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By Harold G. Koenig
240 pp, $29.21
West Conshohocken, PA, Templeton Foundation Press, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-5994-7141-9

JAMA. 2008;300(24):2922.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In his newest book, Medicine, Religion, and Health, Harold Koenig reviews the numerous studies linking religion (or spirituality) to health status, an area in which Koenig has published many articles and several books. In this book, he provides an overview of the topic, especially highlighting the numerous research efforts that have already been published.

Koenig sees religion "as a system of beliefs and practices observed by a community, supported by rituals that acknowledge, worship, communicate with, or approach the Sacred, the Divine, God (in Western cultures), or Ultimate Truth, Reality, or nirvana (in Eastern cultures)" (p 11). Acknowledging that the word "spirituality" is often used in a vague or loose manner today, Koenig perceives spirituality as needing a more rigorous definition in terms of research studies (ie, "it must have some connection to religion" [p 17]) so that one study can be compared with another but also as needing . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Pat Fosarelli, MD, DMin, Reviewer
Ecumenical Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
pfosarelli@stmarys.edu

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