Metro Voice News Celebrating Faith, Family & Community
Prayer has a significant impact on a patient’s health if partnered with science and medicine, a well-known doctor wrote in “USA Today.”
“As a cancer practitioner for 30 years, I have encountered at least one terminal cancer patient who was healed by a worldwide prayer effort on his behalf,” wrote Gary Onik, a medical director at the Center for Recurrent Cancer in Florida and an adjunct professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “Rather than dismiss this miracle as inconsistent with my empiric and rationally based training, it made me consider how the new scientific knowledge of quantum physics and human consciousness might support the idea of prayer-facilitated healing.
“I accepted the reality that prayer can have a significant impact on patient outcomes.”
In 2018, when Onik was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer that had spread to his lymph nodes and bones, he asked people to pray for him as he underwent a new immunotherapy regimen he had developed. Onik made his request for prayer in a video he created and shared on social media.
“The response was incredible,” he wrote. “I received messages from people all around the world, in different languages, from different beliefs, who said they were indeed praying for my recovery.”
The prayer, coupled with the new regimen, worked.
“It is now three years since my diagnosis. Prayer combined with immunotherapy treatment has left me free of metastatic cancer and potentially cured,” Onik wrote. “My journey has taken me from being a scientifically based ‘empirical’ atheist to someone with a profound faith. I suspect we are entering an exciting time where the centuries-long separation of spirituality and science will come together again. Would I be cancer-free without prayer? I don’t know, but I suspect not.”
Onik urged people to pray, not only for those who have cancer but also for the medical community that is searching for a cure.
“While we in the medical fieldwork on new treatments and, we hope, a cure one day, in the meantime, we need to pray,” he wrote. “In this time of great political and religious division, I am convinced we can come together and pray for something that transcends our differences: a cure for cancer.”
Lesli White writes on Beliefnet.com: “Are you battling cancer and searching for support and help? God is with you and has the power to heal you from the inside out. The Bible tells us, “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results” (James 5:16).
There are countless verses in the Bible that will give you solid reasons to talk to God and trust His healing power. If you are struggling with cancer and are ready to ask God for healing, turn to these prayers. While we may never understand why God allows some of us to get cancer, we all can know for certain that God is sovereign and that He loves us through all of the storms in this life. Never underestimate the power of prayer and faith.”
She goes on to list eight powerful prayers. You can read them HERE.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
