Spirituality, health and science – A roadmap to integration from the desk of the new editor

Abstract

On a wonderful sunny Pentecost weekend in June 2006 in Cumbria, Steve Wright and I formally agreed that I would take over the editorship of Spirituality and Health International. We – that is me and my research group in Northampton – had just arrived in the UK, coming from Freiburg University Hospital in Germany. We did not have many contacts in the fi eld and although spirituality and health have been subject areas of great interest to me for quite some while, I kept that interest rather hidden and someone had to look closely to discover it. The reason for my being rather quiet was not that I did not want to come out of the closet, but our situation in Freiburg University Hospital had been, shall we say, politically delicate. I had founded one of the few and prime-time research groups dealing with complementary and alternative medicine, not a subject held in particularly high esteem in one of the largest academic hospitals in Germany, especially as we were dealing with topics that, for some, would feature under the heading of scientifi c pornography, such as homeopathy (Walach, 2003; Walach et al., 1997; Walach, Koster et al., 2001), spiritual healing (Walach, Bosch et al., 2002; Wiesendanger et al., 2001), Bach fl owers (Walach, Rilling, & Engelke, 2001), among others. The closest point of contact with mainstream science we ever had was work on the placebo effect (Walach & Jonas, 2004; Walach, Schmidt et al., 2002) or on methodology (Walach, Falkenberg et al., 2006). In recent times the newly arisen interest in mindfulness and its integration gave us a chance to delve more deeply into one of my original interests: the connection between meditation, spirituality and health. We