Spiritual healing

Rodney Methvin treasures his privacy, but, after being diagnosed with lymphoma in 2006, he relinquished it to become the focus of prayer groups, circles and lists as he underwent chemotherapy to treat his cancer.

"When I had the biopsy, there were 20 people from my church in the waiting room, and they knew I had cancer before I did," Methvin said. "It was a tremendous support to know I had my church family in my corner."

Although Methvin emerged from his battle cancer-free, he said it was his faith as much as the medicine that brought him to the other side.

Doctors on a local and national level have begun to recognize the role faith and spirituality can have in the healing process of their patients.

In June, the Duke University School of Medicine hosted the first meeting of The Society for Spirituality, Theology and Health.

Dr. Harold Koenig, co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke, said it's only recently that medicine and spirituality have become separate although the goals of each are the same.

"We've learned that complete health requires both the medical and spiritual, since people are both physical and spiritual/emotional beings," he said. "Today, we know that sickness of the soul affects the physical body, and sickness of the physical body affects the health of the soul. Thus, religion and medicine complement each other beautifully, and we need both for real healing."

Dr. J. Patrick Daugherty, an oncologist and partner at Northwest Alabama Cancer Center, was among the presenters at the conference, and he revealed the findings from a 12-week study of local cancer patients. Daugherty realized that those who watched videos with a spiritual component were better able to cope with their illnesses than those who watched a video without a spiritual component.

"A quarter of Americans have said they've had a spiritually transformative experience," he said. "Our study results tell us two things. One is that our patients are likely to have a spiritual or religious history, and two is that this can be a major part of treatment during a life-threatening event, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, cancer, automobile trauma or rape."

Often, however, physicians don't approach the spiritual realm with their patients - something Daugherty said represents a missed opportunity in the health-care process.

"We found that 65 percent of patients in our study said that they wanted their doctors to ask them about their spirituality, but only 15 percent do," he said.

Koenig said that's beginning to change as more than 100 of the 141 medical schools in the United States and Canada offer courses on religion, spirituality and medicine.

"Seventy percent of these courses are required," he said. "That is quite an increase from 1992, when only three medical schools has such courses."

Like Daugherty, Koenig said the resistance to approach spirituality comes primarily from physicians.

"Most physicians in practice have not been trained to address these issues, don't realize the importance of doing so and don't feel it's their responsibility to do so," he said. "They don't understand how powerful religious faith can be in helping patients cope with illness, and that ability to cope in turn affects the rate of helping and biological responses to medical and surgical interventions."

Rick Oberheide, minister at Grace Episcopal Church in Sheffield, has seen faith work in ways that were otherwise unexplainable.

"My daughter suffered from terrible headaches after having neurosurgery for a tumor," he said. "I came home one day to find her crying on the floor. When I put my hand on her head and silently prayed, the pain immediately stopped. 'My God,' I thought to myself, 'it really worked.' "

A deaf member of his congregation, likewise, went to a healing conference and came home able to hear, Oberheide said.

For skeptics, it's snake oil, the stuff of Elmer Gantry, the fictional faith healer of the black-and-white movie of the same name, or, more recently, televangelist Benny Hinn and his faith-healing ministry based in Irving, Texas.

And, to Oberheide, "whether the TV evangelists are about faith or money is beyond me. Some seem credible, while others turn my stomach. I think it's best to let God separate the wheat from the chaff on that one."

But the ultimate dilemma with faith, he said, is that it's impossible to get to its deeply rooted and personal core.

"The problem that gets in the way is that science and faith are oppositional," he said. "What blocks them is intransigence on both sides - scientific fundamentalism that precludes religion and religious fundamentalism that precludes science. There's very little middle ground where science and faith relate."

For many patients, however, a diagnosis of a terminal illness can prove a test of faith.

The Rev. Patrick Don Bosco Forsythe, the priest at Our Lady of the Shoals Catholic Church in Tuscumbia, said a health crisis can cause the patient to feel angry and turn away from God and faith.

A former anesthesiologist, Forsythe is in a unique position to see how the culture has shifted toward the more secular rather than spiritual when it comes to medicine and how to treat patients.

"We've taken God out of the healing ministry, and medical students are trained as technicians, not as humans," he said. "But we know that there's more to healing than giving pills. What a lot of people don't realize is that your soul needs care every day, just like the body."

For Methvin, losing his faith wasn't an option, nor was ignoring his soul in deference to medical treatment. Despite the nausea that came with chemotherapy, he continued to attend church as well as work five days a week.

"Barely a day would go by when I wouldn't go to the mailbox and pull out a stack of cards from people hoping I'd get better," he said. "There was no room for doubting my faith with the support of those around me."

Methvin and Daugherty will be participating in a program in October at Woodmont Baptist Church in Florence. The event is designed for people diagnosed with cancer as well as their caregivers, but Daugherty said one's denomination matters little when it comes to incorporating faith into the healing process.

"The miracle is that God chooses to work through medicine that is available at the time," he said. "But the greatest miracle is that a positive change happens in someone's life because of something like lymphoma."

Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.