Prayer and healing: Some researchers say it can help

According to an Indiana University team, prayer can help bring healing:

Researchers from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington recently conducted a study on the effects of praying directly with someone for healing. According to Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at IU and author of the study, "proximal intercessory prayer", as she calls it, can actually help to bring about healing.

Anyone familiar with the placebo effect can see why this might be, irrespective of issues around the supernatural or sectarian religion.

In some ways, those issues just get in the way. If you are a Christian, you might want to note that when Jesus healed the centurion's servant, he never asked whether the servant was a good Jew. He responded to the centurion's prayer for help, and that guy wasn't a Jew, though he was friendly to Jews.

More here on prayer and healing.