| SPIRITUALITY could be used in pain-control in future, an editorial in this month’s issue of the journal Pain suggests. Results of a scientific study indicated that, under certain conditions, people with religious faith felt less pain than those who had no faith*.
In an experiment conducted in Oxford, eight women and four men, all Roman Catholic, who were recruited from weekly mass-goers in the city, were tested to see how they reacted when they were given electric shocks. The results were compared against a control-group of nine women and three men who said they were either atheist or agnostic.
The research team was drawn from, among others, the John Radcliffe Hospital, and the Psychology and Religion Research Group from the University of Cambridge. The team said that all the subjects were fit and had normal responses to pain. They were all aged between 19 and 34.
In the experiment, each subject was shown either a religious picture or a non-religious picture, while he or she was given a series of electrical stimuli to the left hand. The religious picture was of the Virgin Mary, Vergine Annunciata by Sassoferrato; and the non-religious picture, chosen to be as close a match as possible, was Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.
The Roman Catholics said that after gazing at the image of the Virgin Mary, they felt less pain when the shocks were applied. They reported being in a meditative state in which they felt “safe”, “being taken care of”, and “calmed down and peaceful”.
As they were undergoing this experience, the researchers took a scan of the subjects’ brains, and found that their brains were creating an analgesic effect. Their brains, the experimenters said, were “reappraising” the negative emotions caused by the pain.
But the same effect was not observed among those who said they were neither religious nor spiritual. They felt the full “noxious stimulus” of the experiment. Neither group experienced any alleviation of the pain when looking at the secular picture.
In an accompanying editorial, the journal said the findings “added a critical dimension to an increasingly vocal theological debate about the existence of God: perhaps it is simply our beliefs about God that underlie our appraisals of situations that alleviate suffering”.
Eventually, spirituality, as well as medication, could be used to tap into the brain’s systems to regulate emotions and reduce pain, it said.
* “An fMRI study measuring analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system”, Weich K. et al., Pain (2008), 139 (2), 239-478, published by the International Association for the Study of Pain® (IASP)®.
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