Mainstream Medicine Looks Into the Power Of Prayer
The medical community calls it distance healing, but most people know it as prayer. Several studies are underway that are trying to measure the amount of prayer (and more controversially) the effect of prayer on patients suffering from serious disease.
Prayer and Alternative Medicine
In the biggest of these studies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 31,000 adults and found that 43% of U.S. adults prayed for their own health, while 24% had others pray for their health. Some scientists say that this frequency of prayer is reason alone to delve deeper into the practice."Almost every community in the world has a prayer for the sick," said Dr. Mitchell Krucoff, a Duke University cardiologist and researcher in the field of distant prayer and healing. And "cultural practices in healthcare frequently have a clue," he said. "But understanding that clue, learning how to best use it, requires basic clinical science."
Mainstream Medicine Meets Alternative Medicine
In other words, where there is smoke, there is fire. Why would so many people in all of the world's cultures bother praying for the sick, if it didn't have any medical purpose?Not surprisingly, the study of distant healing was once the realm of eccentric scientists, but researchers at reputable institutions like the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Chestnut Hill, Mass., Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco are now involved in the field. The National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has spent $2.2 million on studies of distant healing since 2000, though this is still a small fraction of the agency's annual budget, which totaled $117 million in 2004.
