Mary H. Wilson has been living with inherited colon cancer for 49 years. She has endured 40 surgeries since she was 15 and, over time, embraced a gamut of spiritual perspectives: "Better me than anyone else" became "why couldn't it have been someone else," which gave rise to "every morning is a gift."

Wilson, who lives near Sandy, grew up in the Methodist Church and thinks of herself as a Christian. But at 64, she doesn't claim allegiance to any particular denomination.

"My belief is that my higher power is right here beside me, any time I want to talk to him or lean on him," she says. Her faith is "very personal and very open," and she doesn't rely on any particular ritual -- prayer or church attendance, for example -- to keep it vital.

"Doctors have done a heroic job, just keeping me alive," she says. But she believes her faith also plays a part in her health and well-being.

That's a connection that many patients and physicians acknowledge, but one that science has had a hard time quantifying.

Several studies suggest that patients commonly rely on their religious beliefs to cope with serious medical illnesses. Some say their faith led to an actual physical cure. But the difficulty of measuring faith empirically makes it impossible to say definitively whether or how religion or spirituality affects physical health.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, a physician and co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University, contends that prayer, for example, has healed some people of cancer but accepts the results of scientific studies that cannot prove it.

"God is not predictable," Koenig says. "If you could reliably predict the effectiveness of prayer, you wouldn't need faith because you'd have proof."

But Koenig and other physicians say that engaging regularly in religious practices does encourage a number of factors that may influence a person's health: improved coping skills, social support, more nutritious diets, a sense of optimism and hope, and reduced depression, anxiety, smoking and alcohol consumption.

But as proponents of spirituality's connection to good health look for ways to focus on and measure faith, they warn that religious or spiritual views don't guarantee good health. It's important, they argue, to seek and receive medical treatment in addition to practicing one's religion.

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Role of spirituality in healing has its advocates but it's hard to prove