Latest Study Claims Prayers Can
Heal the Sick
The power of prayer really can help to heal the sick, an international study has
found - especially if the well-wisher is standing near the person they are
praying for.
Researchers say the vision and hearing of patients in their tests improved after
healing practitioners prayed for them.
One elderly woman who could not see a person's hand when they held two fingers
up in front of her face from a foot away is said to have been cured after a
healer placed their hands over her eyes and prayed for less than one minute.
The tests were carried out by a team from Indiana University, led by religious
studies Professor Candy Gunther Brown, who were looking into 'proximal prayer' -
or prayers near the patient.
However, experts at the National Secular Society branded the research 'highly
suspect.'
Terry Sanderson, president of the NSS, said: 'this is a highly suspect study,
based on vague results in places where checking would be impossible. There is a
quite obvious religious motivation which undermines its impartiality.
'The fact is that all properly conducted studies of healing through prayer have
shown it to be ineffective or even, in one instance, counterproductive.'
Professor Brown and her colleagues carried out the study as part of a research
program on the cultural significance and experience of spiritual healing
practices.
She said: 'We chose to investigate 'proximal' prayer because that is how a lot
of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic
Christians around the world.'
The team studied the impact of 'healers' on disadvantaged people with vision or
hearing impairments in Mozambique and Brazil.
They evaluated 14 rural Mozambican subjects who reported poor hearing and 11 who
said they had failing sight, both before and after the subjects received
proximal intercessory prayer (PIP).
An audiometer and vision charts were used for a direct measure of improvement
rather than relying on whether the people said they felt better.
The researchers found that two subjects with impaired hearing reduced the
threshold at which they could detect sound by 50 decibels and three subjects had
their tested vision improve from 20/400 or worse to 20/80 or better.
Professor Brown said one subject, an elderly Mozambican woman named Maryam,
initially reported that she could not see a person's hand with two upraised
fingers from a distance of one foot.
A healing practitioner put her hand on Maryam's eyes, hugged her and prayed for
less than a minute then held five fingers in front of her. Afterwards she was
able to count them and even read the 20/125 line on a vision chart. A follow-up
study by the researchers in Brazil revealed similar findings.
Professor Brown said her study, which will be published in the September issue
of the Southern Medical Journal, focused on the clinical effects of PIP and did
not attempt to explain the mechanisms by which the improvements occurred.
But Mr Sanderson, from the NSS, added: 'this study, as it describes itself, is
unscientific and therefore of no worth beyond its use as religious propaganda.
'It exploits the desperation of people living in extreme poverty who are unable
to access proper medical care in order to bring them under the influence of
these Pentecostal churches.'