Can Prayer Heal?

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I would like to weight in on the controversy regarding whether or not prayer heals.

As a board certified family physician, I complete about 5,000 patient visits per year. I ask each patient if they’d like me to pray with them before we finish a visit. In the past seven years, I can only recall three patients who have refused my offer. That’s how long I’ve been incorporating prayer into my healing regimen. In that time, I have witnesses several extraordinary medical recoveries that can only be defined as miracles. In each case, I can only attribute the healing miracle to the power of prayer. How else to explain a complete turnaround from grave illness to a clean bill of health without any known scientific rationale or empirical evidence? My answer: prayer heals.

I won’t argue with anyone who calls my belief in the healing power of prayer irrational, as opposed to rational scientific thought. It is clearly not a provable mathematical formula such as: 2+2=4. Irrational beliefs cannot be proven with a science experiment, but must be accepted through that process we call faith. There’s the rub! We can’t download or text message or e-mail a miracle with our latest technology or cutting edge gadgets.