Spirituality and Adaptive Coping Styles in German Patients with Chronic Diseases in a CAM Health Care Setting

Abstract

For several reasons one may suggest a connection between spirituality and religiosity (SpR) and the usage of CAM. It is suggested that patients with severe diseases which use CAM have more active coping strategies and a higher religious involvement than patients which do not use these treatments. We thus investigated basic attitudes of 313 patients with chronic diseases attending a CAM outpatient clinic towards SpR and their adjustment to their illness, and relevant adaptive coping strategies. All test instruments were extensively (re)validated before usage, particularly the AKU questionnaire which measures adaptive coping styles. The main important strategies were "Search for information and medical help" and "Positive arrangement of life," while "Religious support" and "Positive interpretation of illness" were less important. Among those with an interest in SpR, "Support of life through SpR" was highly relevant. "Search for alternative ways of healing" did not correlate with any of the SpR scales, but strongly with "Search for information and medical help" and "Positive arrangement of life." We conclude that interest in CAM is not a unique pattern of SpR, but of an adaptive and active coping. Nevertheless, we confirm SpR is of high importance in patients with life-threatening diseases such as cancer.

Reliance on God’s Help Scale as a Measure of Religious Trust—A Summary of Findings

“…In the following sections, we describe how the mean scores of the RGH scale were distributed in different samples, the influence of sociodemographic data, which variables may be related, and findings from previous studies and analyses [8][9][10][11]16,17].…”

“…In addition, such reliance on God's help does not necessarily mean that people passively wait for God to do the job; they also actively rely on their internal resources and consult medical doctors [8][9][10]. Such trust in God (referring to Proverbs 3:5) may imply the ability of a religious person to recognize God's presence in everything that happens, and therefore hold the conviction that God is at one's side, even in bad times.…”

Interpretation of Illness in Patients with Chronic Diseases from Poland and Their Associations with Spirituality, Life Satisfaction, and Escape from Illness—Results from a Cross Sectional Study

“…The 3-item scale Escape from Illness is an indicator of a depressive/fearful escape-avoidance strategy to deal with illness (i.e., "fear what illness will bring", "would like to run away from illness", "when I wake up, I don't know how to face the day") [24]. In patients with depressive and addictive diseases, the Escape scale correlates strongly positive with depressive symptoms (BDI; r = 0.57) [25] and strongly negative with various disease acceptance styles (Büssing et al, 2010a), while in patients with cancer Escape correlated moderately positive with anxiety (HADS, r = 0.47) and depression (HADS; r = 0.34), and negatively with SF-12's mental health component (r = − 0.38) [13].…”

Validity and Reliability of the Hebrew Version of the SpREUK Questionnaire for Religiosity, Spirituality and Health: An Application for Oral Diseases

“…We intended to test a Hebrew version of the existing SpREUK questionnaire (SpREUK is an acronym of the German translation of "Spiritual and Religious Attitudes in Dealing with Illness"), developed to examine how patients with severe diseases view the impact of spirituality/religiosity on their health and how they cope with illness [27][28][29][30][31][32][33]40]. The SpREUK appeared to be a good choice for assessing a patient's interest in spiritual/religious concerns, without a potential bias for or against any specific religious commitment.…”

“…The mean age was 38.4 ± 3.1 years (range of [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Among the respondents, 22 had filled in the entire questionnaire twice within a two week span, in order to test for reliability.…”