Prayer as a Healing Force

You can't go through years of education here in the U.S. without being exposed to the idea that everything is physical. If you have a metaphysical, cosmic experience, well, that's just a chemical reaction. If you have a born-again experience, lithium will take care of it! We come out of our schools with no appreciation of the mind or even the presence of consciousness.

In reality, you can't find anything in the body that defines consciousness. It's hard to find anything that you can pinpoint as "the mind." It's time we admitted that nothing in chemistry or physics has even a remote bearing on consciousness. As David Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of California at Santa Cruz said in a recent article in Scientific American, it's time to bite the bullet and admit that consciousness is another force altogether, on a par with matter and energy.

When we talk of prayer we are talking about distant manifestations of consciousness. To talk in this way is to break some kind of taboo. We can accept the power of the mind in affecting bodily processes, but to talk interpersonally--that my consciousness can have an effect on other persons and events--is a major paradigm shift.

The first major shift in our thinking about health came in the mid 1800s when we began to view the body scientifically and mechanically. You identify what's not working right and fix it. The second era brought in the connection between mind and body. We began to talk about psychosomatic illness. The third era introduces the idea of non-local medicine.

Local medicine believes that my mind is localized in my brain. Non-local medicine says that my mind may not be localized to my brain and body or even to the present moment. One way to define intercessory prayer is as a "positive, distant, non-local manifestation of conciousness." This includes born-again Christians' prayers as well as the Buddhists'. It can include rejoicing, talking, silence, be addressed to God or to the universe. How you pray is up to you.

People get upset with this kind of broad definition. Most people in this culture define prayer as talking aloud to oneself or to some white, male parent figure, usually in the English language. But there are many cultures and religions with prayer practices. Unless you want to disenfranchize lots of people, we need a broader definition. And interestingly, the studies on prayer show no correlation between religious affiliation and the effects of prayer in the laboratory. The factors that seems to work are love, compassion, empathy and deep caring.

The most famous prayer study was conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. He took 393 people who had been admitted to the hospital with a heart attack. All of the subjects received the same high-tech, state-of-the-art coronary care, but half were also prayed for by name by prayer groups around the country. No one knew who was being prayed for--the patients, the doctors, the nurses. The prayed-for group had fewer deaths, faster recovery, less intubations, and used fewer potent medications.

If the subject of this study had been a new medication instead of prayer, this would have been considered a medical breaththrough. Up until then, most medical people had considered prayer a nice thing. It didn't hurt much, but they certainly didn't consider it a matter of life and death.

One of the complaints about Byrd's and others' studies is that they are not rigorously done. In writing my books I looked at all of the studies, some 160 of them. While it is true that some have problems, many are fanatically precise and admirably designed. Two-thirds show that the impact of distant prayer is statistically significant.

Some scientists have talked of the "problem of extraneous prayer." How do we know that those cardiac patients in the control group weren't being prayed for by friends and family? People often pray in a crisis. Now, I for one am glad that this problem of extraneous prayer exists. If I have a heart attack, I want to have a lot of this problem! But for research purposes, scientists have gotten around this by doing studies of the growth of bacteria in test tubes. That way you guarantee the purity of the control group. And you know what? The prayed-for test tube also shows a reduction in the growth of bacteria. This kind of study might seem outrageous but this is where precise science can be done.

Some people have told me, "You can't afford to talk about prayer stuff like this. You'll make people feel guilty. What if someone is on this wonderful spiritual path but the pathology report comes back positive? They may feel shame and blame and guilt. They may feel they haven't prayed hard enough or been spiritual enough. So don't bring it up and make them feel uncomfortable."

I think we who believe in the connection between body, mind and spirit have to take this problem very seriously. In some circles there is the belief that if you stay on a spiritual path everything will turn out all right. There's even a book that says that you'll never die if you achieve spiritual perfection. So if you get sick, that means you had some more spiritual work to do.

We need to say emphatically that there is not a one-to-one correlation. One's well-being is not just as simple as being happy and being aware or praying properly. Any model we create about the relationship between spiritual achievement and good health has to account for two groups of people. I call them the Healthy Reprobates and the Unhealthy Saints. One of the oldest men on earth lives in Iraq; he's at least 120 years old and drinks and smokes all the time. And history is full of very spiritual people who were sick all the time. In the Bible, Job was described as perfect, and look what happened to him. The Buddha died of food poisoning.

We should understand that prayer does have an impact, but it can't save us from death or guarantee we won't get sick. There's no historical or clinical evidence that this is true. I would say to you though, don't wait for the results of more double-blind studies to pray. We can stand to have more extraneous prayer in this world of ours.

Visualization, Affirmation and Prayer

As Bernie Siegel, M.D., notes in Love, Medicine and Miracles medical statistics can lead both doctors and patients to assume the worst, at a time when hope is essential. Though the statistical odds may be 99 to 1 against recovery from a particular severe illness, there is no way of knowing in advance which one of the next hundred people will be the survivor. Or which two, or three, or more.

Similarly, when a doctor gives a prognosis (predicted outcome) on any case of any kind, he or she is making what amounts to an educated guess. The truth is that no physician ever knows the course of a patient's healing process in advance. It is the doctor's responsibility to share the information he or she has, based on scientific research as well as personal experience. But all patients should remember that each case stands on its own, and its outcome is not dependent on something that happened elsewhere to other people, no matter how large the statistical sample and no matter how compelling the research documentation.

This applies whether we are talking about a surgeon forecasting the life-expectancy of a cancer patient or a chiropractor predicting the length of time a patient will need to recover from severe lower back pain. Patients should, if at all humanly possible, never assume that they are limited to the time-frame in a doctor's prognosis. Otherwise, the prognosis becomes a straightjacket at best, a death sentence at worst.

But just as negative thinking can limit us, positive thinking can mobilize our healing powers. When this occurs, the effect goes beyond the facilitation of physical healing; an enhanced sense of personal purpose and meaning can emerge as a byproduct.

One of the pioneer works documenting the power of the mind in healing is Getting Well Again, a 1978 book by O. Carl Simonton, M.D., Stephanie Mathews-Simonton, and James Creighton. Dr. Simonton, a radiation oncologist, got his first inkling of the power of the mind in healing early in his career when, as a physician at Travis Air Force Base in California, he ran a research study of 152 cancer patients, and found that "a positive attitude toward treatment was a better predictor of response to treatment than was the severity of the disease." This led Simonton in a new direction, in which he combined visualization exercises and counseling with the standard radiation therapy, and found that many of his cancer patients achieved outcomes far better than expected.

After learning a progressive relaxation exercise, in which they mentally relaxed their bodies step by step, the patients visualized their cancers being overwhelmed by "tiny bullets of energy." Then they pictured their weakened and dying cancer cells being flushed out through their livers and kidneys by their own white blood cells. Simonton's stunning results generated great controversy within the medical profession, since they confounded the then-current conventional wisdom that cancer was something that "happens to people," something over which patients can have little or no personal control.

Simonton described his initial results as follows: "In the last four years, we have treated 159 patients with a diagnosis of medically incurable malignancy. Sixty-three of the patients are alive, with an average survival time of 24.4 months since the diagnosis. Life expectancy for this group, based on national norms, is 12 months . . . With the patients in our study who have died, their average survival time was 20.3 months. In other words, the patients in our study who are alive have lived, on the average, two times longer than patients who received medical treatment alone. Even those patients in the study who have died still lived one and one-half times longer than the control group." After four years, the status of the patients still living was as follows:

Number of Patients--- Percent
No evidence of disease 14 -----------------22.2
Tumor regressing 12 -----------------19.1
Disease stable 17----------------- 27.1
New tumor growth 20----------------- 31.8


Simonton reminds us to "keep in mind that 100 percent of these patients were considered medically incurable." These findings, which were published in the Medical Journal of Australia, stood the test of time. As detailed in Simonton's 1992 book The Healing Journey, follow-up reports were obtained on 98 percent of the patients in the original study, and their survival times were twice those achieved at the world's leading cancer centers. Skeptics have argued that Simonton, a man whose reputation has been built on using the power of the mind to facilitate physical healing in cancer patients, may not qualify as a credible and unbiased observer. And Simonton himself admits that due to limited funds, his initial study lacked "the randomization, and a matched control population, necessary for maximum scientific credibility."

At the time of Simonton's initial studies, no scientifically air-tight research existed to demonstrate the powerful effect of the mind in surviving cancer. There is now such a study. In 1989 a controlled, randomized study on women with advanced breast cancer was published by researchers at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, led by Dr. David Spiegel of Stanford. They reported that rates of survival among those who received counseling were twice the national average, and their statistics matched Simonton's percentages almost exactly. This study was conducted by researchers who did not expect that counseling would have any effect on cancer survival rates.

While Spiegel's research utilized counseling rather than visualization, the results were comparable, and the central point had been made-our thoughts and emotions are intimately related to our health status.

In gradually increasing numbers, physicians and other health care providers have incorporated healing imagery into their work. Psychiatrist Gerald Epstein, author of Healing Visualizations: Creating Health Through Imagery, found that his patients, even those with physical illnesses, responded best when he prescribed imagery rather than medicine. This approach clearly goes far beyond the usual definitions of psychiatric practice, and the results Epstein describes in his book likewise transcend usual expectations.

Epstein gave a patient with warts an imagery exercise in which the man was to remove his face, turn it inside out, wash it in a crystal-clear, fresh-flowing mountain stream, hang it out to dry in the sun, and then turn it right side out and put it back on, with no warts remaining. This visualization was to be done four times a day for three minutes each time, for a period of three weeks. At the end of that time, the patient's warts were gone.