After she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her left lung, Gloria Bailey's doctors recommended she have a mastectomy followed by hormone therapy to fight the tumors that remained. She followed their advice, but had a nagging feeling about the regimen.
"The Lord was just telling me, 'They're not being aggressive enough,' " Bailey recalled. So she sought out a new team of oncologists at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America's Midwestern Regional Medical Center in Zion, Ill., more than 300 miles away from her home in Michigan. Those doctors suggested she undergo a bone marrow transplant, a harrowing ordeal that landed her in a coma.
Faith in a higher power can often lead to more aggressive treatment than is medically warranted, research is beginning to show. As a result, the nation's medical community is now grappling with the best way to bring God into the doctor-patient relationship without subjecting patients to needless suffering before they die.
In a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., researchers found that terminally ill cancer patients were nearly three times more likely to go on breathing machines or receive other invasive treatments if religion was an important part of their decision-making process. Such treatments didn't improve a person's long-term chances, however.
"There's a sense that by not going for life-prolonging care, they're letting God down," said Holly Prigerson, director of the Center for Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the study's senior author. "But the more aggressive care you get, the worse your quality of life in that last week."
Other recent studies have made similar connections. Religious cancer patients who had unsuccessful chemotherapy treatments were twice as likely to want heroic end-of-life measures, according to a report last year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. A 2005 study in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that patients with advanced-stage lung or colon cancer were more likely to want CPR, mechanical ventilation and hospitalization if they believed in divine intervention. They were also less likely to have a living will.
And in a survey of 1,006 randomly selected Americans, published last year in the Archives of Surgery, two-thirds said religious faith would influence their decisions about medical treatment if they were severely injured. More than half said God could heal patients whom doctors thought were beyond the reach of medicine.
