items of interest

John Yaukey

Harold Koenig is a psychiatrist at Duke University. He's also convinced that faith affects patients' health.

Back in the 1980s, when he was a family medicine intern and research fellow in the Midwest, he had patients who read the Bible regularly and prayed in their hospital rooms. Curious about the health effects, he checked out the medical literature. What he found stood in sharp contrast to his experience: a 1961 study argued that patients who relied on the Bible were unstable.

"[My patients] seemed remarkably well adjusted while dealing with life's problems and recovery from serious illness," he says.

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