The Healing Power of Faith

Based on current scientific research, there’s no longer any doubt that a little spirituality in one’s life can affect health and self-healing. But exactly what is it about spirituality and the power of prayer that helps us heal? Most researchers, who until now have dismissed that question as irrelevant to science, are beginning to study this phenomenon and are coming up with some fascinating and illuminating answers.

The National Institutes of Health has funded a group of U.S. scientists to study the effects of prayer on the health of cancer patients. The focus of the investigation is to determine if prayer can actually improve health and stimulate healing. Patients, who are randomly recruited and whose cancer has not spread to other organs, organize one or two months following surgery and run a prayer group for 24 weeks in which they meditate and pray for intervention. At the end of the session, researchers determine how the patients who had prayed for healing compare with those who had not. If successful, other such studies will no doubt follow in an effort to discover how prayer helps us heal and what kinds of spiritual interventions work best for individual patients.

According to a major CBS News poll of 825 people, 80% of respondents believed that prayer or other spiritual practices speed up healing and 64% said they prayed for their own health and well-being. It’s not surprising that more and more physicians are incorporating prayer with standard treatment, the thinking being that if patients believe prayer will help them heal, then traditional therapy will be even more effective. Regardless of how it happens treatment is all about healing; and if prayer, for whatever reason, boosts the immune system and helps one heal, then that’s all that really matters.

The Healing Power of Faith

Since biblical times, people have believed that faith can heal. Just thumb through the old and new testament and you’ll find examples of prayer being used to treat illness and disease. Today, millions of people travel to places like Lourdes in France or Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina where believers claim to have witnessed apparitions, miracles, and spontaneous healings.

Regardless of denomination or sect, all religions have as a common denominator faith that a higher power can heal. Whether a person believes in Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, or other spiritual entity doesn’t matter when it comes to self-healing. It’s the belief system that makes a difference; and the link between the mind, which perceives the healing as real and the body’s immune system, which is activated and strengthened by this belief system.

The question, then, is why are some people more likely to be healed by faith than others? And why does one person’s cancer disappear completely while someone else—who goes to the same church and believes in the same God—die from his or her cancer? It seems unfair that the body responds so differently in people who practice the same faith. According to researchers, the answer lies in a person’s attitude toward sickness, his or her will to live, and how the mind perceives the effect of faith and prayer on the healing process.

I’ve witnessed this myself. Two individuals with similar cancers, thought to be terminal, are members of the same church. One of the individuals dies within two years of treatment while the other is in complete remission more than ten years later. I’d spoken to both individuals, saw them in church on a regular basis, and observed that the one who survived had a consistently positive outlook on life, an incredible will to live, and has centered her life around her faith and her spirituality. There was something extra in her life, something that has given her immune system the boost she needed to overcome her disease.

In many cases, the faith one has in God and his intervention in the healing process has a lot to do with the body’s ability to boost immunity. Since belief is centered in the mind, and the mind is intimately connected with the body, it makes perfect sense that healing is often triggered in those who have a positive flow of energy between the two. But faith alone is often not enough; and that’s where prayer comes to the rescue.

The Healing Power of Prayer

From 1986 to 1992, researchers at Duke University Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine studied the effects of religion, meditation, and prayer on health. During those six years, the research teams studied nearly 4,000 individuals aged 65 and older and looked at their health problems and whether or not they prayed, read the Bible, or were involved in other spiritual endeavors. What they found was astonishing. The results of the study showed that people who rarely or never prayed were at a 50% greater risk of dying during those six years than people who prayed even once a month.

Similar studies over the last few decades have added to a growing list of benefits showing that repetitive prayer increases blood flow, decreases blood pressure, relaxes muscles, improves brain function, and decreases the secretion of harmful stress hormones. In general, the conclusion seems to be that people who are religious or who pray tend to heal much faster and overcome their illnesses more effectively than those who are not religious or who do not pray.

Prayer has also been shown to alleviate the onset and development of mental disorders. A study reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that people suffering with depression recovered significantly faster if they had deep religious convictions. When the results were analyzed further, it was found that religious belief, not neces-sarily activity such as church attendance, was the important factor, and that the higher people scored on a religious conviction test, the faster they recovered from their mental illness.

In another study, conducted at Sheffield Hallam Univer-sity in England, researchers found that people who prayed were less likely to suffer from depression and other mental disorders than people who did not pray. In the study, 464 men and women aged 18 to 29 were questioned about their beliefs and then measured for their frequency of church at-tendance. In both men and women, the frequency of prayer was strongly associated with higher self-esteem and fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. According to the British Journal of Health Psychology, the reason for these findings is that those with personal spirituality have a sense of order, a positive perspective on life, a sense of control, and are more able to cope with stress.

The healing power of faith and prayer cannot be underestimated. Some experts say that religion is hardwired into our brains; others believe that the source of faith healing is the immune system’s response to what the brain is telling it to do, and that people who truly believe they are being healed by faith are simply using the power of the mind-body connection as a trigger for self-healing. More and more physicians are relying on that connection to help their patients recover from illness, disease, and surgery. But regardless of what one believes, there’s no longer any doubt that the brain is the most powerful organ of healing known to man. Knowing that and using the mind-body connection as an in-strument of self-healing will help us stay healthy and disease-free throughout life.

From: Stress, Disease & the Mind-Body Connection: Using the Power of the Brain for Health and Self-Healing by Dr. Andrew Goliszek