Can Prayer Heal?
A physician traces the impact of spirituality in patient outcomes
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On the last day of January, my Twitter feed lit up with a curious and heartfelt call: “Please. Please. Please. Everyone PRAY for my daughter Molly. She has been in an accident and suffered a brain trauma. She’s unconscious in the ICU. Please RT and PRAY.”
The tweet came from a woman named Kaye, a lawyer and mother of three in Los Angeles. Her daughter Molly was in a pediatric intensive care unit after suffering a brain injury. I, along with thousands of others, heeded her call, sharing a private prayer that Molly would recover. Soon Kaye began tweeting live as to Molly’s status — she regressed with brain swelling, needing surgical intervention. She was then stable for another day before her blood pressure and the pressure in her brain (intracranial pressure) fluctuated, needing another brain scan and another surgery to reduce the intracranial pressure.
By sharing what was happening for Molly, Kaye brought thousands of us into that small ICU room over several days, highlighting the hard work and efforts by Molly’s doctors and requesting that followers (the number amassed to more than 60,000 within the span of just a few days) do one thing: pray.
As a physician, I know that the role of spirituality in medical care is fraught with complex questions: Is it okay for doctors to pray for their patients? And what role does prayer really play in healing?
The research on intercessory prayer—the formal name for praying to a higher being or force, for ourselves or for others—paints a conflicting picture. In 2020, a published case report caught my eye: A patient’s blindness “resolved” after the patient received intercessory prayer. But the case happened in 1972; surely the details may have become muddled in the retelling over several decades. The same researchers reported on other cases, like prayer for gastroparesis (when the stomach becomes unable to function) in a 16-year-old. Other research suggests prayer may be helpful as an…
