Going through trauma requires great effort, which is why healing requires support.
Psycho psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ has conducted some of the most rigorous and well-planned studies on distant prayer healing. Her studies have proven that prayers from any religion have an impactful healing effect and distance does not limit its impact.
How It Works
Prayer healers believe that when people pray for the healing of others, an invisible energy known as “prayer energy” is transmitted directly to them to activate some unknown mechanism that produces health benefits. Prayer healers further believe that these benefits could stem from mental or emotional factors or some form of undiscovered biological energy.
As of late, few medical studies had been done on the effects of distant intercessory prayer. One such small study by James Byrd, a Christian pastor hoping to bring religious prayer onto an empirical basis, compared the outcomes for patients prayed for by Christian intercessors to those not praying for.
Byrd employed a double-blind, randomized controlled trial as his experimental design; this is considered the gold standard in assessing therapeutic interventions. To avoid contamination of results by prayer for recipients of intervention by Christian intercessors and medical treatment teams were unaware which recipients had been targeted with Christian prayers; this prevented any biased responses on behalf of beneficiaries to improve outcomes because they had been targeted with prayer.
Byrd’s initial findings were widely welcomed by believers as proof that intercessory prayer works, leading to miraculous events and answering prayers from distant places. When subsequent replicated investigations failed to produce expected results, critics began questioning his research methods and his belief in an external force influencing distant prayer.
One major drawback of the original studies was that all intercessory prayers sent from friends, family and church members directly to patients (both in prayed-for and control groups) may have negated or minimized any effects of those prayer groups directed directly towards patients.
Other researchers have attempted to rule out any possibility that positive results in DH research may be explained by psychological variables, placebo effect, errors in reading the registry entries or internal rhythms both the practitioner and recipient may share. They employed methodologies designed to eliminate their influence such as double-blinding procedures or using control groups not subjected to prayer from intercessors.
Why It’s Effective
Religion has long linked prayer with healing. While scientific proof remains absent, some people have experienced positive health outcomes from remote intercessory prayer and other forms of healing modalities despite this lack of proof, which may be due to multiple mechanisms including relaxation response, placebo effect, expression of positive emotions or enhanced coping strategies from spiritual beliefs. Even thousands of miles apart don’t appear to hinder its beneficial effects.
Skeptics believe these results to be due to random chance, while believers contend that God intervenes to heal sick patients. Unfortunately, such claims rely on an incorrect understanding of God as He exists outside of human scientific experimentation and control and any attempt at testing healing prayers on humans would violate divine sovereignty and violate this principle of divine sovereignty.
Many randomized control trials employ an intervention strategy where one group prays for participants of experimental groups while other people don’t. This design serves to prevent contamination; praying people do not know which patients they’re praying for and the medical team remains unaware of any group status of each patient undergoing medical care. It has been implemented successfully when investigating healing modalities like intercessory prayer, Reiki, acupuncture, or kinesiology.
Randolph Byrd was an esteemed physician and Christian prayer advocate who suggested an approach for conducting such an investigation. His theory held that an all-powerful but all-loving Judeo-Christian god might inflict illness upon His followers to test their faith and demonstrate His power of healing. To test this idea, Byrd’s research team devised five major investigations utilizing intercessory prayer with cardiac patients.
Early studies discovered that experimental prayer groups experienced significantly lower mortality rates than their control groups; however, later trials yielded mixed results and the authors of these studies reviewed and reevaluated their research; Olshansky and Dossey have since criticized these studies as flawed and have presented research showing no relationship between distant prayer and quantum physics.
Who Can Pray For You
People in our lives who care about us and love us are an excellent starting point when seeking prayer support. You could turn to friends, relatives or acquaintances – even coworkers! Just make sure that they can be trusted to protect your privacy. Depending on their faith level and experience praying with someone new may make them anxious or awkward at first; but most likely they’ll gladly offer assistance as you struggle through difficult times – using either our prayers provided here or something they come up with themselves.
How to Pray
Prayer is an act of mental concentration wherein one appeals to an external force that one believes has the ability to guide reality toward desired results. Prayer is generally associated with monotheistic religions in this country; distant healing studies often use intercessory prayer as their experimental model.
No matter your religion or belief system, prayer for healing should always be used with love and respect for the person being prayed for. Don’t expect anything tangible to come out of these prayers, rather release yourself to loving expectation with an open heart and mind.
If you’re struggling to start praying, start with something as simple as “May the Christ consciousness in you awaken,” then focus on opening your heart and connecting to the universe’s beneficence – this will allow healing waves to come pouring over you! While praying, remember the Bible for verses which provide hope and inspiration – something which may help give the prayer more focus.
