Ahimsa Times 2008 08 SrNo 98

Author(s): Ahimsa Times
Publisher: Ahimsa Times

Page 10

AHIMSA TIMES - AUGUST 2008 ISSUE - www.jainsamaj.org
Page 10 of 18
and don't even know it. In the most widely publicized studies of the effect of intercessory prayer, cardiologist Randolph Byrd studied 393 patients admitted to the coronary-care unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Some were prayed for by home-prayer groups, others were not. All the men and women got medical care. In this randomized, double-blind study, neither the doctors and nurses nor the patients knew who would be the object of prayer. The results were dramatic and surprised many scientists. The men and women whose medical care was supplemented with prayer needed fewer drugs and spent less time on ventilators. They also fared better overall than their counterparts who received medical care but nothing more.
time on ventinose medical care the results
Even more outrageous experiments in distance healing involve nonhuman subjects. In a survey of 131 controlled experiments on spiritual healing, it was found that prayed-for rye grass grew taller: prayed for yeast resisted the toxic effects of cyanide; prayed-for test-tube bacteria grew faster. "I adore these experiments," says Larry Dossey, M.D., perhaps the world's most vocal expert on prayer and medicine. "Because they don't involve humans, you can run them with fanatical precision and you can run them hundreds of times. It's the best evidence of all that prayer can change the world. And it operates as strongly on the other side of the Earth as it does at the bedside." In several experiments, volunteers visualized stimulating or retarding the growth of bacteria and fungi and achieved significantly positive results from as far as 15 miles away.
At the 'Mind Science Foundation' in San Antonio, Texas, researchers took blood samples from 32 volunteers, isolated their red blood cells (RBCS) and placed the samples in a room on the other side of the building. Then the researchers placed the RBCs in a solution designed to swell and burst them, a process that can be measured extremely accurately. Next the researchers asked the volunteers to pray for the preservation of some of the RBCS. To help them visualize, the researchers projected color slides of healthy RBCS. The praying significantly slowed the swelling and bursting of the RBCS. In another study at the Mind Science Foundation, volunteers in a room on one side of the building were asked to visualize volunteers in a room on the other side of the building becoming calmer or more agitated. Meanwhile, the "receivers" were hooked up to biofeedback-type equipment to gauge their reactions. The results showed that the "influencers" exerted a statistically significant effect on the receivers' moods. Experiments also showed that prayer positively affected: High Blood Pressure, Wounds, Heart Attacks, Headaches, and Anxiety. The processes that had been influenced by prayer were: Activity of enzymes, The growth rate of leukemic white blood cells, Mutation rates of bacteria, Germination and growth rates of various seeds, Firing rate of pacemaker cells, Healing rates of wounds, The size of goiters and tumors, Time required to awaken from anesthesia, Autonomic effects such as electrodermal activity of the skin, rates of hemolysis of red blood cells and hemoglobin levels.
At a Boston conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School, one of the participants predicted that in just 10 years patients will be questioned about not only their personal medical history but also their spiritual belief system. Certainly, the idea of distance healing is catching on even today. Cyberspace is full of fellow believers who post their requests on daily prayer chains. Those who believe in distance healing are not sure how it works, though theories abound. Some say it involves sending some kind of subtle, as-yet-unidentified energy to the person in need. Others, including Dossey, say quantum physics may play a role, or what Cambridge-trained biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls "morphogenetic fields," unabounded by space or time. In the absence of hard data, it remains a mystery or a miracle. The other kind of prayer, in which sick people pray for their own recovery, is far easier for science to explain. Given the proven health benefits of meditation - lowering blood pressure, reversing heart disease - it's not difficult to see how prayer, which can be equally
http://jainsamaj.org/magazines/august-2008.htm
8/11/2009