Association between religious life and health: a brief review of quantitative studies

Abstract

Since the start of the formation of human society, health work turned to cure and prevention of diseases has been tightly organized as being linked to religious practices. With the advent of modernity and appearance of scientific medicine, it has been sought to guide and explain the process of sickness and cure in a manner not linked to religion. However, from the end of the XX century, the theme of correlation between religious life and spirituality with the population health levels started to deserve a broad interest from researchers from several academic institutions. With the appearance, mainly in the United States, of several quantitative medical studies that have researched the association between religious life and health conditions and recovery from diseases, this theme started to deserve recognition from important academic fields on health sciences. These quantitative studies, performed from epidemiological methods, have been important to legitimate the qualitative studies that have also been expanded. This study seeks to make a review of these studies on the international literature.