Prayer relieves pain

"In An Extensive clinical study of healing, personal prayer caused an overall 20 percent decrease in the amount of pain experienced by patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Patients also reported less swelling in their joints, greater mobility, and a heightened sense of spiritual peace," reports Tara Yeaman, writing for Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology.

The study was conducted at the Arthritis/Pain Treatment Center in Clearwater, Florida, by Dr. Dale Matthews. It also examined the effect of distant intercessory prayer for 44 patients, all of whom were told that people were praying for them (even those in the control group, who were not actually being prayed for).

According to researchers, "The distant prayer showed no additional effects." Research News' report continues, "In the past, clinical studies on prayer have focused on distant intervention, a group of religious people praying for patients from a distance. Matthews claims that such studies call for an enormous leap of faith on the part of the medical community.

" 'It just sounds like magic. Medical science has not come up with a medical explanation for the distant prayer phenomenon,' explains Matthews. ...

"In the clinical study, again, the results defied medical science. Although the patients reported less pain and more motion in the affected joints, [there did not appear to be a change in their physical condition].

"It raises the possibility that perhaps the effect of prayer is not going through the inflammatory mechanism," says Matthews, "but instead is happening at a more cerebral level."

"Prayer Study Returns Positive Results"
May 2001

Commuters pray; boy saved

The family of Andrew Hayden, an eleven-year-old Middle School student in Taunton, Massachusetts, believes that prayer saved his life. Andrew was playing basketball with a friend when the ball bounced into the street. The boy made it across the street and got the ball safely. But on his return trip, he failed to see an oncoming Jeep and was hit. Severely injured, Andrew was rushed to the Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

Jack Leddy, the owner of a printing shop in Taunton, learned about the accident and put up a sign along a heavily traveled commuter road that read "Prayers work—Say them for Andrew Hayden." He says that strangers stopped to ask who Andrew was and to assure him that they would pray. The boy's family is convinced that the child is alive today because of those prayers.

Forgiving one's adversaries

"Sacred Literature is replete with suggestions and admonitions that forgiveness is a practice that leads to both emotional healing and spiritual growth," write Frederic Luskin and Dana Curtis in California Lawyer: Luskin is a senior fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, and the author of Forgive for Good (to be published by HarperCollins). Dana Curtis is an attorney mediator in private practice in California.

"It may be reasonably asserted that learning to forgive may be one of life's most demanding and meaningful tasks," they continue, "because forgiveness asks the offended person to reappraise both the hurt and its source. This is a significant challenge, and in [the United States'] adversarial legal system it is too often ignored."

"Forgiveness"
December 2000

A NEW OPENNESS TO SPIRITUAL HEALING

One of the very first indicators that interest in spiritual healing is growing is how easy it has become to find indicators of the growth. If someone asked where there wasn't evidence of an interest in spiritual healing, that would be the harder question to answer.

The media are publishing more and more stories of healing. This might be called "soft data." And there's quite a bit of it. Bookstores, for instance, have arranged, and rearranged, and rearranged yet again their shelving to accommodate the vast increase in the number of books now published on self-help, religion, spirituality. Newspapers are even adding full-time religion writers to their staffs. The wall Street Journal recently published a feature called "The Prayer Cure," which discussed how many churches and synagogues across the country are giving more attention to what they call an ancient belief that worship can help fight disease.

For hard data, there are surveys, polls, research studies. The National Institute of Health Care Research has done quite a few studies on spiritual healing issues. They've shown recently that 82 percent of Americans say they believe in the healing power of personal prayer. And that 77 percent go on to say they believe that God can cure people with serious illnesses.

One of the more interesting places to find out about spirituality and healing is in medical schools. In a listing of accredited medical schools, where three of them taught a course on spirituality and health in 1995, 68 of them now are teaching a course—and that's over half of the accredited schools. That's a significant shift.

Perhaps what stands out the most is the fact that it's becoming increasingly easy for people to be open about their search for spirituality. For over 25 years, the polls have showed that the belief in God and in religion, as well as a place for prayer in one's life, has not fluctuated. It has remained in the 90th percentile or greater for those 25 years. So while the basic beliefs have not changed, the openness that people have and their insistence on having spiritual components to their healing interventions seem to have changed. And the access is becoming easier and easier.

Adapted From Sentinel Radio