The Power of Prayer

December 2008

by Molly Ginty

Lyn Thompson felt that God was her best hope.

At age 39, Thompson was widowed and raising her four daughters alone when she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer, which has a 50 percent survival rate. How could she afford treatment on the salary she earned as a teacher? How could she endure a double mastectomy and chemotherapy while struggling to support her young family?

So Thompson prayed.

“God’s answers came in response,” says Thompson. “When I had only $2,000 left, I prayed for financial help and received $1,000 in the mail anonymously and another $1,000 as a gift from a student’s family. When cancer left me feeling beaten down, I rested in my faith and listened to God’s voice, which assured me I would survive.”

Two decades later, Thompson is cancer free and working as a spiritual outreach coordinator at Tulsa’s Cancer Treatment Center, one of a growing number of health care facilities that are relying on prayer and faith to help speed their patients’ recovery.

In Jeremiah 30:17, God says, “I will restore health to you.” And in recent years, new research has backed up this pledge. Studies show that prayer can ease mental illness, improve patients’ quality of life, and help them cope more effectively with illness. Surveys show that most patients rely on prayer, and 80 percent feel better after “spiritual healing.”

From Lazarus to the lepers, the Bible abounds with stories of healing. And from the pilgrims who flock to Lourdes, France, to the Christian Scientists who say that God heals them without medicine, the modern-day world abounds with such stories, too.

In Anchorage, Alaska, a 43-year-old woman with stage III lung cancer read her Bible daily and was cured despite having just a 7 percent chance of survival. In Sanford, North Carolina, a 16-year-old girl with severe anorexia heard God speak to her in her room one evening—and felt her obsession with weight disappear. In Wilmington, Delaware, a 55-year-old social worker lost seven family members over the course of two years, developing depression and bleeding ulcers as she grieved these deaths. When she began to pray regularly, both her physical and mental ailments eased.

Just as in these stories, a growing body of research links spirituality to health and healing.

In 1997, an American Journal of Public Health study found that subjects who attended religious services regularly lived an average 10 years longer than those who did not. In 2005, Lancet research showed that heart surgery patients had 50 to 100 percent fewer health complications if others prayed for them.

In 2004, a New Scientist study showed that women who had difficulty conceiving were twice as likely to get pregnant if people prayed for them. And last year, research in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease showed that hospital patients who pray and attend worship regularly recover from post-operative depression 50 percent faster than those who are not as religious.

Analysis done by Mayo Clinic researchers reveals that 75 percent of studies on spirituality and health show a positive correlation.

That’s why more and more doctors are incorporating spirituality into medical practice. At the University of Alabama School of Medicine, professor Cheryl L. Holt uses Bible passages to reach out to local church members and encourage them to get health screenings. At Duke University Medical Center, psychiatrist Harold G. Koenig takes note of his patients’ spiritual history in the same way he examines their medical charts. And at three-quarters of United States medical schools (including Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA), future physicians can take classes that explore the link between spirituality and health.

In the future, will doctors dispense prescriptions for prayer? Will hospitals use religious services and Scripture to help people with heart disease lower their cholesterol levels and help hospice patients feel less pain and more peace?

Experts predict that since research on prayer’s efficacy is mixed, since modern medicine is scientific and secular— and since it’s impossible to measure God in a lab—spiritual practices will largely continue to be left to the patient.

Even so, health advocates are encouraging patients to turn to their faith communities—and their faith—when they face medical challenges.

“At times of health crises, we can be ‘emptied’ enough to experience God’s presence,” says Sue Edison-Swift of Park Ridge, Illinois, who prayed fervently during a cancer scare that her daughter survived. “Most times we are so full of ourselves that we believe we can think, act, pray, cajole, or otherwise work our way into health. The gift of being emptied means we realize that it’s not us, but God, who acts.”

For many patients, that “emptiness” or grace can itself be a form of healing.

“Though studies have yet to prove that prayer can improve physical health, prayer can nevertheless offer patients courage and guidance,” says Anne Harrington, chair of scientific history at Harvard University and author of The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine. “By drawing on the resource of spirituality, they can better cope with any illness—or any difficulty—that they may have to face.”

Molly M. Ginty lives in New York. Her work has appeared in Ms., Marie Claire, Redbook, and Women’s eNews.

For more information, visit the ELCA's online prayer center.

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