Can Prayer Heal?
Human beings have always prayed for themselves and their loved ones. All the great religions of the world have stressed the importance of prayer for healing.
The Buddha said that prayer keeps us free of disease. The Rig Veda stressed the role of prayer in keeping us free from disease and imbecility. Jesus’s power of healing through prayer is legendary. Hazrat Mohammad (PBUH), the prophet of Islam, said that we should pray and donate to be free of disease. He said, “Allah hasn’t sent any disease for which there is no remedy. When the right remedy is used, the disease disappears.” Sometimes this remedy is medicine, other times it is prayer.
Praying is a natural human tendency. A survey conducted by the University of Rochester found that 85% of people pray for swift recovery from a disease. A 1996 Time/CNN poll found that 82% of Americans believe that prayer can cure serious illness, 73% believe that praying for others can cure illness, and 64% want their physicians to pray with them. A 1995 survey by the Journal of American Medical Association found that 43% of American doctors personally prayed for their patients.
Praying for others is equally effective as praying for ourselves. Nowadays, a growing number of studies are adding scientific weight to this intuitive knowledge. Studies have shown prayer, distant healing or ‘distant intentions’ can positively affect the outcomes of everything from heart disease and AIDS to infertility, anxiety and depression.
For example, in a study conducted in Paris, a group of 120 terminally ill patients were divided into two groups of 60 each. One group was prayed for, the other wasn’t. Members of the group that was prayed for lived 4 months longer than members of the other group on average. 5 of them survived miraculously.
In another study conducted in 1988, Dr. Randolph Byrd of the San Francisco General Medical Centre randomly assigned 393 patients of the coronary care unit to two groups: the intercessory prayer group (192 patients) and to a control group (201 patients). While hospitalized, the first group received prayer and the control group did not. Amazingly, patients of the prayer group left the hospital earlier than the control group, and needed one-fifth the amount of antibiotics. Complications recurred in just one third of the cases.
Dr. Daniel Banor compiled a list of 131 studies that concluded that prayer and religious faith are effective for healing. (Complementary Research Center, 1990). Due to this growing body of evidence, prayer has been included in the curriculum of more than 50 Medical Schools across the United States.