Healing Study Beres et al. - Part 1: Psychological and Immunological Changes after meeting a Chaplain coupled with Biblical Readings among Hospitalized Patients

Healing Study Beres et al.: A Clinical Study to evaluate Potential Psychological-, Neurological- and Immunological Effects of a Visit by a Chaplain coupled with Biblical Readings among Hospitalized Patients.<br><br>The authors pre-screened hospitalized participants to find those who were the most in need of an intervention by a chaplain. A passage from the Bible was read to the participants during a meeting with the chaplain at the bedside, or in the chapel of the hospital. No meeting occurred in the randomized control group, which was compiled in a way to get a group of participants with an approximatively similar pattern of diagnoses and treatment days than the intervention groups. <br>The pace of enrollment was deliberately slow in order to assure the authenticity of the visits ("slow science"). <br>Part 1: blood samples were taken 30 minutes prior, and 60 minutes after the meeting to measure White Blood Cell (WBC)-, lymphocyte counts, interferon gamma (IFN-γ)-, immunoglobulin M (IgM)-, immunoglobulin A (IgA)-, immunoglobulin G (IgG)-, and complement C3 levels. Raw psychological parameters were estimated with the usage of "Healing Questionnaires" designed for the Study, "before" and "afer" the visits, containing single-item rating scales in order to record assessements by the patients and the chaplain separately; PSS-14 Scale was also used in the groups at the chapel.<br>Part 2: a subgroup of the visited participants was subjected to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), where they were played an audiotape of readings of the same passage from the Bible. fMRI raw data and the corresponding co-authors are published in a subsequent dataset corresponding to this study (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16751851).