The Healing Power of Prayer
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.
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Seriously that's all prayer is
You cannot base a claim on anecdotal evidence. Your claims could be due to confirmation bias . Plus, as has already been stated, just because some people get better does not mean that your god did it.
Of course I do think that modern medicine often overlooks the power of the human mind in the healing process (I am not saying that you can think or pray a cancerous growth away), but I have been hospitalised for long periods of time (due to spinal cord injuries, and complications), and my recovery period tends to improve if I am able to think positively, and really challenge the physiotherapy and other specialties. On times where perhaps through depression I have not been able to hold the same positive views then the process can take longer, and have less satisfactory results. But I know that the difference is down to me, and my own attitude, and I do not rely on a mythical supernatural entity. To try to ascribe the positive results to a supernatural entity does a disservice to individual effort. If I get better it is due to the skill of my medicos, and the attitude of my own mind. To suggest otherwise is to lie to your patients.
The medical profession is limited. The rest is up to you! I can testify to prayer healing as the doctors I encountered were not able to diagnose, nor was my family doctor aware of the pain I was in until it was too late and I ended up in the hospital for an overnight stay. When I got out, it was up to me to look up ways to help myself and prayer was a big part of it. As long as they collect their money , they are happy, they can't
follow you around all the time and even then, half the time you can't get an appointment. Keep up with the prayer!!! alayna, nurse.
So if prayer cured some of the good doctor 's patients, did it kill the ones who died? Why did he listen to some prayers and completely ignore others?
I smell a rat.
He was persecuted something horrible for his faith in Gd but he stood by his faith. As a semi-retired nurse I have worked with many doctors , some too heinous to mention, while this one particular one was from another country...maybe thats why he was soo nice, prayed with my daughter asking Gd to heal her wound and then did a procedure on her foot. He knelt down, right there in the office so they would be at the same eye level and called on Gd to help heal her.
PS She has never had another problem with this issue. Gd is real. Prayer does not heal..Gd does though. Times in my life he has healed me and other times not. I still love to pray to Him and feel His loving arms around me and my family. If we were all honest with ourselves and others wed all admit they we are were we are in life because someone prayed for us!
I have experienced healing through the power of prayer myself as a patient and I have witnessed many people and even animals being healed by the power of prayer. I have a very close friend who died at the age of 10. He was placed in the morgue, had rigor mortis, and through prayer, he was revived or raised from the dead. His mother is a Medical Doctor and his father is a Pharmacist. His mother prayed him back to life in the morgue. This is a documented case. When you're rigor mortis, you're pretty dead. His case is not unusual but very common. Many Physicians, Nurses, and Scientists believe in the power of God, prayer, and healing and have witnessed the miraculous.
I believe in healing but not even Jesus could raise the dead.
if it is documented then you can provide a link to that documentation.
Yeah...I'm going to ahead and agree with the physician on this one. Never, ever underestimate the power of faith on the human body.
There may be a supernatural reason for improvement, but there doesn't have to be. Perhaps there aren't conclusive studies on the healing power of prayer , but there ARE studies on the health of people who have hope/faith/optimism vs people who just accept that they're going to die.
Psychologists have found that while self-proclaimed pessimists have a more realistic view of the world, optimists live, on average, a decade longer. Someone who prays for their body to heal may not be realistic, but their optimism is shown to have a medical advantage.
If praying gives a patient hope, or gives them a brighter outlook on their situation, it definitely falls under the "optimistic" category.
This optimism has an effect on cortisol levels, their amphetamine levels, and their endorphin levels. This leads to lower stress on the central nervous system. I fail to see how this isn't advantageous to a person's well being.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/635292.stm
http://www.fitconnect.com/fitness-tips/OzzieOcean/Optimism-can-increase-your-lifespan
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119470823/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
However at that point it is not specifically the prayer that is helping... it is the positive thinking. Praying for someone who does not believe that prayer can heal will not help them, where as other ways of keeping their spirits up will.
Of course you're right, but I don't advocate prayer (or any religious activity) based on the belief that it's for God's benefit. If God does not exist, then praying, at the very least, inspires hope in a sick person, which can be medically advantageous. But if God does exist, I tend to think that prayer is still for our benefit more than his. And maybe this is true because scientifically prayer seems to help the healing process.
Also, I do think there is some benefit to family and friends praying for a sick person, especially if the person sick prays with their family. Serious illness is a huge stressor, not only to the person ill, but to their family as well. Perhaps the rest of the family isn't ill, but they have nothing but worry to go home to. Taking care of a sick family member is, in my opinion, often more stressful than being sick yourself. If a family is not hopeful or optimistic in any way, then I'm pretty sure the family member who is ill will be able to tell - and that won't inspire less stress in them any time soon.
I'm not saying there aren't other ways to say positive, but I do think prayer is medically useful.
"God did it" instead of "I don't know how it happened" Anything is possible. However there is a real difference to the two answers that has real implications for people's health. If the default is "miracle / God" then no new research needs to be done, we just have to organize to have more people praying at hospitals and clinics. If the default is "I don't know" then we should document everything about the case we can and see to it that more research is done.
Personally, I'm for more research.
Your arguement goes: I pray with my patitents, some of them have unexplainable recoveries, therefore this proves that prayer heals.
The conclusion that prayer heals is not supported by the "evidence" - I use quotes around the word "evidence" because there really isn't any. There is nothing that indicates that it was the prayer - to the exclusion of all other possibilities - that directly resulted in the cure. There are many points and objections I could raise, but I'll limit myself to the following:
What aree the worldwide rates of spontaneous, unexplainable cures for the illnesses your mairacle patients suffered from? Worldwide, how many of these miracle recoveries involved prayer? If prayer was involved in a majority of them, then you might be onto something.
What about the patients who chose not to pray? What were their outcomes? Did any of them have incurable conditions? If so, did they get better? Why? If their conditions were not incurable by conventional medicine, did they get better? Why?
For the majority of your patients who had treatable conditions and who improved, do you credit the prayer or the treatment they received for causing the improvement? If it was the prayer, why prescribe treatments at all? If it was the treatment why bother with the prayer? Or does prayer only work on untreatable conditons - ones that would require a miracle for improvement or cure?
Please be careful to not make the logical error of assuming that if something cannot be explained, it MUST be caused by something paranormal or supernatural. After all, not so long ago doctors could not explain the causes of disease, but now we know that they are NOT caused by unbalanced humors, malevolent spirits or witches
The doctor's claim to have witnessed miracles exemplifies my point about confirmation bias and irrationality. His belief that recoveries he can't explain must be miracles and answers to prayers begs the question. Just because you don't know how something happened doesn't mean it must have happened miraculously. We make mistakes in diagnoses and prognoses, and are ignorant of many bodily processes. There is something disingenous about turning mistakes and ignorance into miracles by declaring them to be so.