Research Confirms Healing Power of Prayer
Modern medicine is recognizing what the Bible has long taught – prayer provides physical and mental as well as spiritual healing benefits. Adult patients experienced significant relief from pain and anxiety after just five minutes of in-person prayer, according to a study at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Department of Family and Community Medicine.
“Prayer is powerful and beneficial on many levels,” Jesse Bradley, pastor of Grace Community Church in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital. Prayer is the most used form of complementary medicine in the United States, relied on by more than four in 10 Americans, the study said.
All participants in the study previously had reported experiencing moderate to severe pain, anxiety or both. Following their standard medical appointments, the patients were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the prayer group, in which participants received five minutes of in-person Christian prayer delivered by a trained volunteer, and the music group, where they spent five minutes listening to music. The researchers then tracked changes in the participants’ self-reported pain and anxiety levels at multiple intervals — immediately after the five-minute session, at two weeks and at six weeks.
The study, published in “The Annals of Family Medicine,” revealed that although patients in both groups showed improvements, those in the prayer group reported substantially greater relief. For pain reduction, the individuals who received in-person prayer experienced greater drops in pain intensity immediately following the session. This superior level of relief remained evident during the two-week follow-up compared to the music group, the researchers found.
READ: America’s most stressed generation turns to prayer
For anxiety reduction, the benefits of prayer were even longer-lasting. The prayer recipients reported significantly greater reductions in anxiety immediately after the session, and these positive effects remained statistically significant at both the two-week and six-week checkpoints.
“We expected that patients who expected prayer to work would benefit more, but that wasn’t what we found,” said. Dr. Katherine Jacobson, assistant professor of family and community medicine. “Religious affiliation, religious intensity and expectancy of healing did not predict who improved. Benefits appeared across a wide range of patients, including those not of the Christian faith and those who did not expect the intervention to help them.
“For physicians and health systems, the study supports continuing to ask patients about spiritual care preferences as part of whole-person care and considering whether trained Christian volunteer prayer practitioners could be integrated into outpatient settings for interested patients.”
–Lee Hartman
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