Does distant prayer heal?
BY HILARY MACGREGOR, Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2005 Science is still trying to decide Los Angeles, USA — On an operating table at a medical center in San Francisco, a breast cancer patient is undergoing reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy. Three thousand miles away, a shamanic healer has been sent the woman’s name, a photo and details about the surgery. For each of the next eight days, the healer will pray 20 minutes for the cancer patient’s recovery, without the woman’s knowledge. A surgeon has inserted two small fabric tubes into the woman’s groin to enable researchers to measure how fast she heals. The woman is a patient in an extraordinary government-funded study that is seeking to determine whether prayer has the power to heal patients from afar — a field known as “distant healing.” While that term is probably unfamiliar to most Americans, the idea of turning to prayers in their homes, hospitals and houses of worship is not. In recent years, medicine has increasingly sho
