Ur kapitel 4:

Praying for Health

In 1988 Physician Randolph Byrd at San Francisco General Hospital undertook such a clinical study. 192 patients from a coronary-care-unit were randomly selected and their names, diagnosis and conditions were sent to people of various religious denominations who were instructed to pray for them. A second though similar group was selected as a control, and was not prayed for (or at least not in any form organised by Byrd). The objective was to find out if prayer as a form of non-local healing actually worked, or if the intent of a complete stranger could significantly improve the health of another human, without any direct contact.
The primary results were impressive as the prayed-for patients were five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema than the control group, and fewer patients in the prayed-for group died.

Though this study was conducted professionally, sceptics still found possible flaws, such as no one checking if the people selected to pray actually prayed, a lack of information about which prayer strategies were employed and the fact that the control group may well have had people praying for them also. These arguments may seem strange, as they all assume that prayer might work rather than the opposite, but they remain valid arguments just the same.

When all factors were taken into account, the prayed-for group showed between a 5 to 7 percent improvement over the control group. This does not exactly constitute a miraculous improvement or a testament to the power of prayer, as it like most other similar studies remains interesting but inconclusive. Hopefully, more such studies will be undertaken in the future which may statistically prove the effect of healing through prayer.

It may also be interesting to speculate whether the results of this study might have proved more impressive if only experienced healers had been used. Healing may well be a skill everybody can learn, yet as always with us humans some people seem to be more successful at certain skills than others. Supporting this is a 1995 study conducted by Dr. Elisabeth Targ and researcher Fred Fisher with distant healers and AIDS patients, that showed encouraging results . In Israel, researchers Zvi Bentwich and Shulamith Kreitler reported the previous year that patients who received distant healing recovered faster from hernia operations than other patients did. Their surgical scars healed faster, they had fewer cases of elevated temperature, experienced less pain and more improvement in other attitudinal factors .

Also, some kind of link between the person praying and the person being prayed for might have helped both focus and dedication. As reported in the previous chapter, experiments consisting of one person staring at another through a one-way video system proved to be the most successful demonstrations of psychokinetics. If this could be incorporated into the study of healing in some way, these results may also prove more impressive. Perhaps this could be facilitated by all patients writing a brief letter about themselves, including pictures, or perhaps an interview on video, so that the people supposed to pray could form a more personal relationship to help focus during prayer. This would not have to disrupt the basic methodology of such experiments, as long as all patients, subjects and controls alike, provided the same background information. No patients would 'know' whether they were being prayed for or not, and those praying would have no direct contact with their designated subject until after the study was concluded.

Of course, though such a study may shed light into the efficiency of healing, it would reveal little about how healing actually works. As demonstrated earlier the non-local mind works in mysterious ways. Perhaps the non-local mind of the patient senses the intent of those praying and boosts his or her own bodily functions, a case of one's own mind influencing one's own body as suggested earlier. Perhaps one's own mind is being bypassed and the non-local minds of those praying work directly on one's cells. Perhaps the healing is divine in the traditional sense: we ask God to heal someone, and God heals that person. Perhaps the power of life is always around us and all we need do is tap into it.

Unfortunately it is with healing as it is with the rest of the evidence provided in this book; as long as we do not see how it can possibly work from a scientific perspective, a lot of people will be unable to accept that it works at all. Only irrefutable empirical evidence has sufficient scientific clout to change the way we look at healing, and will probably not everyone even then. So is there any other clinically reliable evidence into healing that can not be so easily explained away?

Healing and Test Tubes

Dr. William Braud of the Mind Science Foundation, mentioned in chapter three, is one of the researchers who has contributed valuable data that might shed some light over the validity of healing. Apart from showing a link between one person's mind and another's bodily functions (such as galvanic skin response and blood pressure), he also had subjects attempt to influence the performance of red blood cells. These experiments entailed placing red blood cells in test tubes of distilled water, which is a hostile environment if you happen to be a red blood cell. Distilled water unlike the plasma normally surrounding the blood cells lacks salt, which results in the weakening of cell's walls and eventually causes its contents to leak out. This for the cell fatal process is medically termed hemolysis. The speed and extent of hemolysis can me measured by shining light through the solution, as the transmission of light increases with the decay of blood cells into the solution.

In each test, the subject would sit in a separate room from the one with the ten test tubes containing red blood cells and the ten control test tubes with the same content. The subject would then attempt to keep the blood cells of the designated ten test tubes alive (i.e. intact) for as long as possible, while the red blood cells of the ten control tubes had to fend for themselves. Comparing the results, Braud found that subjects attempting remote healing managed to significantly retard the hemolysis of the red blood cells in the tubes they were attempting to protect. Another interesting finding was that the subjects who produced the most statistically significant results, i.e. the most successful healers, were slightly better at protecting their own blood cells than those originating from someone else . When we look into the research of Cleve Backster in the next chapter, these results will make more sense, as the non-local link between mind and body deepens.

In another such experiment, American healer Olga Worrall, working with physicist Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher and biologist Dr. Beverly Rubick, attempted to heal E.coli bacteria that had been poisoned with tetracycline. After four hours of exposure to the antibiotic, all of the control bacteria had died, whereas a significant number of the bacteria which Mrs. Worrall had been directing her healing efforts at remained alive . Interestingly enough, the healer was not able to increase the growth rate of a healthy bacteria colony, only aid bacteria that were in need of healing. Several other studies lend validity to the existence of the phenomenon of healing. Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Benor reviewed over 150 controlled studies into healing on organisms in 1993. These ranged from enzymes, cell cultures, bacteria and yeast to plants, animals and humans. More than half of these studies, resulting in his book Healing Research, demonstrate significant effects of healers .

 

 

tillbaka