many randomized and double-blinded studies intend to show that intercessory prayer (IP) improves surgical outcome. Most of them have significant methodological flaws, commonly misusing the data. The researchers are looking to prove their stated hypothesis, but dozens of outcome variables may be incidentally measured. If you measure enough variables, some will achieve significance. These should be identified and researched with another study. Instead, a biased researcher might say, "Eureka! The prayers were answered." This is called the "sharpshooter's fallacy" - drawing the bull's eye on the barn after the arrows have reached their mark.

The following things good researchers take great care not to do:
1. Use anecdotes
2. Ignore confounding factors
3. Confuse correlation with causation - Factors associated with health outcomes may be markers but not causally related
4. Scientific conclusions cannot be based on the sharpshooter's fallacy

The authors writing articles about the religion/health issues are guilty of all these things and more. As a result, their articles are almost always published in the same group of sub-par journals, released as abstracts, or leaked to the press without peer review. They are then restated inaccurately in religious periodicals until they reach the myth stage.

The best part of this book is Part Two: Reading the Evidence. It is a well-done expose of religion-inspired efforts to skew data. The rest of the book (rightfully) takes to task those Doctors who want to evangelize while they practice medicine, but I don't see this as the burning issue Sloan does. Throughout the book, he questions the validity of doing these studies at all - because it trivializes religion. Religion shouldn't get this free pass and I eagerly welcome the few well done studies - the poor ones are not going to disappear. There is much to be said for relentless application of the scientific method - no other method has ever worked so well in uncovering the truth. If certain myths fall by the wayside, so be it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Religion & Medicine, January 22, 2007

By	Marilyn Clark "Freethinker" (Washington State) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Fast read, non-technical. Good overview on how to evaluate the quality of studies, medical journal reviews, and the process of scientific experimentation. The third section of the book seemed to bog down and become more "opinion-based" rather than fact- or statistically-based.

16 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars Till the Last Two Chapters, December 5, 2006

By	A Discerning Reader (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) - See all my reviews

Will attending church or reading the Bible help you live longer? Help you have less complications after surgery? Help your blood pressure go down? Columbia professor Richard P. Sloan introduces us to the major players in this new area of Christian evangelism. The studies purporting to show any health benefits from going to church or "being religious" are all so flawed as to render them useless. Using his epidemiological knowledge, Sloan carefully shows the reader how one should analyze claims from the media and claims in journals that purport to show a connection between religious behavior and improved health. In an organized, straightforward approach, Sloan one by one rips these shoddy studies and their charlatan authors to shreds. It's just beautiful, and Sloan should be applauded for using common sense, caution, and science to analyze this growing movement. He's right--trying to bring religion into medicine is a very bad idea with all sorts of negative consequences for patients, physicians, and the general public.

Somehow, after a beautiful twelve chapters, something goes horribly wrong. Professor Sloan bumps his head, is pressured to soft pedal to sell more books, or something--but the rational, sensible flavor of the book just goes out the window. He has just taken us on a very pleasant journey using a clear head, reason, and science to find the truth of this important matter. But now, we must throw all those tools away because we're going to talk about religion.

We must keep religion away from medicine, we read on p. 241, because we might "dumb down religion by eliminating what is distinctive about different religious traditions." Tradition is right--that's all there is to any religion; and therefore, there is nothing really distinctive at all to lose. Better still, "...religion and science are independent approaches to knowledge, and neither can be reduced to the other" (p. 253). What? We can't or shouldn't use science to see if the Earth is the center of the universe? We can't use science to see if the world was destroyed by a universal flood six thousand years ago? You bet we can, and we should.

As if he hasn't already hasn't weakened his argument enough, Sloan tells us that "religious truths are considered to be enduring and not subject to change. Scientific truths, on the other hand, are completely dependent on evidence, and as new evidence merges, scientific truths change accordingly" (p. 254). This is pretty misleading. Religion is a set of stories invented to explain thunder and lightning (when we didn't yet know how they come about), a set of stories to quell our fear of dying. That's it; and implying that religion is the one constant in life while science is always changing its mind is incredible. Scientific truth is real and lasting; it is like a building that keeps getting taller--very, very infrequently do we ever adjust anything in the lower levels of the building.

On p. 260, we are told that if we use religious practice as another recommendation to improve health, "a great deal will have been lost" and we will "strip [religion] of its transcendence". The only thing (of value) that will be lost is religion's pretense to reality. Losing some Bronze-age myths is certainly nothing to bemoan. "[It is a] fact that religion and science represent different approaches to knowledge, wisdom, and truth, each with its own operating principles. This does not make one superior to the other" (p. 264). Stephen J. Gould's overlapping magisteria again. The reader should remember that religion has usually been an obstacle to truth--real, palpable truth--like evolution, cosmology, geology, archaeology, and anthropology. Religion is not an even remotely valid approach to obtaining knowledge or wisdom of any kind, as history has shown since the Enlightenment.

On a different tack, Professor Sloan tells physicians that if a patient tries to bring religion into a medical encounter, they should refer patients to specialists (clergy of some kind). This seems to insult specialists like oncologists, radiologists, or gynecologists by lumping them in the same boat with more "specialists" like palm readers, crystal gazers, and tea-leaf readers. Being well versed in debunked and mythological creeds won't help anyone, sick or not. In summary, the last two chapters of this book are so incongruous with the rest of the book that I can only hope Sloan was forced to include them. This is a great work, but skip the last two chapters!