Harold Koenig, MD – You are My Beloved. Really?
Victor Fuhrman: Fascinating. Now, how was the Duke Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health founded?
Dr. Harold Koenig: When I was getting interested in this, in 1995, I developed a program on religion, health, and aging. In 1998, I received a grant from the Templeton Foundation to start The Center for Religion, Spirituality, and Health. I continued doing that for a while, and then I got another grant from the Foundation to support a new center that we renamed The Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. I’ve been directing that center since about 2005. The center is all about training people to do research, getting colleagues at Duke together to actually do research, summarize and try to make sense of what other people are finding in the growing field. It’s become a field now–of religion, spirituality, and health and helping to interpret what those findings mean for people out in the community and, for other academic colleagues. That’s what the center does now.
Victor Fuhrman: Duke has a tradition of accepting open-minded positions on things. I remember the Rhine studies on ESP back in the ’60s. So, Duke is a Mecca for open minded study with an “out of the box” approach.
Dr. Harold Koenig: I’ve been at Duke since 1986, and Templeton didn’t fund us until 1998. So, there were about 10 years there where I had no funding support and Duke was supportive. At least they didn’t discourage me. A lot of places I’d been before were discouraging. Duke said to learn the research methods, do your studies, design them and we’ll see what happens. They were open-minded, actually. I had many people, especially in the Center for Aging, that were very supportive of what I was doing, even initially. Linda George, Harvey Cohen, and Dan Blazer were the leading people in the world on aging. They agreed to participate in my research and be co-authors with me, placing their reputations on the line in these papers.
Victor Fuhrman: There have been studies and reports years ago about the power of prayer in healing, and I’m not talking about people praying for themselves or being prayed for in person, but people being prayed for remotely. In those tests, I recall that some people were not prayed for in a control group, some people were prayed for in the other group and that, at the time, there were some interesting outcomes. What’s your knowledge on this, and what’s your experience with it?
Dr. Harold Koenig: Well, you’re referring to the Intercessory Prayer Studies that–the first one was in the mid-1980s at San Francisco General by Randolph Byrd. I was there doing my medical school rotation in psychiatry around the time that he was doing these studies. That started a series of maybe 25 different studies that culminated in the Harvard multi-site study on which I was part of the advisory group. Herbert Benson was the lead investigator. They studied 1,800 people who were undergoing open heart surgery and coronary artery bypass grafting. They randomized 900 to intercessory prayer, nine to no prayer, and half of the ones in the intercessory prayer group who were getting the prayer were told that they were getting the prayer. They followed these people for a period of time and found that the group getting the intercessory prayer did no better than the group that was not getting prayer. The group that was told they were getting the intercessory prayer did worse. In fact, it was on the cover of Newsweek at the time. It came out in the American Heart Journal in 2006. It was titled, “Please Don’t Pray for Me.” Duke did a study. It was published in The Lancet before that and also found no difference between prayed for and non-prayed for. Since the beginning, I have had a negative view towards those studies. I mean, nobody goes into the intensive care unit if somebody’s not praying for them, I can tell you that. They’re getting prayer by family members, they’re praying for themselves, the nurses, whatever. They’re getting a lot of prayers. So, now it’s not a matter of, prayer versus no prayer. God may not answer the prayer right during the study period. Maybe he wants to heal people after the study is over. They only followed them up I think for three or six months. Maybe after a year, he wants to heal them.
Victor Fuhrman: Harold G. Koenig: in preparation for our interview, you mentioned that you were currently reading some of the Hindu scriptures. Eastern philosophy embraced the mind, body, spirit connection long before the West began embracing it. Have you gained any insights from the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita?
Dr. Harold Koenig: I’m saving the Bhagavad Gita for after I get through the Upanishads. But, from the Upanishads, everything is all one. The body is, the mind, the breath, the speech is all part of the one and part of Brahman, as I understand it. I’m getting to the Bhagavad Gita, which emphasizes that with the coming of Lord Krishna into being, Brahman having come to earth that is, God coming to earth to guide his people.
Victor Fuhrman: No accident! In the stories of Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions and Christianity, we know that it comes from the same source.
Dr. Harold Koenig: That’s my belief.
Victor Fuhrman: Your new book is called You Are My Beloved. Really? It’s a treatise on questions that people of every faith and people of no faith have asked since we’ve had the ability to ask. What prompted you to write this book?
Dr. Harold Koenig: Well, Victor, I’ve been caring for patients as a psychiatrist, and I do geriatric psychiatry right now, and I have run into so many patients–by the time they get to see they have got a lot of problems. A lot of these people have chronic pain and multiple medical problems. They’re developing dementia, or they’re depressed or psychotic. And, I must deal with their caregivers. I’ve come to know and love some of these patients. They’re not just patients to me. I’ve so wanted to help them and give them something of myself. My spiritual, religious transformation experience three years ago changed my life. I want to be able to give this to my patients because I feel like it will help them. I’ve had chronic pain syndrome and other problems for all of these 30 years. There was a time that I had to use a wheelchair. I’m much healthier just in the last year or two, and I really can’t attribute that to anything other than prayer. This book kind of captures everything that I have learned as a psychiatrist, as a researcher and just as a person, going through bad experiences like everybody else is going through, good and bad experiences. I’ve tried to compact this into this tiny book that explains what I think and that I plan on reading as a devotional for the rest of my life. Everything that I’ve learned in my life is in this little book on how to live a happy, holy, healthy life. It’s what we did with the elderly patients initially. Then we started to engage people with PTSD – in fact, our soldiers and our veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been doing research with this population now for about two to three years, and we have developed a treatment for what’s called a moral injury. It’s called Spiritually Oriented Cognitive Processing Therapy.
Cognitive Processing Therapy is a type of psychotherapy that is used to treat active duty military and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder that results from their combat experiences and various, kinds of horrific experiences that people go through during the war. Part of this post-traumatic stress disorder involves moral injury. Moral injury is the kind of feelings that soldiers and veterans feel when they do things that transgress their moral code. Even if they’re just doing their duty, it has consequences. It affects them morally. And that is where we think a lot of the trauma lies and is one of the reasons why post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t respond to treatment very well. Probably 70 percent of people with PTSD don’t really get all that better, and it follows them into their later years. When they get sick, they try to suppress this trauma. If they lose their job and can’t work, then it comes back. So, we are targeting this moral injury, and the book is designed for this intervention. It features two chapters per session in a series of six weeks. It’s part of this spiritually oriented cognitive processing therapy that is targeting moral injury.
Victor Fuhrman: And the lesson that we should learn from that is–it’s the simplest lesson of all – love one another. That’s what it comes down to. Take care of people. The Golden Rule; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Dr. Harold Koenig: It is so simple. And, it’s so hard to do. It’s so hard to maintain it, to continue to do it, because, loving–we almost have to have God’s love in us for us to truly love others unconditionally. That’s the thing. Natural love is kind of a negotiation – you do for me, I do for you, but if you stop doing for me, I stop doing for you. It’s conditional. But, this love that God offers is not. It’s unconditional.
