The Strong Evidence for the Healing Power of Prayer

Most people know from personal experience that prayer is an effective therapy. This is the reason why human beings have prayed for thousands of years. This alone should be sufficient for the medical profession to support prayer as a formal medical therapy. However, there is considerable scientific evidence in mainstream medical literature validating the effectiveness of prayer in treating many diseases. Nonetheless, it is not taught in medical schools and physicians are not encouraged to pray for or with their patients. Because of its effectiveness, simplicity, safety, and affordability this therapy should be a common consideration.

So, why isn’t prayer taught as a therapy in today’s medical schools, and why do so few of our physicians pray with their patients, or at least discuss it as an option? Perhaps the lack of acceptance of prayer as an effective and acceptable medical therapy is related to the fact that spirit is not officially accepted as part of today’s medical model. It is interesting that many physicians go to church on Sunday and pray for themselves and their families, and then return to work on Monday, “forgetting” that prayer is a powerful healing tool.

There is a rapidly growing body of scientific research that documents the benefit of a special form of prayer called “remote healing.” Elisabeth Targ, MD, published fascinating work on patients with AIDS using this form of therapy in The Western Journal of Medicine in December 1998. Basically in her study she divided patients with AIDS into two groups. Both groups were treated using conventional therapies. However, self-proclaimed healers who concentrated on using mindful concentration treated only one group. These energy medicine practitioners used simple prayer or “energy transference,” such as with Reiki therapy or therapeutic touch, to help these patients heal. In all parameters measured, the group receiving the remote healing did significantly better.

Even more fascinating work was published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in its December 22, 2001, issue. This study documented that remote healing could be successfully performed on patients with severe bloodstream infections more than five years after these patients were hospitalized! This incredible study included nearly 4000 patients and showed highly statistically significant shortened hospital stays and duration of fever. As modern physics has documented, and this experiment supports, time is not a linear function, and it appears from this study that the laws of the universe are not always governed by linear time. If Albert Einstein was correct, time is an invention of man!