Healing Power of PrayerEarly scientific research indicated that prayer had a positive effect on medical patients. A more recent and rigorous study leave that in question.Four scientific studies have shown that prayer has a healing effect. These independent studies were with patients in cardiac care units and with advanced AID’s. A fourth study was on the effects on pregnancy. These studies indicated that when patients are placed on prayer lists and prayed for, healing is facilitated—even though they do not even know they are being prayed for. These studies were significant in that not only did being prayed for work, but the religious affiliation did not matter. It did not matter if the they were Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American, etc. All that mattered was that the treatment groups were prayed for. Also, it did not matter about the type of prayer—long or short, meditation, all had the same healing effects. The first of these studies was a landmark study published back in 1988 by cardiologist Randolph Byrd, M.D. in the Southern Medical Journal. (Byrd, 1988). A computer randomly assigned incoming cardiac patients at the San Francisco General Hospital to either home prayer groups (192 patients) or a control group that was not prayed for (201 patients). In scientific lingo, it was a randomized, double-blind experiment in which neither patients, their doctors, nor their nurses knew who was assigned to what group. The study found that the prayed-for patients: 1) were five times less likely to need antibiotics; 2) were three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema; 3) did not require artificial airways attached to a ventilator to be placed in their throat (while twelve of the non-prayed-for group did); and 4) had fewer deaths. Ten years later another group of San Francisco researchers at another medical center published the results of a study on patients with advanced AIDS (Sicher et al., 1998). Along with prayer, various other forms of distance healing were used, including psychic healing. Again patients were assigned to the prayer (treatment) groups or non-prayer (control) group in a double-blind, randomized design. Healers (those doing the praying and healing) were located throughout the United States. These healers represented a variety of healing traditions. After six months the patients charts were examined and scored for a several AIDS-related symptoms. The study found that the treatment group had fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, were not as sick, and required fewer doctor visits, hospitalizations, and days in the hospital. They also showed improved moods. A fourth study looked at the effects of prayer on pregnancy rates. Published in 2001 in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, the objective of this study was to assess the effect of prayer on women undergoing in vitro fertilization (Kwang et al., 2001). The women were in a clinic in Seoul, South Korea, and the prayer groups were located in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The researchers were located at yet another location at a medical center in the US. The results were that the prayed-for group had both significantly higher pregnancy and implantation rates. It appears that prayer can also affect pregnancy rates. A more recent pilot study reported in 2001 also indicate positive results (Krucoff, et al., 2001). This study was done at Duke University Medical Center for patients in their cardiac unit (American Heart Journal). In this ambitious and scientifically rigorous study, several “non-traditional” approaches were examined—prayer, stress reduction, guided imagery, and touch therapy. Again, the prayers were from a variety of healing traditions. While the number of patients used in this pilot study was too small to show statistically significant results, overall there was a positive effect on patients for all of the non-traditional approaches. Prayer, however, had the biggest effect. Patients that were prayed for had the lowest short-term and long-term complication rates. Results from large study at Harvard University Medical School was reported in 2006 (Benson, et al. 2006). These researchers concluded that intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from coronary artery bypass grafts. In fact, they found that those patients that knew they were receiving intercessory prayer had a higher incidence of complications. Results from the larger Duke University study are sill pending. So while early less rigorous studies indicated that prayer might facilitate healing, the more recent, larger, and rigorous study does not support this hypothesis. Literature
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Psychospirituality Index
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- Alternative States of Consciousness
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- Unitive Experiences
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- The Power of Prayer: what the research says
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