Healing involving the help of spiritual agencies or powers has a very long history going back to hunter gatherer groups predating the rise of agrarian societies. Healing the sick was one of the principle activities of Jesus, and healing through His power (or the Father’s) has been practiced by some Christian groups or individuals ever since. During the mid- 20th century there was a surge of interest in faith healing – healing through prayer – in a number of Protestant denominations. This was not the dramatic and highly emotionally charged healing as practiced by TV evangelists but a movement backed by sober theological scholarship and led by mainstream Methodists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. Among the most influential were Agnes Sanford, author of the classic work The Healing Light, and John Gaynor Banks, who in 1932 founded the organization now known as the Order of Saint Luke, which is a professional and lay order that dedicates itself to promoting the central role of healing in the Church’s ministry.
The movement drew inspiration from a number of gifted individuals who attributed their healing abilities to prayer. Among the finest and most beloved faith healers in modern Christianity were Ambrose and Olga Worrall. Both the Worralls as children exhibited unusual abilities. They knew things about people that they couldn’t explain, and they were able to cure people’s pain by touching them. Following their marriage word of their healing abilities spread, and in 1957 they established the New Life Clinic at the Mount Washington Methodist Church in Baltimore where they saw hundreds of people every week. Nurses, physicians and clergy came regularly to their clinic to study with them. The Worralls’ book about their work with the healing power of prayer, “The Gift of Healing”, includes examples of the thousands of grateful testimonials from patients, family members, physicians, and other caretakers. Usually they worked by placing their hands on the heads or ailing portions of people being prayed for, but for those not able to be physically present, they simply visualized the person and prayed from a distance. The Worralls never accepted money for their services which they saw as profiting from the sickness or trouble or need of others
Stories of seemingly miraculous healing accomplished by certain gifted individuals can be found down through the ages all over the world. Whether, in fact, such healing actually occurs has been the subject of serious study for years. As in other areas of unusual or apparently paranormal phenomena, a number of investigative procedures were employed early on such as controlled observation, testimonials of those claiming to be healed, and the like. However, to rule out natural explanations of any observed healing effects such as the influence of the healee’s (patient’s) belief and expectations, the normal remission of the disease process, and numerous other possibilities, has been notoriously difficult.
Claims to any effectiveness of healing at a distance are particularly suspect. As in other areas of paranormal or anomalous phenomena, from an orthodox scientific perspective distant mental (spiritual) healing is impossible. The mind is simply an emergent property of the physical brain, localized within it, and entirely dependent upon its workings. A healer at one location cannot affect the physiology of a patient at another because without some kind of physical or psychological intervention there is no mechanism by which the patient can be influenced.
The Worralls freely acknowledged that they had difficulties understanding their own extraordinary abilities, and they supported scientific efforts to study spiritual healing. Ambrose, a professional aeronautical engineer, who worked at Martin Marietta throughout his career, wrote:
“I believe that all areas of human and Spiritual activities should be subjected to the most exacting examination, precisely as I expect the stress calculations on the structure of a new aircraft to be examined down to the most exacting requirements. I believe we should employ, in our research into Spiritual therapy, the latest and most applicable scientific methods to gather data that cannot be obtained by casual observation.”
The Worralls made themselves available for study whenever and wherever they could including labs all over the United States run by medical schools, and requests by physicists, biologists, and psychologists. They sent data regarding their healings for study to the Rhine lab at Duke, but unfortunately the early experiments in which they participated often relied on methods that were unsophisticated and procedures that were poorly controlled. Nonetheless, some of the findings were intriguing and helped lay a groundwork for subsequent experimental work.
Within the past fifty years there has been increasing recognition on the part of mainstream science that the mind and body do interact, sometimes in rather surprising ways. William James once said, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” Norman Cousins 100 years later captured the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “belief becomes biology.” An external suggestion can become an internal expectation which then can manifest in the physical body. Hundreds of scientific and clinical observations in such areas as psychoneuroimmunology, psychosomatic illness, the spontaneous remission of serious disease, and the placebo effect demonstrate this. Studies of drug tests and disease treatments estimate that the placebo response accounts for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses.
The question as to the effectiveness of mental intention to influence living biological systems, not human subjects per se where a placebo effect might well occur, began attracting the attention of a number of researchers beginning in the 1960’s. In the ensuing years a large number of controlled laboratory studies were conducted on living systems including everything from enzymes to cell cultures, bacteria, plants, mice, hamsters, dogs, and human beings. A major difficulty in analyzing these studies results from the fact that instead of the simple hit or miss outcome variables employed in other kinds of psi research, they looked at a broad array of effects ranging from the speed of wound healing, to mortality rates, to unconscious physiological responses, to biochemical changes, and beyond.
Benor and Dossy independently in the early 1990’s reviewed at least 130 publications describing controlled experiments on living systems, of which 56 reported results with odds against chance of one hundred to one or better. The odds of obtaining 56 successful studies out of 131 are well beyond a trillion to one. Radin, however, points out that these results might not be as highly successful as they would seem due to a likely file drawer problem (only successes published), but nevertheless they remain impressive.
Psychologist William Braud and anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz conducted studies at the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, for over seventeen years focusing on people’s attempts to influence the nervous system of remote percipients. In 1991 they summarized all their studies to date which involved 37 experiments comprising 655 sessions, with 449 people or animals acting as receivers, 153 people acting as senders, and 13 principal experimenters. Seven different physiological response systems served as outcome indicators including blood pressure, muscle tremor, and skin conductivity. Of the 37 experiments 57 percent were independently statistically significant. The combined results of all 37 yielded odds against chance of more than a hundred trillion to one.
A major group of studies involved skin conductivity (called electrodermal activity) which effectively detects unconscious fluctuations in emotion. The procedure involved a receiver who was wired up to a monitor that continuously measured the conductivity of his or her skin. A sender was instructed at random times to attempt to arouse or to calm the distant receiver solely by thinking about that person. At other randomly selected times the sender was to direct his or her attention elsewhere to provide control periods of no mental influence. Typically, an individual session consisted of 10 to 20 one-minute periods of randomly alternating mental-influence and control periods for a total of 15 to 20 minutes. The sender and receiver were always isolated by distance and at times also by special soundproof and electromagnetically proofed rooms. The outcome measure in most of these studies was the proportion of the receiver’s total electrodermal activity occurring in the instructed direction (calm or aroused) divided by the total electrodermal activity. A chance proportion of 50 percent would result if there were no mental interaction effects.
In 1997 Radin analyzed the combined results of all known experiments studying distant mental influence on human electrodermal activity up to that point, 15 fifteen studies reported by Braud and Schlitz, along with the results of four replications by other investigators. The over 400 individual sessions involved yielded an average effect size of about 53 percent compared to a 50-percent-equivalent figure for chance. The odds against chance of this degree of remote influence of electrodermal activity turned out to 1.4 million to I.
In his discussion of this work Radin put these results in further perspective.“There is an increasing emphasis in meta-analysis on reporting experimental effects in terms of “normalized effect sizes.” The procedure for calculating these effect sizes will not be detailed here. It turns out, though, that the average effect size for the electrodermal studies is about 0.25, where the possible effect sizes range from –I (absolute success, but opposite to the predicted direction) to +I (absolute success).”The 0.25 effect size for distant mental interactions may … be compared with the effect sizes obtained in recent placebo-controlled studies of the drugs propranolol and aspirin, which were based on testing 2108 and 22,071 people, respectively. Both of these studies were stopped before they reached their planned end-points because in both cases the drugs were found to have beneficial results, and it was considered unethical to continue the clinical trials (which withheld the drugs from the control groups). The equivalent effect size for the propranolol study was a mere 0.04, and for the aspirin study 0 – 03. When we compare these effect sizes to the 0.25 effect size in distant-mental-interaction studies, we see that some psi effects recorded in the laboratory are much larger than many people realize”
While these laboratory studies of the effects of mental activity on living biological systems are impressive, the question we most want answered is whether healing actually works with people in the real world, and, furthermore, can it work at a distance. Although many problems in studying effects at this level abound, nevertheless there have been a number of worthy recent attempts to do so. What many believe to be among the best of these, although not without major criticism, is the Cha- Lobo- Wirth study.
In September 2001 the results of an investigation known as the Cha – Lobo – Wirth study was conducted under the auspices of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons was published in the “Journal of Reproductive Medicine” (JRM). The study concluded with the statement, “Our data suggest a benefit of IP (intercessory prayer) on IVF-ET (in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer).” For the flagship journal of Western reproductive medicine to decide that the study’s evidence supporting the extraordinary claim that prayer makes a difference was strong enough to warrant its publication was itself extraordinary.
The study was authored by two physicians on staff at Columbia, Kwang Cha, a research scientist from Cha Hospital in Seoul, Korea, and Rogerio Lobo, chair of obstetrics and gynecology, along with Daniel Wirth, a lawyer with a long history of involvement in alternative and spiritual healing. It involved 219 women at Cha General Hospital, aged 26 to 46, who received in vitro fertilization treatment over a four-month period. They were randomly assigned to one of two groups, one of which received intercessory prayer – prayer focused on benefiting another – and a group that received no prayer. The people who prayed were in the United States, Canada, and Australia, halfway around the world from the women for whom they prayed. None of the Korean women seeking fertility treatment nor anyone involved in their care knew about the study or that anyone was being prayed for. The prayer subjects were identified by a randomized process involving independent statisticians from Korea and the United States who transmitted their pictures to prayer groups in the different countries. No one directly involved in the study, including the authors, had information about how this randomization was conducted until the study was completed and researchers had evaluated who had and had not become pregnant. Thus, double and triple security measures were imposed to ensure anonymity of the data.
The study’s results were remarkable. The women who were prayed for were almost twice as successful in becoming pregnant as those not prayed for (50 percent versus 26 percent). The odds of pure chance accounting for this difference were less than 13 out of 10,000 or 0.0013. While the number of eggs retrieved and the in-vitro fertilization rate were comparable for the two groups, the prayed-for group had double the implantation rate of the non-prayed-for group, a statistical probability of 0.0005 (less than five out of 10,000).
The results were so radically counter to the scientific understanding of reality that the authors were initially concerned about even publishing them. They did so because, in good scientific conscience, they could not do otherwise. “It was not even something that was borderline significant,” Dr. Lobo told the New York Times. “It was highly significant!”
The study was outstanding in several respects. First, the outcome measure was superior to those employed in the large number of studies on the effects of prayer on such highly complex diseases as AIDS, cardiovascular illness, or cancer. While a number of those studies had produced impressive and intriguing positive findings, even the best designed and conducted faced the difficulty of assessing outcomes. A change in a disease condition involves a number of factors, such as need for medication, pain, mental capacity, and longevity. There might be improvement in one variable and not another. Can we say, for example, that a longer, but symptom filled life, is a positive outcome for all individuals? Pregnancy as an outcome measure doesn’t run into these difficulties. Either a woman is pregnant or she is not.
Another prominent feature of the study was that because standard informed consent procedures were not required, neither the women being studied nor any of the medical personnel involved were informed that a study was taking place. This allowed valid testing of the effect of someone else’s intention on the subject, rather than that effect mediated through the person’s own awareness, which would have been a version of the well-known placebo effect.
Wayne Jonas, M.D, formerly the director of the Office of Alternative Medicine for the National Institutes of Health, and his colleague, Cindy Crawford, directed a team that critical reviewed over 2,200 published reports on distant mental intention and spiritual healing. The conclusion was published in 2003 in a 400 plus page volume.
“There is evidence to suggest that mind and matter interact in a way that is consistent with the assumptions of distant healing… . While conclusive evidence that these mental interactions result in healing of specific illnesses is lacking, further quality research should be pursued.”
Mayer, E. (2007). Extraordinary Knowing
Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe.