The National Cancer Institute
defines spirituality as an individual's sense of peace or purpose and feelings
about the meaning of life in general. Religiosity can be a conduit for
spirituality in the context of specific beliefs and practices, usually in
conjunction with other people who hold the same beliefs...
In terms of physical QOL, we found
that religious patients had better QOL if they were highly spiritual. For
mental QOL, we found a significant difference between the extreme groups (low
spirituality/low religiosity and high spirituality/high religiosity), but our
findings for mental QOL had another level of subtlety which raises a question
as to what the role of religiosity is in mental QOL.
For
example, among patients who have low levels of religiosity, patients who are
highly spiritual have better mental QOL. Similarly, among patients who are
highly religious, those who were highly spiritual had better QOL. However,
among patients who were highly spiritual, we failed to detect a significant
difference in mental QOL when comparing patients with high and low levels of
religiosity…
Medscape:
To a degree, your findings suggest that spirituality is more important than
religiosity in terms of QOL, at least in this patient population.
Dr Cannon: For mental health, our findings say precisely that.
Spirituality also confers benefits among patients who are highly religious,
helping with physical QOL as well.Conversely, spirituality tends to be more
intrinsic: Peace, purpose, the meaning of life, and connectedness to others are
concepts that must be considered and understood by each individual. Therefore,
we postulate that the aspects which constitute heightened spiritual awareness
are the ones that preserve mental QOL because they help individuals cope with
and understand hardship—in this case, a diagnosis of cancer.
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