Word: faithful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
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...