Saints and Sinners: The healing powers of God
The day may be coming when you will call your doctor in the middle of the night with an ailment and he will tell you, “Say two prayers and call me in the morning.”
Doctors who believe in the power of prayer are increasing.
The cover story in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine carried the headline “God and Health: Is Religion Good Medicine? Why Science is Starting to Believe.”
In the Nov. 10 article, Newsweek’s Claudia Kalb wrote that many of today’s doctors are beginning to “embrace the God they banished from the clinic long ago in favor of technological and pharmaceutical progress.”
The article continues, “People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in mortality — that is, they live longer — than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle.”
But Dr. Julian Whitaker was telling folks essentially the same thing more than a decade ago in his monthly newsletter “Health and Healing.” In it, he gave an affirmative answer to the question, “Does prayer help healing?”
The evidence that it does, he wrote, is not only anecdotal. “The power of prayer,” he said, “can be measured scientifically, and it has been done.”
Whitaker reported on a well-known study on prayer done by Randolph Byrd, M.D., in 1988, in which half of a test group received intercessory prayer while the other half of the patients formed the control group used for comparison.
When patient progress and results were evaluated, it turned out that those who received prayer were substantially better off in terms of the number of complications they developed, medical procedures required, etc., and a significant percentage did not require as many antibiotics or use of as many support systems as the patients who were not prayed for.
“My recommendation is very simple,” said Whitaker. “If you are ill (or a family member or friend is), pray for recovery and encourage others to do likewise.”
This recommendation is from a physician!
But even before that, another physician found a link between God and our health.
Dr. Richard Cabot, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an esteemed staff member of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston from 1898 until 1921, once wrote about a 64-year-old man who “stepped off the corner of a street without looking where he was going, was struck by an automobile and fatally injured. He was brought to the hospital and died within an hour. His wife told us later he had never been sick in his life.
“At the autopsy, however, we found that he had four fatal diseases inside of him, none of which had done him any harm! These diseases had either healed themselves or the body had found new ways to carry on the functions of the diseased organs.”
Cabot said the conclusions were “for each to draw for himself.” But he felt it meant that no matter how doctors “may fall short, a gigantic healing power fights on our side. There is a great power in ourselves that makes for health and that works night and day, when we are asleep and when we are awake, when we are good and when we are bad. … To me that means the goodness of God.”
In our fight against disease, added Cabot, “we have a prodigiously ingenious and powerful force always at work on our side.”
This is the secret many doctors are only just now incorporating into their medical practice.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)