Book Reviews
 |
|
Healing Connection, The
The Story of a Physician's Search for the Link between Faith and Health
Harold G. Koenig, MD
|
The Midwest Book Review
12/1/2005
Can a person’s faith really have a positive effect on his or her mental and physical health? What does modern scientific research have to teach us about the healing power of faith? These are the questions addressed by the founder and director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health.
His research has shown that men and women who both attended religious services and prayed or studied the Bible frequently were 40 percent less likely to have diastolic hypertension. Other research has shown that people who attend church regularly live longer, an effect that is equivalent to wearing seat belts or not smoking. The last section addresses the implications of his research for ministry in the 21st century. This includes an excellent section about those times that faith does not heal, detailing negative religious coping behaviors.
Dr. Koenig is quick to emphasize that faith does not guarantee good health and a long life, but that a healthier and happier life is often a natural consequence. The author hopes that his personal story and his research will be a wake-up call to health professionals to concern themselves with the spiritual component of their patients. This should be especially good reading for health professionals with its emphasis on the often-neglected power of spiritual healing.
More Information on this book
Living Church - Milwaukee, WI
11/1/2005
Can a person’s faith really have a positive effect on his or her mental and physical health? What does modern scientific research have to teach us about the healing power of faith? These are the questions addressed by the founder and director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health.
His research has shown that men and women who both attended religious services and prayed or studied the Bible frequently were 40 percent less likely to have diastolic hypertension. Other research has shown that people who attend church regularly live longer, an effect that is equivalent to wearing seat belts or not smoking. The last section addresses the implications of his research for ministry in the 21st century. This includes an excellent section about those times that faith does not heal, detailing negative religious coping behaviors.
Dr. Koenig is quick to emphasize that faith does not guarantee good health and a long life, but that a healthier and happier life is often a natural consequence. The author hopes that his personal story and his research will be a wake-up call to health professionals to concern themselves with the spiritual component of their patients. This should be especially good reading for health professionals with its emphasis on the often-neglected power of spiritual healing.
More Information on this book
Journal of Community Nursing
6/1/2005
Anyone familiar with Koenig’s work will want to read this book revealing how Koenig’s personal trials (his turbulent youth, expulsion from medical school, former battle with mental illness, ongoing struggle with a chronic, debilitating physical disease) became the catalyst for his pioneering research that has elucidated the connection between faith and health. The book is a personal testimony of how God changed one life, an instructional book about religion and health and a challenge to develop constructive ways of implementing the Healing Connection that can be found in faith.
More Information on this book
National Medical Association
6/1/2005
"The Healing Connection: The story of a Physician’s Search for the Link between Faith and Health" by Harold G. Koenig, MD with Gregg Lewis was published in 2000 by the Templeton Foundation Press. The Templeton Foundation Press is an extension of the John Templeton Foundation. This foundation seeks to publish scholarly and trade books on a variety of subjects, including the connections between science and religion, spirituality and healing in medicine, the verification of universal spiritual laws, character development, and freedom.
Dr. Koenig is the founder and director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health. I could find no background for Gregg Lewis and I don’t know how much of this book was written by Dr. Koenig and how much was written by Gregg Lewis.
This book is divided into three parts: [1] One man’s story, [2] The research findings, and [3] The link for us.
The first part is the personal and professional life of Dr. Koenig. And what a life it is! A core feature in Dr. Koenig’s life has been progressive physical limitations due to psoriatic inflammatory arthritis necessitating now using a wheelchair to move about.
Dr. Koenig was an only child born of European-American parents who grew up on a small family farm in California. His mother and Catholicism were the central themes during his early years. He described himself as a shy and introverted youth.
Dr. Koenig was a wonderfully gifted student endowed with a vigorous work ethic. He won a full academic scholarship to Stanford University. In college, he had difficulty adjusting to a more competitive academic settling and more varied lifestyles of his classmates.
Concerned that his academic record at Stanford University was not sufficiently stellar at the end of his junior year to guarantee his admission to medical school, Dr. Koenig obtained a summer research position with a team of anthropologists working in Africa and associated with Jane Goodall. He described an approach to this summer research experience that gives meaning to the term "workaholic."
During the summer before medical school at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Koenig fell deeply in love for the first time. The breakup of this relationship proved devastating for him and stimulated him to study Eastern religious thought and practice in an effort to both better understand himself and many of life’s existential issues.
Although Dr. Koenig performed well academically during the fist year in medical school, he studied readings and practices of many contemporary psychics and hippies because of personal dissatisfactions. It is unclear how extensively he used mind-altering drugs himself. He was expelled from medical school.
Before he was re-admitted to medical school after a four-year hiatus, he worked multiple odd jobs, joined the US Army only to be discharged because of a previously injured right knee, obtained a degree in nursing, and met and married his first wife. That marriage ended in divorce—apparently because Dr. Koenig was too self-absorbed. He returned more actively to the Catholic Church and interpreted several events as providential interventions.
Sequentially, Dr. Koenig completed a residency in family practice, met his second wife while she was a second-year medical student, completed his first research project, completed a fellowship in gerontology, was experience by some of his patients as more of a minister than a physician, and completed a three-year fellowship in geriatric medicine and then a three-year residency in psychiatry at Duke University. In 1995, Kr. Koenig started the Program on Religion, Aging, and Health at Duke University. Two years later, he founded and became director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health where he remains to this day.
Part two of this book focused on Dr. Koenig’s research findings. He described himself as a medical scientist studying chronic medical illness and the effects of life stress and religious faith and practice on mental and physical health. He also reflected on his own progressively disabling arthritis and incorporated his observations about himself into his studies of others. He turned his life over to Christ and this conversion became the centerpiece of his personal and professional work.
In this second part of his book as he had done in the first part, Dr. Koenig juxtaposed his life and experiences with those of Sigmund Freud. Dr. Koenig asserted that Freud viewed religious belief as a cause of mental illness (neurosis). Dr. Koenig asserted that, based on his research and personal experiences with chronic illness, religious faith healed physical and mental illnesses. Dr. Koenig did not remind the reader that Freud himself battled for many years with cancer of the jaw.
Dr. Koenig’s study of the effects of religious faith on health had a decidedly Christian focus. In this part of his book, Dr. Koenig described in some detail his second wife feeling abandoned due to his continuing immersion in himself and his work. Apparently for most of this marriage, he and his wife received couple’s counseling.
In part three of this book, he provided a more balanced view of religion while continuing to extol the virtues of Christianity whether one does or does not recover from disease. Dr. Koenig warns the reader not to view continuing poor health as God’s punishment. However, he devoted little time and attention to the theodicy trilemma. That is, how can an [1] all powerful, [2] benevolent God allow [3] good people to suffer?
This book, while providing a wealth of information about Dr. Koenig’s view of the relationship between religious faith and health and disease, creates as many questions as it provides answers for the clinician. For example, should "Christian physicians" only use their mastery of Christianity to better understand their Christian patients or should they attempt to thrust their religious views on their patient?
Dr. Koenig does not discuss the enormous difference in the power relationship between physician and patient. In this setting, the physician is all-powerful and the patient quite helpless. The patient is in no position to engage the physician in a reflective discussion of the role of religious faith in health and disease.
The autobiographical dimensions of this book are interesting but not particularly useful for most readers of the Journal of the National Medical Association. This book has an almost exclusively Eurocentric view of the world. His personal behavior towards those he loves and those who love him does not provide readers useful examples to enrich their own personal lives.
Most troublesome for this reviewer is fully appreciating the evidence Dr. Koenig offers as "proof" for his various views about the healing properties of religion. By definition, faith is belief in the absence of proof. Dr. Koenig does not argue that he can prove there is a God. But, he does argue—and from his perspective provides compelling evidence obtained using research principles—that belonging in God is medically therapeutic and not believing in God contributes to poor health.
In summary, "The Healing Connection" is short, easy to read, and useful to clinicians sharing Dr. Koenig’s faith and approach to patient care. Principles found here are not easily exported to other faiths and other patient-care settings.
More Information on this book
Journal of the National Medical Association
6/1/2005
"The Healing Connection: The story of a Physician’s Search for the Link between Faith and Health" by Harold G. Koenig, MD with Gregg Lewis was published in 2000 by the Templeton Foundation Press. The Templeton Foundation Press is an extension of the John Templeton Foundation. This foundation seeks to publish scholarly and trade books on a variety of subjects, including the connections between science and religion, spirituality and healing in medicine, the verification of universal spiritual laws, character development, and freedom.
Dr. Koenig is the founder and director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health. I could find no background for Gregg Lewis and I don’t know how much of this book was written by Dr. Koenig and how much was written by Gregg Lewis.
This book is divided into three parts: [1] One man’s story, [2] The research findings, and [3] The link for us.
The first part is the personal and professional life of Dr. Koenig. And what a life it is! A core feature in Dr. Koenig’s life has been progressive physical limitations due to psoriatic inflammatory arthritis necessitating now using a wheelchair to move about.
Dr. Koenig was an only child born of European-American parents who grew up on a small family farm in California. His mother and Catholicism were the central themes during his early years. He described himself as a shy and introverted youth.
Dr. Koenig was a wonderfully gifted student endowed with a vigorous work ethic. He won a full academic scholarship to Stanford University. In college, he had difficulty adjusting to a more competitive academic settling and more varied lifestyles of his classmates.
Concerned that his academic record at Stanford University was not sufficiently stellar at the end of his junior year to guarantee his admission to medical school, Dr. Koenig obtained a summer research position with a team of anthropologists working in Africa and associated with Jane Goodall. He described an approach to this summer research experience that gives meaning to the term "workaholic."
.During the summer before medical school at the University of California in San Francisco, Dr. Koenig fell deeply in love for the first time. The breakup of this relationship proved devastating for him and stimulated him to study Eastern religious thought and practice in an effort to both better understand himself and many of life’s existential issues.
Although Dr. Koenig performed well academically during the fist year in medical school, he studied readings and practices of many contemporary psychics and hippies because of personal dissatisfactions. It is unclear how extensively he used mind-altering drugs himself. He was expelled from medical school.
Before he was re-admitted to medical school after a four-year hiatus, he worked multiple odd jobs, joined the US Army only to be discharged because of a previously injured right knee, obtained a degree in nursing, and met and married his first wife. That marriage ended in divorce—apparently because Dr. Koenig was too self-absorbed. He returned more actively to the Catholic Church and interpreted several events as providential interventions.
Sequentially, Dr. Koenig completed a residency in family practice, met his second wife while she was a second-year medical student, completed his first research project, completed a fellowship in gerontology, was experience by some of his patients as more of a minister than a physician, and completed a three-year fellowship in geriatric medicine and then a three-year residency in psychiatry at Duke University. In 1995, Kr. Koenig started the Program on Religion, Aging, and Health at Duke University. Two years later, he founded and became director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health where he remains to this day.
Part two of this book focused on Dr. Koenig’s research findings. He described himself as a medical scientist studying chronic medical illness and the effects of life stress and religious faith and practice on mental and physical health. He also reflected on his own progressively disabling arthritis and incorporated his observations about himself into his studies of others. He turned his life over to Christ and this conversion became the centerpiece of his personal and professional work.
In this second part of his book as he had done in the first part, Dr. Koenig juxtaposed his life and experiences with those of Sigmund Freud. Dr. Koenig asserted that Freud viewed religious belief as a cause of mental illness (neurosis). Dr. Koenig asserted that, based on his research and personal experiences with chronic illness, religious faith healed physical and mental illnesses. Dr. Koenig did not remind the reader that Freud himself battled for many years with cancer of the jaw.
Dr. Koenig’s study of the effects of religious faith on health had a decidedly Christian focus. In this part of his book, Dr. Koenig described in some detail his second wife feeling abandoned due to his continuing immersion in himself and his work. Apparently for most of this marriage, he and his wife received couple’s counseling.
In part three of this book, he provided a more balanced view of religion while continuing to extol the virtues of Christianity whether one does or does not recover from disease. Dr. Koenig warns the reader not to view continuing poor health as God’s punishment. However, he devoted little time and attention to the theodicy trilemma. That is, how can an [1] all powerful, [2] benevolent God allow [3] good people to suffer? This book, while providing a wealth of information about Dr. Koenig’s view of the relationship between religious faith and health and disease, creates as many questions as it provides answers for the clinician. For example, should "Christian physicians" only use their mastery of Christianity to better understand their Christian patients or should they attempt to thrust their religious views on their patient?
Dr. Koenig does not discuss the enormous difference in the power relationship between physician and patient. In this setting, the physician is all-powerful and the patient quite helpless. The patient is in no position to engage the physician in a reflective discussion of the role of religious faith in health and disease.
The autobiographical dimensions of this book are interesting but not particularly useful for most readers of the Journal of the National Medical Association. This book has an almost exclusively Eurocentric view of the world. His personal behavior towards those he loves and those who love him does not provide readers useful examples to enrich their own personal lives.
Most troublesome for this reviewer is fully appreciating the evidence Dr. Koenig offers as "proof" for his various views about the healing properties of religion. By definition, faith is belief in the absence of proof. Dr. Koenig does not argue that he can prove there is a God. But, he does argue—and from his perspective provides compelling evidence obtained using research principles—that belonging in God is medically therapeutic and not believing in God contributes to poor health.
In summary, "The Healing Connection" is short, easy to read, and useful to clinicians sharing Dr. Koenig’s faith and approach to patient care. Principles found here are not easily exported to other faiths and other patient-care settings.
More Information on this book
Scientific and Medical Network, The - Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
3/20/2005
Harold Koenig is best known for his pioneering research on the links between faith and health. In this autobiographical book he relates the tumultuous story of his early life and his struggles with debilitating disease that has made his daily life so arduous. The second part of the book summarises his research in spirituality and health, while the third addresses some of its implications for the future of the healthcare in the US and elsewhere. The book is written from an explicitly Christian perspective but those who share a spiritual outlook will respond to Koenig’s findings and prognoses.
More Information on this book
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation - Volume 57, Number 1
3/1/2005
Koenig is the Director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health, and Editor of Science and Theology News. He has authored dozens of books and journal articles about the relationship between faith and health. Templeton Foundation Press, the publisher of this book, promotes knowledge about invisible and intangible reality including such spiritual aspects as love, creativity, worship, and purpose.
Koenig’s interest in faith and health has been influenced by his life’s personal experiences, and his study of research outcomes. He learned that in times of physical and emotional turmoil, people turn to religion for help. Many of them find it helps lessen depression, anxiety, and physical symptoms.
Koenig is careful to point out that benefits flowing from religious belief do not prove God’s existence. Furthermore, religious faith does not guarantee good health and long life. But Koenig does conclude that both individuals and churches might consider how physical and mental wellbeing can be improved by religious faith and action.
More Information on this book
Science & Theology News
12/1/2004
Religious belief is good for your health, testifies The Healing Connection by Harold G. Koenig, founder of Duke University’s Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health and editor-in-chief of Science & Theology News. Koenig has spent much of his professional life promoting the impersonal, scientific study of the connection between religion and health. With this book, he makes the professional personal, using his own story to affirm his life’s work.
Koenig’s call to study the health benefits of spiritual practices came from two sources. The trauma of divorce from his first wife precipitated his spiritual quest, leading to the epiphany of his call to ministry as a doctor. Equally pressing was a debilitating, painful impairment - psoriatic inflammatory arthritis - that put him in a wheelchair. In an anecdote illustrating the connection between physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health, Koenig vividly tells of being helplessly stranded in a wheelchair at the airport when the person responsible for pushing him between terminals did not arrive. The drive-to-succeed Koenig, who received a full scholarship to Stanford, uses his weakness as a catalyst for growth in a concise, captivating story of triumph.
This story softly supports the theme Koenig argues in his multiple other books and professional writings: Religion and spirituality are powerful antidotes for physical and mental health problems. A practicing Christian, Koenig’s book speaks most directly to other Christians, yet his message is broad enough to engage readers from other spiritual traditions, especially those who enjoy a good autobiography.
In The Healing Connection, Koenig routinely refuses to get polemical in defense of the religion-health connection or to refute the objections of scientific materialists who deny any such connection. This book is about telling a story rather than bandying evidence about. It doesn’t address skeptics - it ignores them.
The book allows us to identify with Koenig’s vulnerability and humanity. He summarizes some of his extensive research in an enjoyable-to-read style. The book could be used as an introduction to the mind-body connection, but it is most obviously a guide for Christians to improve their health through faith when both health and faith are tried most.
More Information on this book
www.Spirit-works.net
6/1/2004
While Dr. Koenig’s book is unequivocally slanted toward Christian thought and ideology, the research stands alone undaunted. I felt the book well worth reading and look forward to sharing it with my son in medical school. The power of ‘belief’ and knowing the body’s ability to heal itself, can take us far in today’s healthcare market. I highly recommend it to you also.&mdashRev. Dr. Sandra Gaskin
More Information on this book
Christian Marketplace
5/1/2004
The John Templeton Foundation is perhaps best known for the Templeton Prize, an annual award created in 1972 by global investor Sir John Templeton to reward religious endeavor, in the same way in which the Nobel prizes reward endeavor in the disciplines of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. This prize is awarded to a living individual who has shown originality in advancing ideas and institutions that deepen the world’s understanding of God and of spiritual life and service. Valued at approximately 795,000 pounds, more than $1.4 million, it is the largest annual prize given to an individual. However, this is just one aspect of the Foundation. It also funds hundreds of research projects every year to explore areas of spiritual research and discovery.
The Templeton Foundation Press publishes a range of titles that shed light on similar aspects concerning faith and the relationships between spirituality and health, and science and religion.
One of the most popular authors published by Templeton Foundation Press is Harold G. Koenig, MD, whose books deal with practical issues of health, retirement, and spirituality in a forthright manner, outlining the alternatives and suggesting solutions for problems that other books often just ’talk over.’
Harold G. Koenig, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Centre, Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Koenig has published extensively in the fields of mental health, geriatrics, and religion. His research on religion, health, and ethical issues in medicine has been featured on over 40 US national and international TV and radio news programs, and in over 200 national and international newspapers of magazines. He is the editor of the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine and has given testimony before the US Senate concerning the benefits of religion and spirituality on health. But his many achievements have not come easily. As we shall see later, Dr. Koenig has had an extraordinary life and, as he puts it, he has ’a few years yet’ before he reaches the statutory retirement age that he helps so many prepare for.
First of Dr. Koenig’s titles to be published this year is Purpose and Power in Retirement: New Opportunities for Meaning and Significance that is available now in paperback. Age Concern recently published a report indicating that the baby boom generation numbers 17 million in the UK. Assuming a proportion will retire at 60, this generation, comprising 28% of the UK population, will begin to retire in 2006. In America the baby boom generation numbers 80 million. How can they plan for retirement? Purpose and Power in Retirement examines the situation in the US and explodes the myths about retirement and, based on a comprehensive distillation of contemporary international research, offers constructive advice for planning a fulfilling retirement that can be universally applied.
Later in the season Faith in the Future: Healthcare, Aging, and the Role of Religion will assess the developing crisis in healthcare for the growing elderly population, and suggest solutions. The book also examines the latest research on the link between spirituality and health. Religious faith and practice appear to foster better health among older people, reducing the need for repeated hospitalizations as well as the length of hospital stays. There are provocative findings on religion and longevity. Research also indicates it is possible that prayer has a significant impact on the immune function. Additionally, studies show that volunteering significantly reduces the level of toxic stress in our lives, thus offering protection from depression and perhaps even from some physical illnesses. So, for both the person needing help and the person offering help, there are significant health benefits.
Finally, in The Healing Connection: The Story of a Physician’s Search for the Link between Faith and Health, Dr. Koenig shares his own, often surprising personal story including his personal crisis that resulted in an emotional breakdown, disruptive behavior that led to his expulsion from medical school, and to battling with mental illness as a street person in San Francisco. He had no idea that he would become a medical scientist, study factors that help people cope with chronic illness and stresses associated with aging and depression, and explore the effects that religious faith and practice have on mental and physical health. He had no idea he would fight against slowly progressive and disabling arthritis that would dramatically affect his own physical challenges and cause him to face the same challenges that many of his patients encounter.
More Information on this book
|
