Having dropped most of my reading of lefty magazines on a regular basis I'd missed the first promotions of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, "Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer." I doubt I'll read it, Ehrenreich is an author I've gone decidedly lukewarm over as I've cast a more critical eye over the practical reality of her style of politics and, especially, her ideology. I await her books, now, with the same absence of anticipation I had when the aged Leon Uris or Howard Fast or Laura Z. Hobson were still publishing.
When I last noticed her then recent book about her surprise at having what might be described as spiritual experiences, my conclusion was that whatever else you could say about Ehrenreich, she knew how to promote a book.
I don't think I'd have bothered writing anything about this one except that I think it's pretty disgusting for someone who is a 17-year survivor of breast cancer to be slamming mammograms and medical treatment, I can only imagine if you took that stuff out and paraded it in front of the pseudo-skeptical, really atheist industry you'd get bloggers galore slamming them for encouraging people to die. But being one of that band, herself, dutifully slamming "mindfulness" and, apparently, other things that her fellow pro-atheists would slam as "woo" she will be given a pass. If what I read is correct, I can imagine someone like a close relative of mine was influenced by what she's saying, she'd have died when her children were babies instead of living and working with stage-four breast cancer for about the same time that Ehrenreich has survived. I think she owes it to the many who will follow her book tour but who won't read the book to correct that if it is a misimpression of what she's saying about the diagnosis and treatment, even heroic treatment, of such diseases because I don't really get anything like encouragement in the matter.
Not having read the book my conclusions are based on what she's said in interviews and what positive reviewers of her book have said about it. Being the sales-savvy Ehrenreich, there will be lots of those.
As so often Ehrenreich pushes her conclusions about the scientific literature on the basis of her long-ago activities as a biologist, something she hasn't practiced in a very long time. I question whether or not her reading of the literature isn't based on the predetermined theme of her book instead of being anything like objective. Not all researchers looking at the literature, most of the ones who publish in journals on the subject, have reached the same kinds of conclusions she has. For example from the abstract of a paper by Raphael M. Bonelli and Harold G. Koenig:
Religion/spirituality has been increasingly examined in medical research during the past two decades. Despite the increasing number of published studies, a systematic evidence-based review of the available data in the field of psychiatry has not been done during the last 20 years. The literature was searched using PubMed (1990–2010). We examined original research on religion, religiosity, spirituality, and related terms published in the top 25 % of psychiatry and neurology journals according to the ISI journals citation index 2010. Most studies focused on religion or religiosity and only 7 % involved interventions. Among the 43 publications that met these criteria, thirty-one (72.1 %) found a relationship between level of religious/spiritual involvement and less mental disorder (positive), eight (18.6 %) found mixed results (positive and negative), and two (4.7 %) reported more mental disorder (negative). All studies on dementia, suicide, and stress-related disorders found a positive association, as well as 79 and 67 % of the papers on depression and substance abuse, respectively. In contrast, findings from the few studies in schizophrenia were mixed, and in bipolar disorder, indicated no association or a negative one. There is good evidence that religious involvement is correlated with better mental health in the areas of depression, substance abuse, and suicide; some evidence in stress-related disorders and dementia; insufficient evidence in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and no data in many other mental disorders.
There are lots of studies that indicate that what the "skeptics," the front of organized atheism would slam as superstition has a decidedly positive effect on people's' mental and many, though not all aspects of physical health as opposed to the absence of it.
To make sense of the morass of data, the NIH commissioned a series of papers, published earlier this year, in which scientists attempted to definitively assess the state of the faith-and-health research. Lynda H. Powell, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, reviewed about 150 papers, throwing out dozens that had flaws--those that failed to account for age and ethnicity, for example, which usually affect religiosity. In one respect, her findings were not surprising: while faith provides comfort in times of illness, it does not significantly slow cancer growth or improve recovery from acute illness.
One nugget, however, "blew my socks off," Powell says. People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in mortality--that is, they live longer--than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle. While the data were culled mainly from Christian churchgoers, Powell says the findings should apply to any organized religion. "This is really powerful," she says.
In an effort to understand the health differences between believers and nonbelievers, scientists are beginning to parse the individual components that compose religious experience. Using brain scans, researchers have discovered that meditation can change brain activity and improve immune response; other studies have shown it can lower heart rate and blood pressure, both of which reduce the body's stress response. (Most religions incorporate meditative practices, like chanting or prayer, into their traditions.) Even intangibles, such as the impact of forgiveness, may boost health as well. In a survey of 1,500 people published earlier this year, Neal Krause, a researcher at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, found that people who forgive easily tend to enjoy greater psychological well-being and have less depression than those who hold grudges. "There's a physiology of forgiveness," says Dr. Herbert Benson, head of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, and a host of the upcoming Harvard conference. "When you do not forgive, it will chew you up."
I can't remember who it was but someone said that with the kind of studies indicating the health benefits of religion or "spirituality" if someone found a drug that did the same thing they'd get a Nobel prize and go down as one of the greatest heroes in modern history. I've been extremely critical of the attempts to study "prayer" for reasons similar to what is pointed out in that article but counting people who attend church and their health status and finding those results it doesn't seem responsible to me to quibble about the rigor of them. I certainly wouldn't discourage people from doing anything which is otherwise innocuous that possibly held those benefits.
As someone who is rapidly reaching the same age as the book touring Ehrenreich, 76, I can say that her advice to drop any attempt to extend your life might make a lot more sense for geezers than it does for young people with a life to live into a future we will not see. If there is not a stated lower age limit for what she's pushing, it is repulsively irresponsible.
I will say that I could probably find some common ground with her on the recent fad of "mindfulness" but that's more a question of marketing than a comment on its effectiveness. I think the product as sold in the past decades is mostly a distortion of Buddhist meditation technology that demeans the intent of it as well as oversells what it will produce. I used to practice a form of Buddhist meditation that has been sold, recently, not when I practiced it, under the brand name "mindfulness" though it wasn't back then. I have adapted it to have religious content, meditating on passages of Jewish-Christian Scripture instead of my transient thoughts. I respect what Buddhists have discovered about meditation but I found, after a number of years, it wasn't enough. But I doubt Barbara Ehrenreich would have anything nicer to say about what I do, if it came to her notice. I have no plans on peddling it with the same kind of hype that "mindfulness" has been in the past decade, so it's probably safe. And I'd never make claims about it on the basis of health surveys and statistical analysis, though I would on the basis of personal experience.
I caught one of her interviews, not realizing until late into it who she was or what the topic was. I didn't necessarily disagree with her thesis as revealed in the interview, that we worry too much about death and fear it too greatly. I've seen the same thing in my time in ministry: cemeteries are places separate from churches now, places no one visits unless they have to. I knew people who didn't want a funeral in their church, so they wouldn't be reminded of the death of the loved one by being there. Understandable enough, yet we used to put the loved on in the front room and sit up with them so they weren't left alone. Now we want the body whisked away ASAP, made up to "look like" they did when alive (the difference is substantial between a corpse and a sleeping body, actually), and all matter funerary kept at places as unfamiliar to us as possible.
ReplyDeleteNone of which is what Ehrenreich was on about. The more I listened, the more she sounded like a crank bitching about the kids on her lawn with their loud voices and raucous play.
And frankly, the benefits of meditation (or as Christians call it, prayer and lectio divina) are not best measured by the material measures of statistical longevity. That is, of course, the way of the world, but then, I don't love my wife and child because it means I'm likely to add a year or two to my life expectancy. In fact, it's a funny way of looking at it, when you think of it. Who stands outside their own existence so much as that?