Religious factors in health and medical care among older adults.

摘要

Use of the word "healing" is especially egregious. This term promises what empirical studies simply do not support, nor have ever addressed: the possibility that being more religious, or becoming religious, will somehow cause diseases to be cured. This threatens to elicit distorted expectations in patients. Moreover, it risks translating failures to achieve medical cures into a "spiritual" deficiency on the patient's part that may result in feelings of self-blame and guilt. Those positive findings that have been observed simply indicate that religious participation, on average, exhibits primary-preventive effects in well populations by an association with lower morbidity. No more, no less.