Prayer and Health

As strange as it may seem scientifically, people all over the world are known to pray for health and, in times of illness, for symptom relief. Healing through prayer, healing through religious rituals, healing at pilgrimage sites and related forms of intervention is a long-standing tradition in many religions and belief systems.

Religious practices have been associated with healing for thousands of years. People pray for good health and recovery from illness. Prayer can result in health and healing through one or more mechanisms. Many studies have considered prayer as a special form of meditation and therefore associated with meditation, including all of its health benefits, and different types of meditation have been shown to result in psychological and biological changes potentially associated with improved health. Prayer can also be underpinned by varying degrees of faith and is therefore associated with all the benefits associated with the placebo response. In addition, prayer may be associated with improvements resulting from spontaneous healing, regression to the mean (regression to the mean, which is more in line with the nature of the topic) non-specific psychosocial support, the Hawthorne effect (change in behavior of the observed under observation) and the Rosenthal effect (self-fulfilling prophecy).

Simple illnesses such as colds and pharyngitis and psychiatric disorders such as depression and mania can fluctuate and spontaneously improve. In clinical trials, such fluctuations often only occur in one direction (i.e. towards recovery), as patients are often preselected for higher severity of illness. In addition, psychological benefits arise through interpersonal contact, such as non-specific emotional support, diagnostic and assessment exercises. Non-specific support approaches can reduce anxiety, depression, pain. Prayer is one of them. The improvements seen in patients in all these contexts are real improvements. However, in randomized controlled trials of the effectiveness of prayer as a treatment, graded improvements that are not real improvements can also occur. Some studies have reported that prayer does not benefit the person being prayed for, but makes the person praying feel better.

Prayer and anxiety management

The 2016 study by Simao et al. examined the positive effects of prayer in terms of anxiety management: In this study, electronic and international databases were searched. 12 of the 92 articles were included in the study. In seven studies, prayer was evaluated as a positive factor and many positive effects of prayer on health were identified: Prayer was found to reduce anxiety in mothers of children with cancer and to improve both anxiety levels and physical functioning in participants who believed that prayer was the solution to their problems. The researchers stated that prayer is a non-pharmacological intervention and resource and recommended that it be included in holistic nursing care aiming at the well-being of patients (1).

Few studies have examined the impact of prayer frequency on life expectancy in people with chronic disease. A 2023 study looked at 1931 people with chronic illness in the US for six years. It was found that those who prayed every day or more, compared to those who prayed less, had a positive effect on survival over the six years of the study (2).

Conclusion

“For many reasons, research on the healing effects of prayer is full of assumptions, difficulties and contradictions that make the subject a scientific and religious minefield.” “We believe that the research has yielded no convincing concrete results and that future research will have the scientific limitations we have outlined (3).” These words are taken from the article by Professor of Psychopharmacology C. Andrade et al. As with many other issues, it is very difficult to address the relationship between health, well-being and religious beliefs without dogma. This is because studies have reported conflicting results in human and non-human species, with prayer improving outcomes, having no effect on outcomes, worsening outcomes, and having retrospective healing effects.