Published by Twelve years ago, Nancie Nicholson’s twelve-year old nephew Kyle started having problems with his balance – something just wasn’t right. It took doctors about a month to figure out what was wrong: tests showed a rare form of cancer on one of his adrenal glands.
Surgery to remove the gland was recommended by doctors, but the risks were high: the young boy was given a 20-25 percent chance of recovery. Feeling powerless, Nancie decide to enlist the help of group prayer. Before the boy’s operation she asked the principal at her children’s Catholic school in Uxbridge Ont. If a special plea for her nephew could be included in morning prayers. On the day of surgery, 30 students and staff put their hands and minds together and prayed for him.
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Most people, regardless of faith or religion, turn to prayer at some point in their lives. It’s a centuries old source of comfort and strength during times of crisis and chaos. In recent years, as the events of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war unfolded, a spiritually reawakened North America has bowed its collective head even more. This renewed focus on prayer has been encouraged even further by thought provoking books by authors such as Bruce Wilkinson and Larry Dorsey, via the Internet through such sites as Beliefnet.com, by New Age personalities such as Deepak Chopra and through a growing interest in mind-body activities such as yoga and meditation.
But the question – and hope – remains: Can prayer really affect health? Over the past decade the medical community has gone down on its knees to investigate and there are now hundreds of scientific studies that point to a positive and at times mysterious link between prayer and health. As a result, 80 of the 125 medical schools in the United States have formal courses that examine the evidence around the healing power of prayer.
That’s not to say there isn’t some skepticism among health professionals and spiritual leaders across the continent. Many point out, for example, how difficult it is to oversee the act of praying in order to maintain a controlled study. Presumably the sick patients that participate in scientific study groups have a social circle outside of the group whose prayers are not accounted for. Harold G Koenig co-director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality and Health at Duke University Medical; Center in Durham, NC and author of Medicine, Religion and Health: Where Science & Spirituality Meet, says, “Surely your friends will pray for you whether you study in it or not”.
Scientists have addressed this concern by studying the impact of prayer on nonhumans, says Dr. Larry Dossey, an internal medicine specialist in Santa Fe, NM and author of ten books on faith and healing, including The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives (Dutton Adult 2009) and Healing Beyond the Body (Shambhala 2001). “Animals, plants, microbes in the control group (or treatment group) presumably don’t pray for themselves, and their fellow animals aren’t praying for them (as far as we know)”, he says.
And what about all the sinless people who die without prayer? “Are people who promote prayer as healing implying that people whose prayers aren’t answered aren’t sufficiently faithful?” asks Rabbi Reuven P. Bulka, writer, activist and former co-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Even if there is scientific evidence that casts doubt on the healing power of prayer, numerous North Americans swear that the prayers of family, friends and in some cases total strangers were instrumental in their recovery. Nancie, for example, truly believes that prayer helped Kyle, now a healthy fourteen-year old.
Koenig, too, believes that praying for health or recovery from an illness really works – especially for the person who is praying. “As scientists, we can show that people experience a sense of relaxation, peace, comfort when they’re praying”, he says.
Over and above the relaxing and stress-busting benefits, quieting the mind and body in prayer has proven to have physiological effects, too, and may even prolong life. Koenig describes a large American study of healthy older adults published in the Journal of Genealogy in 2007. It shows that those who pray or read the Bible are 50 percent more likely to survive over a six-year period than those who don’t. Similarly when Dr Marilyn Baetz, a psychiatrist and an assistant professor in the department of Psychology at the University of Saskatoon, studied the level of religious commitment of 88 depressed and medicated psychiatric patients, she found that those who used religion to cope (prayer or attending worship services) had shorter hospital stays and higher life satisfaction than those who didn’t.
Of course, for all of the prayer studies that indicate a positive effect, there are those studies that rebuke the idea. In a 2005 Duke University study, researchers found no difference between patients that received bedside prayer, intercessory prayer (i.e. without the person knowing), or no prayer at all. This has left some people perturbed. They believe scientists are intentionally stirring up the age-old science vs. religion debate in order to dissuade the masses from the benefits of organized religion or worse yet of disprove the existence of God. Yet Koenig is adamant that “by showing the world that spirituality can heal, the doors will be open to better health and longer lives for everyone”.
So how does prayer affect the body? The physiological explanation is that a meditative state reduces emotional stress, which in turn, decreases blood pressure, relaxes muscles, reduces the secretion of stress hormones and relieves insomnia. Also, prayer appears to have a positive effect on immune system and cardio-vascular function and to help the body cope with illness.
But physiology alone can’t explain the case of Father Tom Lynch. About 12 years ago, at the age of 32, Lynch was stricken with a form of Bell’s palsy, a virus that permanently destroyed a nerve on the right side of his throat and left him with one vocal chord. At the time, he was a busy prison chaplain in Columbus OH who also ran two parishes. His voice gave out during a conference, and, by month’s end, there were such severe complications – breathing and swallowing problems – that he had to resign his posts. Over a very difficult 14-month period, Lynch learned how to swallow again and miraculously, how to speak again. To this day doctors tell him that he shouldn’t have a voice.
Lynch believes that prayer saved that voice. During hi s ordeal, thousands of people. Including parishioners and prayer groups, prayed for his health. “I believe fervently that I’m able to talk because of prayer,” says Lynch, who now works at St Augustine Seminary in Toronto ON.
Physiology also can’t explain how prayer on behalf of someone else (intercessory prayer) works when the afflicted person doesn’t even know that he’s being prayed for. Consider the story of Marguerite Provost of Ste- Genevieve, QC. Sister Odette Saint Pierre of Montreal explains that doctors don’t know how 71-year-old Marguerite, who was sick and dying in sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal in October 2001 recovered. A few weeks after having a tumor removed from her colon, Marguerite suffered several severe complications that culminated in a general wound infection call peritonitis. She had three more operations in three weeks, but her condition continued to worsen because antibiotics failed to take effect. Her doctor finally threw up his hands, saying there was nothing more he could do – Marguerite needed a miracle.
So that’s exactly what family members, along with the Sisters of St. Anne in Ste Genevieve and parishioners, asked for. Two days after they had prayed to the venerable (and deceased) Mother Marie Anne Blondin to intercede and ask God to cure Marguerite, she started to recover.
As far as the Vatican was concerned, Marguerite’s case was a medical and religious miracle, which qualifies Mother Marie Anne Blondin for canonization, being only one miracle away from sainthood. Saint Pierre reports that at least five doctors and several theologians studied the medical documentation on behalf of the Vatican and concluded that Marguerite’s cure was medically unexplainable and, therefore, attributable to the prayers offered to Mother Marie Anne Blessed in a beatification ceremony on April 29 2001.
Dossey is another believer in the benefits of this type of distant prayer. He can rhyme off a litany of studies and reports that provide support. For example
- In a widely publicized study, cardiologist Randolph Byrd studied almost 400 patients admitted to the coronary-care unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Some were prayed for by home-prayer groups, others were not. All the men and women got medical care. In this randomized, double-blind study, neither the doctors and nurses nor the patients knew who would be the object of prayer. At discharge, those who had been prayed for were much less likely to need antibiotics or develop complications.
- At the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, researchers took blood samples from 32 volunteers, isolated their red blood cells (RBCS) and placed the samples in a room on the other side of the building. Then the researchers placed the RBCS in a solution designed to swell and burst them, a process that can be measured extremely accurately. Next the researchers asked the volunteers to pray for the preservation of some of the RBCS. To help them visualize, the researchers projected color slides of healthy RBCS. The praying significantly slowed the swelling and bursting of the RBCS.
- In 2001, The Journal of Reproductive health published a study from Columbia University in New York that examined 199 women at an in vitro fertilization clinic in Korea. It showed that women who were prayed for were twice as successful in conceiving.
How do you explain these apparent prayer-inspired recoveries? Scientists and theologians offer numerous possible theories. According to Lynch, for example, prayer and faith could cause some sort of spontaneous disease remission, “or various environmental factors could come together to overcome the onset of a disease or trauma temporarily,” he says.
These and other theories, however, don’t satisfy everyone. The bottom line is that no one knows for sure how prayer might work to cure the sick. For now, the phenomenon remains mysterious and unexplainable – at least to science as we know it. “ It is presumption to say that we know everything right now because let’s face it, we don’t, “ says Lynch.
But if we accept that prayer does heal, is it only those of a specific faith who can benefit? What about the nonbelievers? All people, no matter what their faith, respond to their health concerns with focused questions that are ‘spiritual” in nature and not necessarily religious in content, says Dr. John Vincent, teaching supervisor of pastoral services at Toronto General Hospital. People with serious illnesses may ask, “Why me?” or “What will this event or illness mean for me?” – questions that Vincent considers a form of prayer. “The focus of these individuals may not be on God but on the god within,”he says.
So even if nonreligious people say they don’t pray, they probably do look within and outside themselves to find answers surrounding life and death issues, says Vincent. “It seems that the answers come from within people, and yet, at the same time the answers come to people from somewhere beyond themselves – a source of energy and life that all people acknowledge as beyond ourselves,” he says.
For Dossey, this pause for prayer can affect a person’s health, whether God is in the loop or not. And such prayer may continue to form an integral part of our lives, he concludes, “Sept. 11 has redirected people into a transition period in human culture. We cannot order our personal lives – or even our world – without trying to bring a sense of spirituality and meaning to modern life”.
