Prayer and Healing: Is There Really a Connection?

In Christianity, along with many other religions, prayer for healing is a fundamental principle of belief.

There are many stories in the Christian Bible of Jesus and His apostles healing the sick and injured, even raising the dead, through prayer. Many people in the post-millenium world wonder if healing through prayer still exists today.

Prayer for healing clearly exists in the American culture today, evidenced by church prayer groups, television preachers claiming to heal through prayer, and the many internet prayer chat groups. Prayer has been called the most common complement to mainstream medicine, surpassing herbs, vitamins, and other remedies.

Until recently, the use of prayer in healing has been largely by faith and efficacy of prayer in healing anecdotal. Two studies, one in 1988 and again in 1999, indicated that intercessory or "distant" prayer done for people hospitalized for heart problems led to the patients needing less drugs and fewer breathing problems.

Earlier this year, a study was published that indicated the exact opposite. In this study of prayer and healing, the largest one and the most rigorously controlled, patients receiving intercessory or "distant" prayer without their knowledge had little or no difference to the ones not receiving prayer.

So does prayer heal or not?

Skeptics would say that trying to validate the supernatural with science is flawed and misguided from the beginning. And believers in prayer point out that it is useless to understand God's ways by experiments designed by humans. From a purely human, scientific viewpoint, it appears that prayer for healing is useless and nothing more than a device to perhaps comfort and palliate the ones praying.

From a Christian standpoint, the Bible does say "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." Matthew 21:22. Or in James 5:15 "And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up."

Is that the answer to prayer and healing? The one being healed must have enough faith? But that indicates that the person seeking healing is responsible for that healing, which goes against most traditional church teaching of prayer and healing.
Church history is full of examples of people being healed through prayer and other miraculous interventions. Perhaps these healings are to be considered gifts from God and not necessarily able to be measured in an empirical, scientific study of prayer and healing.

Another explanation that Christians usually employ involves the definition of "healing". Since God's view is eternal and much vaster than our mortal one, a person healed through prayer may have received the perfect healing, or death on earth and thus a new life in heaven. Or since God is involved in healing both body and soul, and the Bible is unclear which healing is referred to, perhaps God healed the soul in response to prayer , and not necessarily the body.

Scientists are unlikely to prove or disprove the efficacy of prayer in healing. Prayer, whether intercessory prayer for a stranger or intimate prayer for oneself or family member, is primarily a conversation with God. And a conversation with a Supreme Being is not going to be definable in human terms.

In the end, prayer and healing are going to remain one of the mysteries that must be taken on faith. Faith, according to the Bible, is "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." Hebrews 11:1.