'DOES PRAYER REALLY HELP?' WHAT DO THE MEN OF SCIENCE SAY?

In the book 'Healing Research' by Dr Daniel J. Benor over 150 controlled studies of (prayerful) healing have been published. But as this book was initially published ten years ago in 1992, I would prefer to relate more up-to-date research into healing through the power of prayer.

 Because the rules that govern healing are so little understood and the energies used apparently so illusive, mainstream scientists have been afraid to take on the challenge to discover, or even test, the efficacy of prayer upon a sufferer. However, as we develop more sensitive and highly effective monitoring equipment, so the 'sceptical' mind is being forced to accept that there are things greater in heaven and earth than we mere mortals can currently understand.

 I was asked (challenged?) to write this article by Ed Le Quesne (after previously taking him to task for his 'tongue in cheek' remark to a piece in the September issue of the Jersey Methodist entitled ‘Scientific test of prayer?') So, here goes… 

Last November I gave a talk for the Jersey Cancer Help Centre charity at the General Hospital entitled 'Healing - the Scientific Evidence'. In it, I was able to produce sufficient details to illustrate the factual existence, of the power of 'purposeful intent' i.e. prayer, upon the condition of the sufferer. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'prayer' as being a 'solemn request to God or object of worship; make devout supplication; to beseech earnestly for or on behalf of a person. 

It was in the 1960's that a behavioural psychologist named Dr William Braud became interested in the biochemistry of memory and learning and in particular the way that people could influence their own muscular reaction and heart rate by purposeful mental direction. In 1971 he began research into telepathy and consciousness. By 1990 he had become the leading expert in this field. His experiments would include placing his subjects in a ganzfeld environment, i.e. one where all sensory input is cut out, to test the ability of one group of people to affect the mental state of a second group of people sometimes many miles away. The outcome of these experiments when combined with his others studies resulted in a success rate of 82%. Apparently, the odds against these results coming from pure chance were a phenomenal ten billion to one. It was these studies that led Braud to conclude that human intention could be used as an extraordinarily potent healing force.

 One of Braud's associates was psychologist and researcher Dr Fred Sicher. He had for a long time wanted to do some research into distant healing, but he needed a sceptic, down-to-earth scientist to work with if his experiments were to be acceptable by the outside world. He found such a person in orthodox psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Targ. Targ was not at all well up on prayer. She came from a scientific background where the only god was the scientific method for all things and therefore proved to be just the sort of person to head up this new study. As a daughter of a Russian scientist living in America, she had once visited the Soviet Academy of Science and been fascinated by their work in parapsychology so she decided to accept Sicher's offer. She would see if prayer and distant healing had any affect on her patients with advanced AIDS. She took over four months to find her forty assorted healers across the country. Some were Christian orientated, some Jewish, some Buddhist, a North American Medicine Man, a Ch'i Gong master from China and others who rang bells, chanted and even a few who worked with crystals. The only criteria Targ and Sicher maintained was that each healer believed that what they were doing would work. They divided twenty terminally ill patients in half with both groups still receiving the usual orthodox treatment, but ten of them receiving, in addition, healing. Neither doctors nor patients knew who was being healed and who wasn’t. The only people who knew were the healers themselves as they were supplied with a photo, name and a T-cell count of the patient concerned. Each healer treated every patient in turn in order to test the healing aspect of the experiment rather than the particular individual giving the healing. During the six months of the experiment, Elizabeth Targ saw 40% of her patients in the control group die. But all ten patients in the healing group were not only still alive, but had become healthier on the basis of their own reports and that of medical evaluations. Targ didn't believe the results and decided to do the experiment again, but with much tighter protocols and forty patients instead of twenty. This time she wanted to see if distant healing could slow down the progression of AIDS. Could the healers bring about fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improve T-cell levels, less medical intervention, and improved psychological well-being? Six months later the results again startled her. The treated group were healthier on every parameter; significantly fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalisations, fewer days in hospital, fewer AIDS-defining illnesses and significantly lower severity of disease. Only two of the treated group had developed any new AIDS-defining illnesses against twelve in the control group and significantly more improvement in moods on psychological tests were registered with the healed group than that with the control. Targ continues her studies to this day, although I have heard that she has recently discovered she has cancer. Some prayers her way would not come amiss! Her studies along with those of many others today show that when individuals have the intention to pray for those who are sick, those patients can have a better recovery experience.

 Intention and consciousness appears to be the secret behind the effect of distant (prayerful) healing as shown by the following very recent work in this field. 

A professor of engineering at Princeton University, Robert Jahn, contacted psychologist Brenda Dunne from the University of Chicago to attempt the impossible. Jahn had developed a machine called a Random Event Generator (REG) which was driven by an electronic noise source controlled by something similar to the white noise you hear between stations on the radio. This is the sound of random electrons through the ether. The beauty of this machine was that it could send out random strings of positive and negative pulses. Statistically, under normal working conditions, over time you would expect 50% positive and 50% negative pulses. So they set up laboratory tests with the most refined scientific protocols and failsafe devices. A positive pulse would show up on the computer as a 1, a negative pulse as a 0. The machine was set to run continuously day and night, week in and week out with all the data being analysed and mean graphs of the peaks and troughs (1's and 0's) being recorded. Volunteer subjects were then brought into the room next door to the machine and asked to tell the machine mentally to register either a 1 or a 0 dependant on the throw of a coin. Jahn and Dunne completed 5,000 studies before they took any of the data and fed it to the computer. What they expected to see was a series of graphs showing 50% 1’s and 50% 0’s because this was the accepted state of pure chance. However, the two types of intention i.e. thinking of 1’s or thinking of 0’s, had each gone in the opposite direction. The red graph, indicating the 1’s had veered to the right of the chance average point, whereas the green graph, indicating the 0’s had veered to the left of the chance average point. Somehow, the participants had been able to influence the random movement of a machine simply by an act of will.

Late last year early in the morning another Random Event Generator, which had been quietly working away randomly choosing 1’s and 0’s and producing its usual unambiguous 50% chance graph, suddenly jumped way over into the negative zone below the chance average point. There was no test being carried out at the time. Nobody was in the room with it and there was no initial reason for its reaction except, perhaps, the date. In America, it was the morning of Tuesday September 11^th.

Other studies on the Positive Effect of Religion on Health:

 1 . American Journal of Public Health. 1997.

 Study reports the results of a 28-year follow up study of 5,000 adults involved in the Berkeley Human Population Laboratory Scheme. Mortality for persons attending religious services once a week or more often was almost 25% lower than for persons attending religious services less frequently; for women, the mortality rate was reduced by 35%.

 2. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 1998.

 The relationship between religious activities and blood pressure was examined in a 6 year prospective study of 4,000 older adults. Among those subjects who attended religious services once a week or more and prayed once a day or more, the likelihood of diastolic hypertension was 40% lower than among those who attended services and prayed only occasionally.

 3. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 1997. Findings suggest that those who attend church frequently have stronger immune systems than less-frequent attenders and may help explain why both better mental and better physical health are characteristic of frequent church attenders.

 4. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1998.

Found that depressed patients who had a strong intrinsic religious faith recovered over 70% faster from depression than those with less strong faith. 

5. American Journal of Public Health. 1998.

In a 5 year study of 1,931 older residents of Marin County, California, people who attended religious services were 36% less likely to die during the follow up period.

 6. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1990.

 Reported that among 33 elderly woman hospitalised with hip fracture, greater religiousness was associated with less depression and longer walking distances at the time of hospital discharge.

 7. My own somewhat amateurish bit of research. September 2002.

Scanning through the Methodist Hymns & Psalms hymn book one Sunday morning during the offering I happened to realise that Charles Wesley was 81 years old when he died. I began to wonder about the age of other hymn writers and how their ages might compare to the life expectancy of that period. So over the next few days I went through the 823 hymns in my own hymn book and discovered that the average age of all lyricists from 1600 to 1938 was 69. By researching further, I discovered that the overall average life expectancy during the same period was only 35. However, if you were to survive up to the age of fifteen then your life expectancy rose dramatically to 51. Excluding the fact that many hymn writers may have come from the more “well off” in society, it is still remarkable that this particular group of people should live, on average, eighteen years longer than was generally expected.