The letter was short. “Dear Sean, do you believe prayer works? I don’t. Please pray I survive my surgery today.” Signed, Anonymous.
Dear Anonymous, before they wheel you back, a few things:
New York, December, 2004, a national survey of 1,100 physicians, conducted by HCD Research and the Louis Finkelstein Institute found that 74 percent of doctors believe prayer-miracles have occurred in their career; 73 percent believe they can occur at any time.
Duke University doctors recently studied 20 heart patients. The patients didn’t know it, but their names were sent all over the world. To places like Nepal, Jerusalem, Baltimore, etc. Randomly selected people prayed for participants’ recovery. Patients performed approximately 50 to 100 percent better than patients who received no prayer.
At San Francisco General Hospital’s Coronary Care Unit, 393 patients participated in a double blind study on prayer. Participants remained blind throughout the study to prevent bias.
Those who received prayer had less need for mechanical ventilators; required less medications, diuretics, and
antibiotics; required less CPR; reported less occurrences of pulmonary edema, angina, congestive heart failure, and cardiac events. There were significantly fewer deaths.
In a study of 999 cardiac patients from Mid America Heart Institute of St. Luke’s Hospital, those who were unknowingly prayed for fared 90 percent better than heart patients who didn’t receive prayers.
The American Heart Journal studied the effect of prayer on 150 patients undergoing angioplasty with stent insertion. Participants were randomly assigned for prayer. The “prayed for” group reported significantly fewer complications than the control group.
Elisabeth Targ, a doctor at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, studied the efficacy of prayer on 40 AIDS patients. Half of patients who received prayers from places as far away as Alaska and Puerto Rico required fewer hospitalizations.
In two similar studies that…