As humans suffered ills and sought healing throughout history, two healing traditions religion and medicine have joined hands in caring for them. Often those hands belonged to the same person, the spiritual leader was also the healer. Maimonides was a twelfth-century rabbi and a renowned physician. Hospitals, which were first established in monasteries and then spread by missionaries, often carry the names of saints or faith communities. As medical science matured, healing and religion diverged. Rather than asking God to spare their children from smallpox, people were able to vaccinate them. Rather than seeking a spiritual healer when burning with bacterial fever, they were able to use antibiotics.

Recently, however, religion and healing are converging once again: Of America's 135 medical schools, 101 offered spirituality and health courses in 2005, up from 5 in 1992 (Koenig, 2002; Puchalski, 2005). Since 1995, Harvard Medical School has annually attracted 1000 to 2000 health professionals to its Spirituality and Healing in Medicine conferences. Duke University has established a Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. A Yankelovich survey (1997) found 94 percent of U.S. HMO professionals and 99 percent of family physicians agreeing that "personal prayer, meditation, or other spiritual and religious practices" can enhance medical treatment.

Booksellers are featuring such titles as The Healing Power of Faith (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Religion and Health (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Faith, Medicine, and Science (Haworth, 2005). Not to forget the spiritual lessons brought forward in the past few decades by some of our most respected recent spiritual teachers such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, David Hawkins, Caroline Myss, Joseph Campbell, Amma & Baghavan, Rev. Michael Beckwith, Walter Russell , Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsh, Gregg Braden., Don Miguel Ruiz, Joyce Whitely Hawkes, Louise L. Hay, John Perkins, Dr. Masuro Emoto,  Nikola Tesla, Georges Lakhovsky among many other emerging Teachers opening the ways for new identity and appreciation of ourselves.

Is there fire underneath all this smoke? More than a thousand studies have sought to correlate the faith factor with health and healing. For example, Jeremy Kark and his colleagues (1996) compared the death rates for 3900 Israelis either in one of 11 religiously orthodox or in one of 11 matched, nonreligious collective settlements (kibbutz communities).

The researchers reported that over a 16-year period, belonging to a spiritual collective was associated with a strong protective effect not explained by age or economic differences.In every age group, religious community members were about half as likely to have died as were their non spiritual counterparts. This is roughly comparable to the gender difference in mortality. In response to such findings, Richard Sloan and his skeptical colleagues (1999, 2000, 2002, 2005) remind us that mere correlations can leave many factors uncontrolled. Consider one obvious possibility: Women are more spiritually active than men, and women outlive men. So perhaps religious and spiritual involvement is merely an expression of the gender effect on longevity.

At the end of the day, our own connection to our creator is what faith is about. Nothing outside of us can or does heal or move us towards perection and completness. it all resides within each and everyone of us to educate and assimilate new and ancient learnings into our own Faith grounded perspective of our true divine power within.