Is Prayer Good for Your Health?

As 2007 drew to a close, news media across the country reported on the usual holiday collection of medical miracles -- stories that almost always end with patients and family members giving credit to the healing power of prayer.

One survivor, a Christian heavy-metal vocalist who was struck in the neck in December's notorious Colorado church shootings, is now recovering, say his friends and fans, with the aid of prayer vigils throughout the United States and Europe.

And Christmas week, a 46-year-old Beach City, Ohio, surrogate mother, who had originally been thought to be carrying only one fetus, delivered a set of healthy twins after a difficult pregnancy. Her niece, the egg donor, announced that the double birth was the result of prayers she had secretly offered for months.

Arising partly out of religious belief and partly out of frustration with high-tech medicine, millions of prayers cross the lips of patients, family members, and even doctors and nurses each day in America's hospitals and examining rooms.

That has prompted a post-2000 wave of research aimed at determining what, if anything, all that praying accomplishes: Can it directly improve patients' health? Does it simply soothe? What happens if the patients aren't told they are being prayed for? And what if they do know -- can patients be harmed by prayer? The answers found so far don't seem to be making anyone feel much better.

Say two prayers and call me in the morning

A 1998 Harvard Medical School survey estimated that 35 percent of Americans pray for good health and that 69 percent of those who pray find it "very helpful" -- a bigger percentage than felt their visits to doctors had been very helpful. A much larger study conducted by the National Institutes of Health in 2002 found 43 percent of people in the United States pray for their own health, and 24 percent seek the prayers of others. Most strikingly, 73 percent of critical-care nurses in a 2005 national survey said they use prayer in their work.

Such results are no big surprise. Most Americans are religious believers and can recount for you any number of stories in which prayer appeared to heal. The highly respected Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University has even set up an "intensive prayer unit" to capture whatever benefits it might provide.

For medical prayer to have an effect, no actual divine or supernatural intervention is necessary; belief alone may give a psychological boost to a recovering patient. Any doctor or scientist wishing to lay bare the healing hand of God or the power of "energy medicine" finds that the placebo effect of prayer is much harder to account for than that of pharmaceuticals, which can be dispensed in controlled doses or replaced by sugar pills.

But one type of prayer experiment does attempt to account for the sugar-pill effect and thereby meet the rigorous statistical requirements of scientific journals. In randomized, double-blind studies, the praying is done by people who aren't in contact with the patients, the patients don't know whether they are being prayed for or not (and in some cases don't even know an experiment is going on), and the doctors and researchers don't know who is praying for whom as they go about treating patients and analyzing the data.

It's through such studies that a small cadre of researchers has been trying in recent years to go straight to the source, to determine whether prayers offered from a distance can heal patients' bodies without passing through their minds. Such "distant intercessory prayer" or "distant healing" studies have also become somewhat of a growth industry. Following only three papers published on the subject between 1960 and 1990 and just four during the 1990s, at least 18 new studies have hit the scientific literature since 2000.