Harold Koenig, MD – You are My Beloved. Really?
An Interview with Harold Koenig, MD – You are My Beloved. Really?
Dr. Harold Koenig is co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University Medical Center, where he also serves on the faculty as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Associate Professor of Medicine. and has published extensively in the fields of mental health, geriatrics and religion with nearly 500 scientific peer reviewed articles and book chapters and more than 40 books.
His research on religion, health and ethical issues in medicine has been featured on dozens of national and international TV news programs and hundreds of magazines and newspapers. Dr. Harold Koenig is the author of many books, including “The Healing Power of Faith,” “Faith and Mental Health,” and “Spiritual Caregiving,” and he has been nominated twice for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He spoke with us recently about why he believes being part of a religious community can make people healthier—and happier.
His ideas have been covered in Newsweek and other news media about religion, spirituality and health, a focus of some of his research and clinical practice. What is the relationship between faith and health? Can prayer heal? Do believers outlive non-believers? These questions came up for me recently during a conversation with a new friend who was struggling with his health. I offered prayer and spiritual healing, and he openly admitted that he does not believe in prayer, or in fact, any form of divinity. In an effort to bring him some evidence of the power of faith, I began researching this topic and came across the work of Dr. Harold Koenig.
Harold Koenig: is currently Board Certified in General Psychiatry and formerly Board Certified in Family Medicine, Geriatric Medicine and Geriatric Psychiatry and is on the faculty at Duke University as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Professor of Medicine. Harold Koenig has given testimony before the US Senate and House of Representatives concerning the benefits of religion and spirituality on public health and travels widely to give seminars and workshops on the topic.
His books include The Healing Power of Faith, and his latest book is You Are My Beloved. Really? 
Interview by Victor Fuhrman, Host of Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio
To listen to the full interview of Dr. Harold Koenig on Destination Unlimited, click the player below:
Victor Fuhrman: Dr. Harold Koenig, I read your CV, and it read like a small book, 88 pages long. Your education, training, and practice were grounded in science and medicine. What events led you to explore the connection between religion and health?
Dr. Harold Koenig: Well, I kind of had the same experience that you did with your friend. As a physician, I came across many, many patients, in family medicine that was having a hard time in the hospital when they got sick, when they had a stroke, when they had a heart attack when they had surgery, and they were trying to cover. Many of them were middle age and older adults, and I just wondered how they were coping with all that. I had been a nurse before becoming a physician, so I’d been trained to be sensitive to how people were dealing with and coping with their health issues. So, I asked people,” What do you do to cope?” I can’t believe how consistent it was that people said their religious faith. They talked about prayer and reading the scriptures of their faith tradition. They said that brought them comfort and gave them hope in the setting of their illness. So, I was kind of shocked by that because I hadn’t had any training at all in nursing or in medical school or certainly not in psychiatry on the role that religion played in people’s mental health or coping with illness. So, that’s how I got interested.
Victor Fuhrman: Did you come from a religious or spiritual background?
Dr. Harold Koenig: I came from a religious background. I was raised as a Catholic. And then you go to high school, and it loses its significance if it ever had significance before that. I went to college, and then it just dropped off the map.
In medical school, you don’t have time for anything. When I started my residency in family medicine, bad things began to happen in my life. My wife left me, I got very depressed, and I had a series of failed relationships that were very, very painful. And so, all around this time, I’m taking care of patients, asking them how they cope and everything. I guess my question to those patients was real, my own search for some way to cope with my problems. What helped them to cope? I was trying to figure out for myself what I had to do to get out of this, this depression, this sense of loss, this just not having much purpose or meaning in life. I was a physician, graduated from Stanford, went to one of the top medical schools in the country, and I had everything, really. I was just not happy.
Victor Fuhrman: So, you literally had a dark night of the soul at that point.
Dr. Harold Koenig: It was indeed. It was a dark night. And it took four years for me to get back on solid ground.
Victor Fuhrman: What do you attribute that to in hindsight? What do you think happened there?
Dr. Harold Koenig: I think what happened was I was reading, and I tend to be very intense in my reading. I was getting into Alan Watt’s teaching which is very much Buddhist. For me, I found that you’ve got to have a guru to help guide you with this stuff. I didn’t have anybody to guide me, and I just kind of went off the deep end. It was just a very a disorganizing experience that caused, initially my own self to kind of vanish. And, then I was lost somewhere, and I didn’t know where–how to get back. That’s the only way I can put it together.
Victor Fuhrman: When you got back into the medical field, you graduated medical school, and you began your exploration of the connection between faith and science. What were some of the initial theorems that you tested, and how did you go about testing them?
Dr. Harold Koenig: Well, I was interested in whether older adults were happier if they were more religious and whether they feared death and if they feared it as much if they were religious. That was my question. Does religion help people to feel happier and experience less death anxiety when they get old and closer to death? Those were the first studies, and I did surveys and, collected data on hundreds of older adults and found that, lo and behold, there was a correlation. Those older adults who were more religious said they were happier, and they said they didn’t fear death as much. I thought, wow, you can show this, you can document it using statistics. So, that was, for me, a surprise.
Victor Fuhrman: Of those studies, what were your findings regarding people approaching transition, approaching death, and how they passed versus those who were not religious or had any faith base?
Dr. Harold Koenig: Well, I did not then pursue that among those who were getting ready to die or dying, although I can talk about that, given a series of about a dozen studies on that topic at Harvard at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. But I departed away from the group of people who were old and dying and started to study people in general, focused on older adults. Our initial findings were that not only did older and middle age adults who are more religious have greater well- being, but also they had less depression. That was something I was interested in because I had transitioned over to Duke. And so, one study after the other began to show that religious people were just less depressed. They coped better with illness and stress. They had less anxiety. I thought this might influence their physical health as well. If they’re not as depressed, if they’re happier, if they have greater well-being, maybe they take better care of themselves. I thought I ought to look at their physical health as well. That resulted in a series of studies showing that those persons who were more religious lived longer, spent less time in the hospital, had lower blood pressure, had less cardiac problems and had a better immune function. One study after another showed that religious people were just healthier, happier, lived longer and basically were more productive as members of the community.
