Is Distance Healing Possible?

I was seven years old when little Kathy Fiscus fell into an abandoned water well in San Marino, California. Above an upright piano in our Bronx apartment was a wooden Philco radio. It looked like a model of a miniature cathedral. My brother and I would have nightmares after listening to The Green Hornet and The Inner Sanctum. We learned useless truths from the Answer Man and laughed with Amos ‘n’ Andy before our parents would tune to WNBC for the Supper Club Variety Show with Perry Como and the Shaffer Orchestra. But on that day, when three-year-old Kathy fell, those shows were incessantly interrupted by news of the rescue effort.

A million people prayed for the healing of a single child.

For two days, my parents sat by that radio, waiting for news of the girl’s survival. Everyone in the neighborhood listened to minute-by-minute broadcasts, praying that Kathy would hang onto life. Thousands at the physical site prayed as they watched rescue crews drill to reach her. Millions all over America, fastened to their radios, prayed. The outpouring of prayer must have been exceedingly comforting to the parents. In the end, however, she was found dead. I can still picture the sorrowful tears dripping from my parents’ cheeks.

Twenty years ago, a study was widely circulated in the spiritual and alternative health community, claiming scientific evidence for psychic healing from a distance. It had come from a double-blind experiment supported by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers recruited 40 healers to pray for 40 patients with advanced AIDS. They concluded that patients had significantly fewer new AIDS-related illnesses, required fewer doctor visits, and fewer days of hospitalization, with notably-improved moods. If true, that would have been a marvelous finding. As with all such results, though, some data remained unexplored. In the case of that study, and likely all distant healing research, the useable data is correct as far as it goes but are missing all those hidden pieces of information that could make a difference. Statisticians call it the sharpshooter fallacy: first shooting at a wall, and afterward drawing a target around the bullet holes.

14 peer-reviewed studies supported the efficacy of intercessory prayer.

The question of the efficacy of prayer certainly is nothing new. Traditional religious healing through prayer is a fundamental component of almost all religions. Over the centuries, there had been hundreds of distant-healing studies; however, except for very few, most lacked scientific rigor. Critics with scientific backgrounds have dismissed them as pseudoscience and parapsychology.

I want to understand where and how one would begin to research whether or not an ill person heals due to the prayers of a stranger thousands of miles away. God does not interfere by recognizing petitions, it is often said. I want to know: Is there any psychophysical, metaphysical, physiological, or psychological basis for healing at a distance, or did the NIH overreach in funding parapsychology? There is no denying that human-to-human contact prayer that includes direct light-shining, sympathy, and reciprocal love can, seemingly miraculously, boost the odds of recovery for the sick and injured. But distant prayer, without any psychophysical bonds? That is a hard sell. So, I must wonder, what sort of miraculous brain-wave mechanism could make it work? I’d be happy to know.

There are studies of what has become known as the practice of distant healing, which includes “psychic healing.” Among all reports, none indicate any consideration of the logical battery of constituents that could have helped recovery from illness: the skill of the attending physician; the nursing care; the patient's confidence, attitude, or their genetic healing powers, personality traits, optimism, motivation, and expectations (the Rosenthal effect); and, above all, the nature and severity of the disease. And then there is the Hawthorne effect: a subject's awareness of being studied).

There have been other studies. As of this writing, 14 peer-reviewed studies support the efficacy of intercessory prayer (that is, a request to God offered for the benefit of another person), and nine claim no significant response to prayer.

Consider how impossible it must be to discount the hundreds of relatives and friends who might or might not be praying for patients in either the experimental or the control group. The research is flawed by two troubling omissions: a coherent understanding of what prayer means and the knowledge of who might or might not be praying for members of the control group. The real problem with these studies is bogus methodology.

Scouring data to confirm a hypothesis

I’m not suggesting that the investigators were consciously conspiring; rather, that the deceptions were on them. Besides, these experiments reduce God’s image to a genie in a lamp, suggesting the illusion that a higher power interferes with nature. That may be the belief of some religions, but certainly not all.

My hope for science is that the inclusion of such a study was, as the Western Journal of Medicine, Linda Hawes Clever, said, "to stimulate other studies of distant healing and other complementary practices and agents. It is time for more light, less dark, less heat.”

The Distant Healing in a Population With Advanced AIDS (DHPAA) study had at least one fallacy: Scientific studies should never scour data to confirm a hypothesis, but that is what the DHPAA investigators did. And yet, even though 23 years have passed since its publication, it has not been retracted.

Since the publication of DHPAA, there have been several studies showing that its research has led nowhere. One from the Indian Journal of Psychiatry concludes, “For a multitude of reasons, research on the healing effects of prayer are riddled with assumptions, challenges, and contradictions that make the subject a scientific and religious minefield…future research, if any, will forever be constrained by the scientific limitations that we outline.”

Good science on the subject requires thinking in that way. The psychosocial benefits of prayer for healing are clear. Any study of distant healing, however, is surely a minefield.