- I was doing my residency at parkland Memorial Hospital
in Dallas, Texas, when I had my first patient with a terminal case of cancer.
It had spread throughout both lungs. I advised him what therapy was
available and what little I thought it would do. Rightly enough he opted
for treatment.
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- And yet whenever I stopped by his hospital bedside he
was surrounded by visitors from his church, singing and praying. Good thing,
I thought when I heard them, because soon they'll be singing and praying
at his funeral.
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- A year later, when I was working elsewhere, a colleague
at parkland called to ask if I wanted to see my old patient. See him? I
couldn't believe he was still alive. At the hospital I studied his chest
X rays. I was stunned. The man's lungs were completely clear. there was
no sign of cancer. "His therapy has been remarkable," said the
radiologist, looking over my shoulder.
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- Therapy? I thought. There wasn't any-unless you consider
prayer. I told two of my medical school professors what had happened. neither
of them were willing to acknowledge the man's miraculous healing. "That
was natural course of the disease," one said. the other professor
shrugged. "We see this," he said. I had long given up the faith
of my childhood. Now I believed in the power of modern medicine. prayer
seemed an arbitrary frill. So I put the incident out of my mind.
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- The year passed and I became chief of staff at a large
urban hospital, I was aware that many of my patients used prayer, but I
put little trust in it. Then one day in the late '80s I came across a study
done by Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital.
Half of a group of cardiac patients were prayed for and half were not,
those who were did better in a significant number of ways.I could not ignore
the evidence. The study was designed according to rigid criteria. It was
randomized, double-
blind experiment - neither the patients, nurses nor doctors knew which
group the patients were in. If the technique being studied had been a new
drug or a surgical procedure instead of prayer, it would have been heralded
as some sort of breakthrough.
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- This study inspired me to look for others. To my amazement
I found an enormous body of evidence: more than 100 experiments exhibiting
the criteria of good science. Many were conducted under stringent laboratory
conditions; about half showed that prayer brings about significant changes
in a variety of living beings. Scientists, including physicians, can have
blind spots. The power of prayer seemed to be one of them.
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- I have since given up practicing medicine to devote myself
to writing and research about prayer and how it affects our health. here
is some of what i have found:
1. The power of prayer does not diminish with distance. Prayer is
as effective from the other side of the world as it is from next door or
at the bedside. As research William G. Braud has pointed out, "The
operating characteristics of the remote influence are not a function of
spatial distance or time, and it is not influenced importantly by physical
barriers or shields."
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- 2. Prayer can be continuous.
As a child I was puzzled by the advice "pray without ceasing."
I would fight sleep as I said my prayers in bed. Eventually, sleep
would overtake me and I felt as though i has failed. only recently have
I seen how prayers might continue in my subconscious. In the fourteenth
century, St. Peregrine, still a young priest, was scheduled for amputation
of his leg because of cancer. The night before the surgery, he prayed fervently
and dreamed he was cured. on awakening, his dream had become reality. He
lived to be 80, dying in 1345 without any further evidence of cancer. An
attitude of prayerfulness can exist even during sleep. As Isaac the Syrian
stated, "When the spirit has come to reside in someone, that person
cannot stop praying; for the spirit prays without ceasing in him."
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- 3. There is no one right
way to address God. I once attended a seminar given by a well-know
authority on prayer, and when a man in the audience boldly asked, "Doctor,
how should I pray?" the expert replied "ask God." It seems
that there is more than one "best" way to pray. For instance,
in the coronary care experiment that so impressed me, both Protestants
and Catholics were simply told to pray, not how to pray. Or when Herbert
Benson of Harvard Medical School studied the health benefits of prayer
and meditation, he found there was no difference in the effectiveness of
Catholics using " Hail Mary, full of grace" or Jews using the
peace greeting "Shalom" or Protestants who said the first line
of the Lord's Prayer. The only contrast that could be made was that those
who meditated on simple phrases instead of prayers with personal meaning
to them eventually gave up.
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- 4. Relinquishing prayers
work best. In our prayers it's tempting to dictate to the almighty, but
sometimes we simply do not know what to pray for. Suppose we want to control
our physiology in a way that promotes healing of a particular health problem.
Should we pray for an increase or decrease of blood flow to a specific
organ? For an increase or decrease in a specific type of blood cell? Or
what is the best in the long run for everone involved? These questions
can be bewildering. Fortunately, research suggests that nonspecific prayer,
the "Thy will be done" approach, works as well or better than
when we specify the outcome.
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- 5. Love added to prayer increases
it's power. One survey of ten thousand men with heart disease found a fifty-percent
reduction in frequency of chest pain (angina) in married men who perceived
their wives as supportive and loving. As the faith healer Agnes Sanford
wrote, "When we pray in accordance with the will of God." empathy,
compassion and love seem to form a literal bond between living things.
For example, a young boy found a wounded pigeon in his backyard. He nursed
the bird back to health and gave it an identification tag. Thenext winter
the boy suddenly became ill, and was rushed to a hospital two hu ndred
miles away. While he was recovering from surgery, he heard tapping at the
window. The boy summoned a nurse and asked her to open it. In flew the
same bird. Pigeons are known for their homing ability, but this bird was
traveling to a place it had never been before. Love had drawn it there.
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- 6. Prayer is outside of time.
A man diagnosed as having colon cancer asked his minister to pray for his
recovery. He was not a religious man and never prayed for himself. A very
private person, he told no one else about his diagnosis. When he returned
to his physician later the same week, follow-up studies showed complete
disappearance of the cancer. When the dates of the diagnosis, the initial
prayer request, the minister's prayer and the disappearance of the cancer
were compared, it was apparent that the cancer had disappeared before the
minister had actually prayed for the man. Can a prayer be answered before
it is made? It certainly seems possible. As the Almighty say's, "And
it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer" (Isaiah
65:24)
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- 7. Prayer is a reminder that
we are not alone. A patient of mine was dying from lung cancer. The day
before his death, I sat at his bedside with his wife and children. He knew
he had little time left and he chose his words carefully, speaking in a
hoarse whisper. Although not normally a praying person, he revealed to
us that recently he had begun to pray frequently. "What do you pray
for?" I asked". "I don't pray for anything," he responsed.
"How would I know what to ask for?" This was surprising. Surely
this dying man could think of some request. "If prayer is not for
asking, what is it for? " I pushed him. "It isn't 'for' anything,"
he said. "It mainly reminds me I am not alone."
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- Prayer is like that, it is a reminder of our unbounded
nature, of that part of us that is infinite in space and time. It is the
universe's affirmation that we are not alone.
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