Faith healing: Does being close enough matter? Study says yes.

In “Faith Healing: Study Finds Proximity Could Be Key To Success Of Healing Prayer”, Medical News Today reports ((07 Aug 2010))

Findings reported from a new international study of healing prayer suggest that prayer for another person's healing just might help -- especially if the one praying is physically near the person being prayed for.

Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, led the study of "proximal intercessory prayer" for healing. It is available online and will be published in the September 2010 issue of the Southern Medical Journal.

The study, titled "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique," measured surprising improvements in vision and hearing in economically disadvantaged areas where eyeglasses and hearing aids are not readily available.

"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," Brown said. "These constitute the fastest-growing Christian subgroups globally, with some 500 million adherents, and they are among those most likely to pray expectantly for healing."

For more, go here.
Read more »

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.

Prayer: Are studies of intercessory prayer an insult to God?

In Chapter 8 of The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I talked about an experiment in praying for the sick that didn't work out too well (the Benson study), and the reasons why. In Answering the New Atheism, philosophers Scott Hahn and Ben Wiker also comment, from a philosophical perspective.

First, they note, there is a big difference between studying a cause that is thought to be a natural cause and studying a cause that is thought to be a person. A natural cause must act under the right conditions, but a person (or Person!) hears you and can choose whether to act or not. It is the difference, for example, between using the laws of gravity to pilot an airplane and persuading the boss to let you buy an airplane for the business. Now, the philosophers say,

The error of the double-blind prayer experiment is that it treats God like some kind of natural cause rather than as a personal, rational Being. In doing so, God is being unjustly subjected to a humiliating attempt to manipulate Him by an experiment. In short, the experiment is an insult, and any rational being, superhuman or not, would treat it as such. That does not, of course, mean that praying for healing itself is an insult; we are speaking only of framing such prayer in the context of a manipulative experiment. (p. 57)

That, of course, has always been the difficulty with studying the effects of intercessory prayer as if they were like the effects of Pill A vs. Pill B.

See also:

Are prayer studies a waste of government money? No way!

Prayer studies: From one-way skepticism deliver us!

Prayer: Intercessory prayer works, according to study

Prayer: Intercessory prayer works, according to study

According to a news brief in Science Daily (March 15, 2007),

David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College of Human Services at Arizona State University, conducted a comprehensive analysis of 17 major studies on the effects of intercessory prayer -- or prayer that is offered for the benefit of another person -- among people with psychological or medical problems. He found a positive effect.
"There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered for the benefit of another person," said Hodge, a leading expert on spirituality and religion. "Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered on behalf of another yields positive results."

Apparently, Hodge's work is featured in the March 2007 edition of Social Work Practice . He doesn't suggest that prayer alone will work in situations such as depression.

Most churches that offer healing prayer find that it provides at least some help for sufferers, especially with chronic conditions. It only rarely reverses the course of serious illnesses.

It would be interesting to relate the power of prayer to phenomena like the quantum Zeno effect.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).