2009-06-28
2009-06-22
2009-06-07
The Biology of Belief
By JEFFREY KLUGER
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain's spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you're dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.
Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")
It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."
That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind. "The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we're going to be enmeshed in both for a long time."
It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators — those with 15 years of practice or more — appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further."
No matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.
Faith and health overlap in other ways too. Take fasting. One of the staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. There are secular water fasts, tea fasts and grapefruit fasts, to say nothing of the lemon, maple-syrup and cayenne-pepper fast. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims observe Ramadan; Catholics have Lent; Hindus give up food on 18 major holidays. Done right, these fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria. This, in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, it's being achieved. Maybe it is, but there's also chemical legerdemain at work. (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting America.)
The brain is a very energy-intensive organ, one that requires a lot of calories to keep running. When food intake is cut, the liver steps into the breach, producing glucose and sending it throughout the body — always making sure the brain gets a particularly generous helping. The liver's reserve lasts only about 24 hours, after which, cells begin breaking down the body's fats and proteins — essentially living off the land. As this happens, the composition of the blood — including hormones, neurotransmitters and metabolic by-products — changes. Throw this much loopy chemistry at a sensitive machine like the brain and it's likely to go on the blink. "There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting," says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Children's Hospital in Boston. "The brain is in a different state even during a short-term fast." Biologically, that's not good, but the light-headed sense of peace, albeit brief, that comes with it reinforces the fast and rewards you for engaging in it all the same. (See pictures of the end of Ramadan.)
How Powerful Is Prayer?
For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation — part of whose mission is to search for overlaps of religion and science — but others have come from more dispassionate investigators.
As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy. An oft discussed 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn't. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a "fool's errand" — and for the most basic methodological reason. "It's impossible to know how much prayer is received," he says, "and since you don't know that, you can't determine dose."
Such exactitude does not dissuade believers — not surprising, given the centrality of prayer to faith. But there is one thing on which both camps agree: when you're setting up your study, it matters a great deal whether subjects know they're being prayed for. Give them even a hint as to whether they're in the prayer group or a control group and the famed placebo effect can blow your data to bits.
First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. "The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways," says Newberg. There's no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm — and probably helps — to know that people are praying for you.
See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.
See pictures of a drive-in church.
Faith and Longevity
If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God and the teachings of religion — which touch devout people at a far more profound level than mere pharmacology — ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week. People who fall somewhere between no churchgoing and weekly churchgoing also fall somewhere between in terms of mortality.
A similar analysis by Daniel Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life. To be sure, he also found that exercise accounts for three to five extra years and statin therapy for 2.5 to 3.5. Still, joining a flock and living longer do appear to be linked. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")
Investigators haven't teased out all the variables at work in this phenomenon, but Hummer, for one, says some of the factors are no surprise: "People embedded in religious communities are more likely to rely on one another for friendship, support, rides to doctor's appointments."
But even hard scientists concede that those things aren't the whole story and that there's a constellation of other variables that are far harder to measure. "Religious belief is not just a mind question but involves the commitment of one's body as well," says Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The sensory organs, tastes, smells, sounds, music, the architecture of religious buildings [are involved]." Just as the very act of coming into a hospital exposes a patient to sights and smells that are thought to prime the brain and body for healing, so may the act of walking into a house of worship.
Neal Krause, a sociologist and public-health expert at the University of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1,500 people that he has been conducting since 1997. He has focused particularly on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it — a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what's going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And in another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who don't. "That's one of the purported reasons for religion," Krause says. "The sign on the door says, 'Come in here and you'll find meaning.'"
African-American churches have been especially good at maximizing the connection between faith and health. Earlier in American history, churches were the only institutions American blacks had the freedom to establish and run themselves, and they thus became deeply embedded in the culture. "The black church is a different institution than the synagogue or mosque or even the white church," says Ken Resnicow, a professor of health and behavior education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "It is the center of spiritual, community and political life." (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)
Given the generally higher incidence of obesity, hypertension and other lifestyle ills among African Americans, the church is in a powerful position to do a lot of good. In the 1990s, Marci Campbell, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, helped launch a four-year trial called North Carolina Black Churches United for Better Health. The project signed up 50 churches with a goal of helping the 2,500 parishioners eat better, exercise more and generally improve their fitness. The measures taken included having pastors preach health in their sermons and getting churches to serve healthier foods at community events.
The program was so successful that it has been renamed the Body and Soul project and rolled out nationally — complete with literature, DVDs and cookbooks — in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. To skeptics who conclude that the churches have played a secondary role in the success of the programs — as a mere venue for secular health counseling — Campbell points out that in her studies, the most effective pitches came not from the nutritionists but from the pulpit. "The body is a temple, and the connection was made between the physical body and religious and spiritual well-being," she says.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Joining Hands
Many scientists and theologians who study these matters advocate a system in which both pastoral and medical care are offered as parts of a whole. If a woman given a diagnosis of breast cancer is already offered the services of an oncologist, a psychologist and a reconstructive surgeon, why shouldn't her doctor discuss her religious needs with her and include a pastor in the mix if that would help?
While churches are growing increasingly willing to accept the assistance of health-care experts, doctors and hospitals have been slower to seek out the help of spiritual counselors. The fear has long been that patients aren't interested in asking such spiritually intimate questions of their doctors, and the doctors, for their part, would be uncomfortable answering them. But this turns out not to be true. When psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State University conducted a survey of oncologists, she found that a large proportion of them did feel it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren't equipped to address the questions themselves. They didn't do so simply because they didn't know how to raise the topic and feared that their patients would take offense, in any event. When patients were asked, they insisted that they'd welcome such a conversation but that their doctors had never initiated one. What both groups needed was someone to break the ice. (See pictures of Billy Graham, America's Pastor.)
Kristeller, who had participated in earlier work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, recalled a short — five- to seven-minute — conversation that the leader of a study had devised to help doctors address the problem. The recommended dialogue conformed to what's known as patient-centered care — a clinical way of saying doctors should ask questions then clam up and listen to the answers. In the case of smoking, they were advised merely to make their concern known to patients, then ask them if they'd ever tried to quit before. Depending on how that first question was received, they could ask when those earlier attempts had been made, whether the patients would be interested in trying again and, most important, if it was all right to follow up on the conversation in the future. "The more patient-centered the conversations were, the more impact they had," Kristeller says.
The success of that approach led her to develop a similar guide for doctors who want to discuss religious questions with cancer patients. The approach has not yet been tested in any large-scale studies, but in the smaller surveys Kristeller has conducted, it has been a roaring success: up to 90% of the patients whose doctors approached them in this way were not offended by the overture, and 75% said it was very helpful. Within as little as three weeks, the people in that group reported reduced feelings of depression, an improved quality of life and a greater sense that their doctors cared about them.
Even doctors who aren't familiar with Kristeller's script are finding it easier to combine spiritual care and medical care. HealthCare Chaplaincy is an organization of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Zen Buddhist board-certified chaplains affiliated with more than a dozen hospitals and clinics in the New York City area. The group routinely provides pastoral care to patients as part of the total package of treatment. The chaplains, like doctors, have a caseload of patients they visit on their rounds, taking what amounts to a spiritual history and either offering counseling on their own or referring patients to others. The Rev. Walter Smith, president and CEO of the chaplaincy and an end-of-life specialist, sees what his group offers as a health-care product — one that is not limited to believers.
What patients need, he says, is a "person who can make a competent assessment and engage a patient's spiritual person in the service of health. When people say, 'I'm not sure you can help because I'm not very religious,' the chaplains say, 'That's not a problem. Can I sit down and engage you in conversation?'"
Patients who say yes often find themselves exploring what they consider secular questions that touch on such primal matters of life and death, they might as well be spiritual ones. The chaplains can also refer patients to other care providers, such as social workers, psychologists and guided-imagery specialists. The point of all this isn't so much what the modality is; it's that the patient has a chance to find one that works. "People say you tell the truth to your doctor, your priest and your funeral director," says Smith, "because these people matter at the end." It's that truth — or at least a path to it — that chaplains seek to provide.
Smith's group is slowly going national, and even the most literal-minded scientists welcome the development. Says Sloan, the author of Blind Faith: "I think that a chaplain's job is to explore the patient's values and help the patient come to some decision. I think that's absolutely right."
Sloan's view is catching on. Few people think of religion as an alternative to medicine. The frontline tools of an emergency room will always be splints and sutures, not prayers — and well-applied medicine along with smart prevention will always be the best ways to stay well. Still, if the U.S.'s expanding health-care emergency has taught us anything, it's that we can't afford to be choosy about where we look for answers. Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms. It's the result, not the source, that counts the most.
With reporting by Alice Park and Bryan Walsh / New York
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879016,00.html
The Biology of Belief
By JEFFREY KLUGER
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain's spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you're dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.
Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")
It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."
That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind. "The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we're going to be enmeshed in both for a long time."
It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators — those with 15 years of practice or more — appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further."
No matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.
Faith and health overlap in other ways too. Take fasting. One of the staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. There are secular water fasts, tea fasts and grapefruit fasts, to say nothing of the lemon, maple-syrup and cayenne-pepper fast. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims observe Ramadan; Catholics have Lent; Hindus give up food on 18 major holidays. Done right, these fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria. This, in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, it's being achieved. Maybe it is, but there's also chemical legerdemain at work. (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting America.)
The brain is a very energy-intensive organ, one that requires a lot of calories to keep running. When food intake is cut, the liver steps into the breach, producing glucose and sending it throughout the body — always making sure the brain gets a particularly generous helping. The liver's reserve lasts only about 24 hours, after which, cells begin breaking down the body's fats and proteins — essentially living off the land. As this happens, the composition of the blood — including hormones, neurotransmitters and metabolic by-products — changes. Throw this much loopy chemistry at a sensitive machine like the brain and it's likely to go on the blink. "There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting," says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Children's Hospital in Boston. "The brain is in a different state even during a short-term fast." Biologically, that's not good, but the light-headed sense of peace, albeit brief, that comes with it reinforces the fast and rewards you for engaging in it all the same. (See pictures of the end of Ramadan.)
How Powerful Is Prayer?
For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation — part of whose mission is to search for overlaps of religion and science — but others have come from more dispassionate investigators.
As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy. An oft discussed 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn't. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a "fool's errand" — and for the most basic methodological reason. "It's impossible to know how much prayer is received," he says, "and since you don't know that, you can't determine dose."
Such exactitude does not dissuade believers — not surprising, given the centrality of prayer to faith. But there is one thing on which both camps agree: when you're setting up your study, it matters a great deal whether subjects know they're being prayed for. Give them even a hint as to whether they're in the prayer group or a control group and the famed placebo effect can blow your data to bits.
First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. "The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways," says Newberg. There's no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm — and probably helps — to know that people are praying for you.
See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.
See pictures of a drive-in church.
Faith and Longevity
If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God and the teachings of religion — which touch devout people at a far more profound level than mere pharmacology — ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week. People who fall somewhere between no churchgoing and weekly churchgoing also fall somewhere between in terms of mortality.
A similar analysis by Daniel Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life. To be sure, he also found that exercise accounts for three to five extra years and statin therapy for 2.5 to 3.5. Still, joining a flock and living longer do appear to be linked. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")
Investigators haven't teased out all the variables at work in this phenomenon, but Hummer, for one, says some of the factors are no surprise: "People embedded in religious communities are more likely to rely on one another for friendship, support, rides to doctor's appointments."
But even hard scientists concede that those things aren't the whole story and that there's a constellation of other variables that are far harder to measure. "Religious belief is not just a mind question but involves the commitment of one's body as well," says Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The sensory organs, tastes, smells, sounds, music, the architecture of religious buildings [are involved]." Just as the very act of coming into a hospital exposes a patient to sights and smells that are thought to prime the brain and body for healing, so may the act of walking into a house of worship.
Neal Krause, a sociologist and public-health expert at the University of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1,500 people that he has been conducting since 1997. He has focused particularly on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it — a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what's going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And in another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who don't. "That's one of the purported reasons for religion," Krause says. "The sign on the door says, 'Come in here and you'll find meaning.'"
African-American churches have been especially good at maximizing the connection between faith and health. Earlier in American history, churches were the only institutions American blacks had the freedom to establish and run themselves, and they thus became deeply embedded in the culture. "The black church is a different institution than the synagogue or mosque or even the white church," says Ken Resnicow, a professor of health and behavior education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "It is the center of spiritual, community and political life." (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)
Given the generally higher incidence of obesity, hypertension and other lifestyle ills among African Americans, the church is in a powerful position to do a lot of good. In the 1990s, Marci Campbell, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, helped launch a four-year trial called North Carolina Black Churches United for Better Health. The project signed up 50 churches with a goal of helping the 2,500 parishioners eat better, exercise more and generally improve their fitness. The measures taken included having pastors preach health in their sermons and getting churches to serve healthier foods at community events.
The program was so successful that it has been renamed the Body and Soul project and rolled out nationally — complete with literature, DVDs and cookbooks — in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. To skeptics who conclude that the churches have played a secondary role in the success of the programs — as a mere venue for secular health counseling — Campbell points out that in her studies, the most effective pitches came not from the nutritionists but from the pulpit. "The body is a temple, and the connection was made between the physical body and religious and spiritual well-being," she says.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Joining Hands
Many scientists and theologians who study these matters advocate a system in which both pastoral and medical care are offered as parts of a whole. If a woman given a diagnosis of breast cancer is already offered the services of an oncologist, a psychologist and a reconstructive surgeon, why shouldn't her doctor discuss her religious needs with her and include a pastor in the mix if that would help?
While churches are growing increasingly willing to accept the assistance of health-care experts, doctors and hospitals have been slower to seek out the help of spiritual counselors. The fear has long been that patients aren't interested in asking such spiritually intimate questions of their doctors, and the doctors, for their part, would be uncomfortable answering them. But this turns out not to be true. When psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State University conducted a survey of oncologists, she found that a large proportion of them did feel it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren't equipped to address the questions themselves. They didn't do so simply because they didn't know how to raise the topic and feared that their patients would take offense, in any event. When patients were asked, they insisted that they'd welcome such a conversation but that their doctors had never initiated one. What both groups needed was someone to break the ice. (See pictures of Billy Graham, America's Pastor.)
Kristeller, who had participated in earlier work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, recalled a short — five- to seven-minute — conversation that the leader of a study had devised to help doctors address the problem. The recommended dialogue conformed to what's known as patient-centered care — a clinical way of saying doctors should ask questions then clam up and listen to the answers. In the case of smoking, they were advised merely to make their concern known to patients, then ask them if they'd ever tried to quit before. Depending on how that first question was received, they could ask when those earlier attempts had been made, whether the patients would be interested in trying again and, most important, if it was all right to follow up on the conversation in the future. "The more patient-centered the conversations were, the more impact they had," Kristeller says.
The success of that approach led her to develop a similar guide for doctors who want to discuss religious questions with cancer patients. The approach has not yet been tested in any large-scale studies, but in the smaller surveys Kristeller has conducted, it has been a roaring success: up to 90% of the patients whose doctors approached them in this way were not offended by the overture, and 75% said it was very helpful. Within as little as three weeks, the people in that group reported reduced feelings of depression, an improved quality of life and a greater sense that their doctors cared about them.
Even doctors who aren't familiar with Kristeller's script are finding it easier to combine spiritual care and medical care. HealthCare Chaplaincy is an organization of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Zen Buddhist board-certified chaplains affiliated with more than a dozen hospitals and clinics in the New York City area. The group routinely provides pastoral care to patients as part of the total package of treatment. The chaplains, like doctors, have a caseload of patients they visit on their rounds, taking what amounts to a spiritual history and either offering counseling on their own or referring patients to others. The Rev. Walter Smith, president and CEO of the chaplaincy and an end-of-life specialist, sees what his group offers as a health-care product — one that is not limited to believers.
What patients need, he says, is a "person who can make a competent assessment and engage a patient's spiritual person in the service of health. When people say, 'I'm not sure you can help because I'm not very religious,' the chaplains say, 'That's not a problem. Can I sit down and engage you in conversation?'"
Patients who say yes often find themselves exploring what they consider secular questions that touch on such primal matters of life and death, they might as well be spiritual ones. The chaplains can also refer patients to other care providers, such as social workers, psychologists and guided-imagery specialists. The point of all this isn't so much what the modality is; it's that the patient has a chance to find one that works. "People say you tell the truth to your doctor, your priest and your funeral director," says Smith, "because these people matter at the end." It's that truth — or at least a path to it — that chaplains seek to provide.
Smith's group is slowly going national, and even the most literal-minded scientists welcome the development. Says Sloan, the author of Blind Faith: "I think that a chaplain's job is to explore the patient's values and help the patient come to some decision. I think that's absolutely right."
Sloan's view is catching on. Few people think of religion as an alternative to medicine. The frontline tools of an emergency room will always be splints and sutures, not prayers — and well-applied medicine along with smart prevention will always be the best ways to stay well. Still, if the U.S.'s expanding health-care emergency has taught us anything, it's that we can't afford to be choosy about where we look for answers. Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms. It's the result, not the source, that counts the most.
With reporting by Alice Park and Bryan Walsh / New York
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879016,00.html
The Biology of Belief
By JEFFREY KLUGER
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain's spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you're dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.
Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")
It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."
That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind. "The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we're going to be enmeshed in both for a long time."
It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.
When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators — those with 15 years of practice or more — appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further."
No matter what explains the shape of the brain, it can pay dividends. Better-functioning frontal lobes help boost memory. In one study, Newberg scanned the brains of people who complained of poor recall before they underwent meditation training, then scanned them again after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.
Faith and health overlap in other ways too. Take fasting. One of the staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. There are secular water fasts, tea fasts and grapefruit fasts, to say nothing of the lemon, maple-syrup and cayenne-pepper fast. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims observe Ramadan; Catholics have Lent; Hindus give up food on 18 major holidays. Done right, these fasts may lead to a state of clarity and even euphoria. This, in turn, can give practitioners the blissful sense that whether the goal of the food restriction is health or spiritual insight, it's being achieved. Maybe it is, but there's also chemical legerdemain at work. (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting America.)
The brain is a very energy-intensive organ, one that requires a lot of calories to keep running. When food intake is cut, the liver steps into the breach, producing glucose and sending it throughout the body — always making sure the brain gets a particularly generous helping. The liver's reserve lasts only about 24 hours, after which, cells begin breaking down the body's fats and proteins — essentially living off the land. As this happens, the composition of the blood — including hormones, neurotransmitters and metabolic by-products — changes. Throw this much loopy chemistry at a sensitive machine like the brain and it's likely to go on the blink. "There are very real changes that occur in the body very rapidly that might explain the clarity during fasting," says Dr. Catherine Gordon, an endocrinologist at Children's Hospital in Boston. "The brain is in a different state even during a short-term fast." Biologically, that's not good, but the light-headed sense of peace, albeit brief, that comes with it reinforces the fast and rewards you for engaging in it all the same. (See pictures of the end of Ramadan.)
How Powerful Is Prayer?
For most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation — part of whose mission is to search for overlaps of religion and science — but others have come from more dispassionate investigators.
As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy. An oft discussed 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn't. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a "fool's errand" — and for the most basic methodological reason. "It's impossible to know how much prayer is received," he says, "and since you don't know that, you can't determine dose."
Such exactitude does not dissuade believers — not surprising, given the centrality of prayer to faith. But there is one thing on which both camps agree: when you're setting up your study, it matters a great deal whether subjects know they're being prayed for. Give them even a hint as to whether they're in the prayer group or a control group and the famed placebo effect can blow your data to bits.
First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again when his doctor administered sterile water but said it was a more powerful version of the medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ultimately declared the drug ineffective, and the patient died. All that may be necessary for the placebo effect to kick in is for one part of the brain to take in data from the world and hand that information off to another part that controls a particular bodily function. "The brain appears to be able to target the placebo effect in a variety of ways," says Newberg. There's no science proving that the intercessions of others will make you well. But it surely does no harm — and probably helps — to know that people are praying for you.
See pictures of spiritual healing around the world.
See pictures of a drive-in church.
Faith and Longevity
If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God and the teachings of religion — which touch devout people at a far more profound level than mere pharmacology — ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. Social demographer Robert Hummer of the University of Texas has been following a population of subjects since 1992, and his results are hard to argue with. Those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next eight years as people who attend once a week. People who fall somewhere between no churchgoing and weekly churchgoing also fall somewhere between in terms of mortality.
A similar analysis by Daniel Hall, an Episcopal priest and a surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that church attendance accounts for two to three additional years of life. To be sure, he also found that exercise accounts for three to five extra years and statin therapy for 2.5 to 3.5. Still, joining a flock and living longer do appear to be linked. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")
Investigators haven't teased out all the variables at work in this phenomenon, but Hummer, for one, says some of the factors are no surprise: "People embedded in religious communities are more likely to rely on one another for friendship, support, rides to doctor's appointments."
But even hard scientists concede that those things aren't the whole story and that there's a constellation of other variables that are far harder to measure. "Religious belief is not just a mind question but involves the commitment of one's body as well," says Ted Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The sensory organs, tastes, smells, sounds, music, the architecture of religious buildings [are involved]." Just as the very act of coming into a hospital exposes a patient to sights and smells that are thought to prime the brain and body for healing, so may the act of walking into a house of worship.
Neal Krause, a sociologist and public-health expert at the University of Michigan, has tried to quantify some of those more amorphous variables in a longitudinal study of 1,500 people that he has been conducting since 1997. He has focused particularly on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also found that those people who give help fare even better than those who receive it — a pillar of religious belief if ever there was one. He has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what's going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And in another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who don't. "That's one of the purported reasons for religion," Krause says. "The sign on the door says, 'Come in here and you'll find meaning.'"
African-American churches have been especially good at maximizing the connection between faith and health. Earlier in American history, churches were the only institutions American blacks had the freedom to establish and run themselves, and they thus became deeply embedded in the culture. "The black church is a different institution than the synagogue or mosque or even the white church," says Ken Resnicow, a professor of health and behavior education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "It is the center of spiritual, community and political life." (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)
Given the generally higher incidence of obesity, hypertension and other lifestyle ills among African Americans, the church is in a powerful position to do a lot of good. In the 1990s, Marci Campbell, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, helped launch a four-year trial called North Carolina Black Churches United for Better Health. The project signed up 50 churches with a goal of helping the 2,500 parishioners eat better, exercise more and generally improve their fitness. The measures taken included having pastors preach health in their sermons and getting churches to serve healthier foods at community events.
The program was so successful that it has been renamed the Body and Soul project and rolled out nationally — complete with literature, DVDs and cookbooks — in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. To skeptics who conclude that the churches have played a secondary role in the success of the programs — as a mere venue for secular health counseling — Campbell points out that in her studies, the most effective pitches came not from the nutritionists but from the pulpit. "The body is a temple, and the connection was made between the physical body and religious and spiritual well-being," she says.
Read "Top 10 Religion Stories".
Read "Top 10 Scientific Discoveries".
Joining Hands
Many scientists and theologians who study these matters advocate a system in which both pastoral and medical care are offered as parts of a whole. If a woman given a diagnosis of breast cancer is already offered the services of an oncologist, a psychologist and a reconstructive surgeon, why shouldn't her doctor discuss her religious needs with her and include a pastor in the mix if that would help?
While churches are growing increasingly willing to accept the assistance of health-care experts, doctors and hospitals have been slower to seek out the help of spiritual counselors. The fear has long been that patients aren't interested in asking such spiritually intimate questions of their doctors, and the doctors, for their part, would be uncomfortable answering them. But this turns out not to be true. When psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State University conducted a survey of oncologists, she found that a large proportion of them did feel it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren't equipped to address the questions themselves. They didn't do so simply because they didn't know how to raise the topic and feared that their patients would take offense, in any event. When patients were asked, they insisted that they'd welcome such a conversation but that their doctors had never initiated one. What both groups needed was someone to break the ice. (See pictures of Billy Graham, America's Pastor.)
Kristeller, who had participated in earlier work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, recalled a short — five- to seven-minute — conversation that the leader of a study had devised to help doctors address the problem. The recommended dialogue conformed to what's known as patient-centered care — a clinical way of saying doctors should ask questions then clam up and listen to the answers. In the case of smoking, they were advised merely to make their concern known to patients, then ask them if they'd ever tried to quit before. Depending on how that first question was received, they could ask when those earlier attempts had been made, whether the patients would be interested in trying again and, most important, if it was all right to follow up on the conversation in the future. "The more patient-centered the conversations were, the more impact they had," Kristeller says.
The success of that approach led her to develop a similar guide for doctors who want to discuss religious questions with cancer patients. The approach has not yet been tested in any large-scale studies, but in the smaller surveys Kristeller has conducted, it has been a roaring success: up to 90% of the patients whose doctors approached them in this way were not offended by the overture, and 75% said it was very helpful. Within as little as three weeks, the people in that group reported reduced feelings of depression, an improved quality of life and a greater sense that their doctors cared about them.
Even doctors who aren't familiar with Kristeller's script are finding it easier to combine spiritual care and medical care. HealthCare Chaplaincy is an organization of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Zen Buddhist board-certified chaplains affiliated with more than a dozen hospitals and clinics in the New York City area. The group routinely provides pastoral care to patients as part of the total package of treatment. The chaplains, like doctors, have a caseload of patients they visit on their rounds, taking what amounts to a spiritual history and either offering counseling on their own or referring patients to others. The Rev. Walter Smith, president and CEO of the chaplaincy and an end-of-life specialist, sees what his group offers as a health-care product — one that is not limited to believers.
What patients need, he says, is a "person who can make a competent assessment and engage a patient's spiritual person in the service of health. When people say, 'I'm not sure you can help because I'm not very religious,' the chaplains say, 'That's not a problem. Can I sit down and engage you in conversation?'"
Patients who say yes often find themselves exploring what they consider secular questions that touch on such primal matters of life and death, they might as well be spiritual ones. The chaplains can also refer patients to other care providers, such as social workers, psychologists and guided-imagery specialists. The point of all this isn't so much what the modality is; it's that the patient has a chance to find one that works. "People say you tell the truth to your doctor, your priest and your funeral director," says Smith, "because these people matter at the end." It's that truth — or at least a path to it — that chaplains seek to provide.
Smith's group is slowly going national, and even the most literal-minded scientists welcome the development. Says Sloan, the author of Blind Faith: "I think that a chaplain's job is to explore the patient's values and help the patient come to some decision. I think that's absolutely right."
Sloan's view is catching on. Few people think of religion as an alternative to medicine. The frontline tools of an emergency room will always be splints and sutures, not prayers — and well-applied medicine along with smart prevention will always be the best ways to stay well. Still, if the U.S.'s expanding health-care emergency has taught us anything, it's that we can't afford to be choosy about where we look for answers. Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms. It's the result, not the source, that counts the most.
With reporting by Alice Park and Bryan Walsh / New York
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879016,00.html
2009-06-06
Test6
http://munya.dtiblog.com/blog-category-11.html
2009年1月1日付けの、不法残留者の人数をマスコミが報道した。
法務省のサイトに原資料が載るはずだが、
見つからないので報道に合わせて資料をまとめてみた。
年 | 平成21年 | 平成20年 | 平成19年 | 平成18年 | 平成17年 | 平成16年 | 平成15年 |
韓国 | 24,198(21.4%) | 31,758(21.2%) | 36,321(21.3%) | 40,203(20.8%) | 43,151(20.8%) | 46,425(21.2%) | 49,874(22.6%) |
中国 | 18,385(16.2%) | 25,057(16.7%) | 27,698(16.2%) | 31,074(16.0%) | 32,683(15.8%) | 33,522(15.3%) | 29,676(13.5%) |
フィリピン | 17,287(15.2%) | 24,741(16.5%) | 28,491(16.7%) | 30,777(15.9%) | 30,619(14.8%) | 31,428(14.3%) | 30,100(13.6%) |
タイ | 約6,000( 5.3%) | 7,314( 4.9%) | 8,460( 5.0%) | 10,352( 5.3%) | 12,787( 6.2%) | 14,334( 6.5%) | 15,693( 7.1%) |
その他 | 47,202(41.7%) | 60,915(40.7%) | 69,869(40.9%) | 81,339(42.0%) | 88,059(42.5%) | 93,709(42.7%) | 95,209(43.2%) |
合計 | 113,072 | 149,785 | 170,839 | 193,745 | 207,299 | 219,418 | 220,552 |
減少数 | 36,713 | 21,054 | 22,906 | 13,554 | 12,119 | 1,134 | |
前年比減 | 24.5% | 12.3% | 11.8% | 6.5% | 5.5% | 0.5% |
表を見た率直な感想はよく減らしたに尽きる。
去年の結果を見たかぎりでは、比率は改善したとはいえ、
減少数は22,906から21,054と減少していて、摘発の限界に近づいたかと思った。
去年のブログに、
「計画最終年度の今年に、約4万人減らさねばならないが、
それは減少数が約2万2千人で高止まった事を考えると無理だろう」
と書いてある通りだ。
しかし、実際には去年約3万6千人を減らし、
半減という5ヶ年計画をほぼ達成した。
去年だけで約4分の1減らしているのだから、たいしたものだ。
この実績は、次の二つの理由で達成できた。
一つは、不法残留者の記録を精査して、
死亡や帰化の理由で1万人を除外したことだ。
そうすると、実質的に減らしたのは、2万6千人だから、
そんなに急激に減少したわけではなくなる。
もう一つは、
生体情報認証システムによって不法残留者の再入国を阻止したことだ。
去年のブログには、
不法入国、不法残留で強制退去させられた人数は45,502人とある。
つまり、おととしは2万4千人不法残留者が増えたけど、
4万5千人捕まえて、正味では2万1千人減らしたことになる。
この増えた不法残留者には、
一度捕まったけど再度入国した人間が相当程度含まれているのだろう。
その再入国を阻止したことが、この結果につながっている。
今年の見込はどうだろうか。
退去させている人数が、摘発の困難さなどより、
入管や警察が処理できる能力で決まっているならば、
今年も2万6千人くらい減少させることは可能だ。
これが続けば、後4年で、不法残留者はほぼ0になる。
不法入国も含めた不法滞在者を0にする能力が証明できれば、
外国人労働者の雇用や観光客の誘致をよりやりやすくなる。
日本の将来のために、入管警察はがんばって欲しい。
関連記事
不法残留者の摘発
不法残留者の経常的な減少
参照にした新聞記事
外国人の不法残留者１１万人、５年で半減をほぼ達成
不法滞在外国人：５年でほぼ半減 今年１月１３万人
不法残留者１１万３０００人＝５年でほぼ半減－法務省
不法残留者、摘発や審査厳の格化で約5年間にほぼ半減
不法残留半減、11万人 不法入国も大幅に減少
| 2009-02-19 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 0 |
[ ▲トップに戻る ]
高度人材の受け入れに関しての疑問で私は、
下記の疑問を呈していた。
1998年から2002年に労働者は20万人から27～8万人に増え、
研究・技能の労働者は7000人から3000人に減っている。
高度人材の受け入れに関して、
この期間特に制限した事はないと思うのだが、
なぜ減っているのだろうか。
高度人材の受け入れ強化するには、
減っている理由を分析して、それを改善する必要がある。
番組にはその分析がなくて、どうもよくわからない。
単純に1998年から2002年は不況だったから、
減っているだけではないだろうか。
だとしたら、2003年以降増えているはずである。
なんか、研究・技術の労働者は減っているというのは、
番組のプロバガンダの気がしてきた。
後で、2003年以降の研究・技術の労働者の数を調べてみよう。
今回下記の統計から、研究・技能の労働者と思われるものを抜き出してみた。
平成１７年末現在における外国人登録者統計について
平成18年末現在における外国人登録者統計について
在留資格 │平成１３年│平成１４年│平成１５年│平成１６年│平成１７年│平成１８年│
│ (2001) │ (2002) │ (2003) │ (2004) │ (2005) │ (2006) │
研 修 │ 38,169│ 39,067│ 44,464│ 54,317│ 54,107│ 70,519│
人文知識・国際業務│ 40,861│ 44,496│ 44,943│ 47,682│ 55,276│ 55,323│
技 術 │ 19,439│ 20,717│ 20,807│ 23,210│ 29,044│ 35,135│
技 能 │ 11,927│ 12,522│ 12,583│ 13,373│ 15,112│ 17,869│
教 授 │ 7,196│ 7,751│ 8,037│ 8,153│ 8,406│ 8,525│
技術あるいは技能の在留資格が該当するのではないかと思うが、
全然数が合っていない。
過去の統計から該当するものを探してみる。
平成１２年末現在における外国人登録者統計について
上記の記事から抜き出す。
在留資格 │平成８年 │平成９年 │平成１０年│平成１１年│平成１２年│構成比│
│（1996） │（1997） │（1998） │（1999） │（2000） │（％）│
研 修 │ 20,883│ 25,806│ 27,108│ 26,630│ 36,199│ 2.1│
人文知識・国際業務│ 27,377│ 29,941│ 31,285│ 31,766│ 34,739│ 2.1│
技 術 │ 11,052│ 12,874│ 15,242│ 15,668│ 16,531│ 1.0│
技 能 │ 8,767│ 9,608│ 10,048│ 10,459│ 11,349│ 0.7│
教 授 │ 4,573│ 5,086│ 5,374│ 5,879│ 6,744│ 0.4│
1998年から2002年にかけて、減っている資格なんてない。
結局、テレビ東京独自の取材による高度な技術を持った労働者数なのだろうか？
テレビ局のプロバガンダとか言うより、
意味のある数値なのか、疑問に思えてきた。
普通に考えれば、
1996年に11,052だった技術の資格を持った外国人登録者が、
2006年に3倍以上の35,135になっているのだから、
高度技術を持った外国人労働者が日本で増えている事ではないだろうか。
なんか、真面目に番組を見て損した気がする。
| 2008-06-03 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 0 |
[ ▲トップに戻る ]
先週金曜日、
ワールドビジネスサテライトで労働者受け入れについての特集があった。
その中で二つばかり疑問を持った。
一つは、研究・技術の労働者数が減っているのだが、その原因。
もう一つは、日本が労働者の開国に閉鎖的なのは本当なのだろうかという事だ。
番組の中で、日本に来ている労働者は増えているのだが、
研究・技術の労働者は減っているというグラフが出ていた。
1998年から2002年に労働者は20万人から27～8万人に増え、
研究・技能の労働者は7000人から3000人に減っている。
高度人材の受け入れに関して、
この期間特に制限した事はないと思うのだが、
なぜ減っているのだろうか。
高度人材の受け入れ強化するには、
減っている理由を分析して、それを改善する必要がある。
番組にはその分析がなくて、どうもよくわからない。
単純に1998年から2002年は不況だったから、
減っているだけではないだろうか。
だとしたら、2003年以降増えているはずである。
なんか、研究・技術の労働者は減っているというのは、
番組のプロバガンダの気がしてきた。
後で、2003年以降の研究・技術の労働者の数を調べてみよう。
もう一つ疑問に思ったのは、
日本が労働者の開国に閉鎖的なのは本当かという点だ。
日本が受け入れに積極的でないのは確かだと思うが、
来たいと思う人材をむりやり拒否している例は少くはないか。
たとえば、日本に留学で来て、大学卒業後日本で就職している人たちが、
在住許可を取るのに困難があるとは思えない。
有名な宋文洲氏とか、最近新書などを出している中国の人たちは、
特に困難もなく日本に住み続けているのではないだろうか。
普通の企業が外国人の入社を認めれば、
簡単にビザが取れると思うのは間違いなのか。
合法的に在住して働いている人間が、
ビザの更新に失敗したという話は聞いた事がない。
もちろん、拒否していないからと言って、積極的とはいえない。
今後の事を考えると高度人材の受け入れに関しては、
積極的になる必要があるのかもしれない。
しかし、高度人材ならば給料も高くなるのだがら、
受け入れのための費用もそれでまかなうのが原則である。
日本人が海外に行く場合、
教育のための日本人学校は自分たちでまかなっている。
日本に来る外国人も基本そうあるべきだろう。
その費用が出せないならば、
本当にその人材が必要なのか問うべきである。
私は単純労働者の受け入れに関しては反対だが、
高度な労働者の受け入れに関しては反対していない。
番組では高度人材の受け入れに関する話が、
なぜ農家で低賃金で働いている労働者の話になってしまうのか、
とても疑問である。
| 2008-05-12 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 1 |
[ ▲トップに戻る ]
ブログで一番最初に書いた不法残留者の経常的な減少の記事の一年経った状況を書く。
もっとも、最初に書いた時は年度別に不法残留者数をまとめているようなページがなかったので、表を作るだけで意義があると思っていたのだが、法務省の発表(【広報資料】本邦における不法残留者数について（平成20年1月1日現在))に、まとめが含まれてしまい、ほとんど意味がなくなってしまった。でも、続けることが大事なのでまた書く。
下記は前回と同じ形式でまとめた表である。
年 | 平成20年 | 平成19年 | 平成18年 | 平成17年 | 平成16年 | 平成15年 |
韓国 | 31,758(21.2%) | 36,321(21.3%) | 40,203(20.8%) | 43,151(20.8%) | 46,425(21.2%) | 49,874(22.6%) |
中国 | 25,057(16.7%) | 27,698(16.2%) | 31,074(16.0%) | 32,683(15.8%) | 33,522(15.3%) | 29,676(13.5%) |
フィリピン | 24,741(16.5%) | 28,491(16.7%) | 30,777(15.9%) | 30,619(14.8%) | 31,428(14.3%) | 30,100(13.6%) |
タイ | 7,314( 4.9%) | 8,460( 5.0%) | 10,352( 5.3%) | 12,787( 6.2%) | 14,334( 6.5%) | 15,693( 7.1%) |
その他 | 60,915(40.7%) | 69,869(40.9%) | 81,339(42.0%) | 88,059(42.5%) | 93,709(42.7%) | 95,209(43.2%) |
合計 | 149,785 | 170,839 | 193,745 | 207,299 | 219,418 | 220,552 |
減少数 | 21,054 | 22,906 | 13,554 | 12,119 | 1,134 | |
前年比減 | 12.3% | 11.8% | 6.5% | 5.5% | 0.5% |
感想を述べる。
一番大事な事は不法残留者数は継続して減少していることだ。これさえ達成できていれば、大きな問題はないと思う。
不法残留者の減少数は減ったが、パーセントでは増えている。分母が小さくなると取締りが、大変になるあらわれなのだろうか。不法残留者の摘発記事が頻繁に出てた印象からすると、大変になったような気がする。ただ、確定的な事は言えない。
今後の動向については、不法残留者を5年間で半減する計画はかなり難しくなっている。平成16年の219,418を起点とすると、半減するには約11万人を減らさなくてはならない。計画最終年度の今年に、約4万人減らさねばならないが、それは減少数が約2万2千人で高止まった事を考えると無理だろう。ただ、指紋検査によって不法入国を減らす事ができれば、強制退去の人数が変わらなくても達成できる可能性はある。実際の事情を知らないと何ともいえないところだ。しかし、このペースを維持できるなら、8年ぐらいで不法残留者は0に近づくので、たいした問題ではない。
読売新聞の記事もそれを裏づけている。
過去最多だった１９９３年の２９万８６４６人から１５年連続で減少した。政府は来年１月１日時点で不法残留者を１１万人までに減らす目標を立てているが、このペースでは目標達成は難しいとの見方もある。
タイとその他の国の不法残留者の構成比が段々減っている事から考えると、より一層の対策が韓国、中国、フィリピン人に求められる。韓国と中国の人数が多いことから、日本人と外見が似ているせいで摘発しにくいかとも思ったが、毎日新聞の記事によると、必ずしもそうではない。
一方、不法入国や不法残留など入管法違反に問われ強制退去させられた数は前年比１万９０８人減の４万５５０２人。国別では中国が最多で全体の２６．３％を占めている。【坂本高志】
強制退去させられた国別の数では中国が一番多いのだから、摘発自体は問題でない。ただ、不法残留になっている人間が一番多いということだけらしい。フィリピンの不法残留者が中国を上回っていたのは、去年一年間だけで今年になるとまた中国の方が多くなっている。外国人の中で犯罪件数が一番多いのが、中国人である事を考えると、より中国人中心な摘発が望まれる。
| 2008-03-12 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 1 |
[ ▲トップに戻る ]
朝日新聞でも指紋チェックが始まった後の入国審査の報道があった。
外国人指紋採取制度１カ月 入国拒否は９５人
そこには、私の気にしていた、指紋拒否以外で入国を拒否されていた人数も報道されていた。
一方、従来の方法で入国拒否された例を含めると、この１カ月の入国拒否者は計５８８人で、０６年の１カ月平均より１８０人少ない数字にとどまった。同省は「制度が知られるようになり、抑止効果が出ているのではないか」とみている。
ただ、少し数字がおかしい。
2006年の不法入国者数は10,441人、月平均870人となる。この一ヶ月の入国拒否者が588人だとすると、06年の一ヶ月平均より280人低い数字になるはずである。"入国拒否者は計588人"が688人の間違いなのか、"180人少ない"が280人の間違いなのか、そもそも不法入国者と入国拒否者の定義が一致していないのか、わからない。テレビの画面から持ってきた10,441人という不法入国者数が間違いの可能性もある。
入国拒否者が588人、または688人とすると、旅券等の偽造により再入国を図る人数95人を引くと493人、または593人が、再入国でない不法入国者となる。指紋チェックは先に実行していると思われ、かつ、再入国のケースは全てひっかかるとする。2006年の再入国でない不法入国者の数も変わらないとすれば、2006年に再入国でひっかかった人数は870人から引いて377人、または277人になる。377人、または277人と+α(これは入国審査をかいくぐって日本に入国した人数)が、95人になったのだとすると、指紋チェックが行なわれると知らないで日本入国をしたのは、4分の1または3分の1ぐらいになる。始まって一ヶ月だとそんなものか、韓国中国以外には報道はあまりないだろうし。一年もすれば0に近づくかな。
なんか面白い結果が出るかと思って、計算したがたいした事はなかった。でも、4分の1または3分の1にしか知られていないとすれば、指名手配されているのに再入国を図ろうとする人間はまだいそうだ。検挙できて欲しいものである。
| 2007-12-27 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 0 |
[ ▲トップに戻る ]
95人のうち94人は過去の強制退去リストと一致した。最後の1人はどうなったの？
＜新入国審査＞１カ月で９５人を拒否 待ち時間２６～３９分
毎日新聞の記事で「来日外国人から指紋などを提供させる新しい入国審査で、１１月２０日のスタート後１カ月で計９５人が入国を拒否された」とし、「拒否された９５人のうち９４人は過去の強制退去リストと一致した。」と書かれている。
こういう記事を読んだら、最後の一人はどういう理由で入国を拒否されたか、知りたいと思わないだろうか。私は気になってしまった。
そしたら、読売新聞で記事があった。
新入国審査１か月、９５人を入国拒否…法務省
１９日までの１か月で来日した約７０万人の外国人のうち、入国管理局が入国を拒否したのが９５人。このうち、７７人に退去命令が出され、１７人が強制送還された。残り１人は警察の指名手配リストの指紋と一致したため、警察に引き渡された。
退去命令を受けた外国人の多くは、過去に強制送還され、来日できないのに、氏名や生年月日が異なる新たな旅券を取得し、入国しようとした。
残り一人は警察の指名手配リストの指紋と一致したのか。この方が大きなニュースに見えるのは私だけか。指紋チェックによる明白なお手柄だと思うのだが。どんな犯罪者か報道はないのか？後、この場合も入国を拒否なのか？入国を認めた後逮捕したという手続きではないんだ。
毎日新聞の書き方は誤解を招きやすい。95人が入国を拒否なら、95人全員送り返したと普通読むと思う。もう少し表現に気をつけて欲しい。
後、この一ヶ月の指紋採取による成果について考察してみよう。下記の二つのページから過去の不法入国者数がわかる。
平成１７年における入管法違反事件について
こちらのページでは2002年から2005年までの不法入国者数がわかる。2002年と2003年については、別表1の入管法違反事件の推移を見る。
Fingerprinting & Illegal Immigration in Japan : Japan Probe
こちらのページではテレビの画面から取得した映像で、2006年の不法入国者数がわかる。
不法入国者は旅券等を偽造して、入管をごまかそうとして捕まった人であり、不法上陸者は入管検査を通らずに捕まった人である。だから、捕まっていない人間を含めた数はそれより大きくなる。2002年から2006年までの不法入国者数を表にしてみる。
平成13年(2001年) | 平成14年(2002年) | 平成15年(2003年) | 平成16年(2004年) | 平成17年(2005年) | 平成18年(2006年) |
8,952 | 8,388 | 9,251 | 11,217 | 11,586 | 10,441 |
新聞報道によると、指紋チェックで入国を拒否されたのは95人だが、指紋チェック以外で入国を拒否されているケースがあるのかどうか、はっきりしない。また、過去の不法入国者数の中で強制退去者ということで入国を拒否された人数もはっきりしない。ビザの偽造等により、初めての入国でも不法入国者になっているケースはあると思う。政治的な理由とかで入国を認めない場合は、そもそも不法入国者になるのだろうか。
過去の不法入国者がすべて旅券等を偽造した再入国のケースだったとすると、一ヶ月約1000人の不法入国者が100人になったということで、これだけでも大きな成果である。もちろん、検挙率が下がった結果だったら、全然誉められた事ではないのだが、不法に入国する意志を持たなくさせたのなら望ましい。正確な結果が出ないうちに、ぬか喜びをしてもしかたがないので、ここらへんで止めておく。
| 2007-12-26 | 日本・移民問題 | コメント : 0 |トラックバック : 0 |
2 名前：名無しさん＠九周年：2009/04/21(火) 00:13:00 ID:Dx9rQ75h0
不法滞在外国人を通報すると５万円もらえます。
↓ ↓
http://law.e-gov.go.jp/htmldata/S26/S26SE319.html
出入国管理及び難民認定法
（報償金）
第六十六条 第六十二条第一項の規定による通報をした者がある場合において、
その通報に基いて退去強制令書が発付されたときは、法務大臣は、法務省令で定めるところにより、
その通報者に対し、
五万円以下の金額を報償金として交付する ことができる。
但し、通報が国又は地方公共団体の職員がその職務の遂行に伴い\知り得た事実に基くものであるときは、
この限りでない。
詳しくは入国管理局のホームページ参照。
http://www.immi-moj.go.jp/zyouhou/index.html
中国・韓国人の犯罪が増えています。日本の治安を守るため
危険な不法滞在外国人を通報しましょう。
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)