Living on a prayer

What if you could actually see the power of prayer on a brain scan? Or measure its positive effects in a cardiovascular patient? Scientists may be discovering ways to do just that. But whatever the measure, studies reinforce a core truth: Faith can help save your life.

A prescription for prayer 
Cardiac care units are serious places. Patients are fighting for their lives, and medical staff members are in the trenches with them. An important weapon in the arsenal? As it turns out: prayer.

In a landmark 1988 study, cardiologist Randolph Byrd studied whether distant prayer can heal. Half of the 400 patients were prayed for by born-again Christians. The results: Patients who were prayed for were less prone to congestive heart failure and cardiac arrest, and fewer of them needed diuretics and antibiotics than the control group.

Doctors have become increasingly open to the spirituality/health connection. When Byrd’s study was published, he was denounced as “fringe.” Now many medical schools around the country have required courses on the role of spirituality in health.

Prayer relieves the pressure
Little about going for a brain scan says “don’t be stressed.” But recent studies have used brain scans to examine how the human brain behaves when believers are deep in prayer. And the results decidedly say, “relax.”

These studies found that intense prayer activates the part of the brain responsible for what’s called the “relaxation response”: Blood pressure and stress hormones go down, breathing deepens, the active mind quiets. All the nasty effects of stress — like inflammation and high blood pressure — wane.

This matters because according to some experts, anywhere from 60% to 90% of visits to doctors can be considered stress-related.

The benefits of prayer in relieving stress go beyond physical relaxation. Prayer and deep faith help give patients and people in crisis perspective and improve coping skills. In a variety of patient and doctor surveys, the vast majority of respondents said they profoundly believed in the power and importance of prayer in patient recovery. Additionally, believers who actively pray have reduced incidence of depression, substance abuse, hospitalization and stress-related illness.

Fellowship fends off disease
With the exception of having to navigate the potluck casserole table, involvement with your church can boost your well-being. Deep faith and strong ties to a church community have been found to be among the best predictors for well-being and disease recovery.

In fact, nearly every published study that includes a religious variable shows that religious individuals lived longer than the non-religious. And a survey of nearly 200 applicable studies offers evidence that practicing faith positively impacts health. Three such examples:

• Churchgoers have lower blood pressure than non-churchgoers — 5 mm lower, according to Larson, even when adjusted to account other risk factors.
• Those who attend church regularly have half the risk of dying from coronary-artery disease as those who rarely go to church.
• Elective heart surgery patients who considered themselves “very religious” and had strong ties to their church communities were three times more likely to recover than those without such belief or ties.

Evidence of things not seen
Skeptics have said that trying to scientifically measure the health and healing benefits of faith is like “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” And yet, overwhelmingly, studies have shown a direct, positive connection between faith and health. Increasingly, doctors and scientists are embracing this idea — one Christians have known and experienced for centuries.