Can Prayer Heal The Sick?

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Dr. Francis MacNutt of Christian Healing Ministries recently spoke to Gordon Robertson about spiritual healing and the power of prayer.

Gordon Robertson: Lately, there is growing recognition by the medical community that prayer is good for your health. And one study recently published in the Southern Medical Journal is helping to verify prayer's healing power against illness and disease. Here to tell us more about that study and its finding is the founder of Christian Healing Ministries, one of my heroes, Francis MacNutt.

Dr. Francis MacNutt: Thank you. It is good to meet you.

Gordon Robertson: Tell us about this study. What started it? I think it's unusual that doctors would get together and say, `Let's evaluate prayer scientifically. Let's have double-blind tests. Let's have control groups that we pray for and those that we don't pray for and see what happens.' What was the study all about and what started it?

Dr. MacNutt: Well, this was not a double-blind study because usually we don't pray double blind. We pray in person. So if you're going to do it the way we usually do it, you don't do a double blind. And besides, doctors don't accept that really because how can you say you have a group of 40 people over here and nobody is praying for them and another group over here...

Gordon Robertson: Because their family is obviously praying.

Dr. MacNutt: …and half over here is praying for you, even though you're in this group. So you can't cut that out.

Gordon Robertson: All right.

Dr. MacNutt: So there's always been a difficulty in proving something in the medical community. And I was a pre-med. student at one point, finished my pre-med., was accepted to medical school, so I've always had a heart to show things the way a doctor would understand, and they don't accept anecdotal evidence -- that is one person who was healed. They say, well, a lot of things like spontaneous remission.

Gordon Robertson: Right.

Dr. MacNutt: We can't prove it. Maybe there's something else there we don't know about, and all of that. But how do you show, then, that God actually heals people? And one of the exciting things in the medical community, as you said, is that there's been enormous change in the last 10 years in more than half the medical schools in this country, about 75 medical schools, have courses in spirituality and healing. Now that's extraordinary.

Gordon Robertson: Yes.

Dr. MacNutt: Except the only thing is that spirituality in these studies is much larger than Christianity. Christianity can be part of it.

Gordon Robertson: Yeah. It includes any higher power. It can be Buddhist...

Dr. MacNutt: And it can be relaxation response and meditate for 15 minutes a day, it helps your health. But there has been a change and they've shown that people who attend church, that worship God and so forth, that that has a good effect on your health. You live longer; you get out of the hospital faster. But if you're a Baptist, you're not likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver, because healthy lifestyle is promoted.

So it's hard to separate that out. But they still show that people who worship -- even allowing for smoking, drinking, things like that -- they still live longer.

Gordon Robertson: Well, tell us about the study. What did you do? How many patients did you pray for? How often did you pray for them and what were the results?

Dr. MacNutt: Well that's what we wanted to show that there is a study that doctors could accept from their perspective. So we did 40 patients and we prayed for them in two groups, six months apart, for three days. We chose rheumatoid arthritis because it's medically incurable. And we figured even in spite of the fact of all these other things...

Gordon Robertson: Is there any cases of spontaneous remission?

Dr. MacNutt: If you can get 40 patients and there's a change and it's medically incurable at the present time, that this would be worth really paying attention to. So that's why we chose rheumatoid arthritis, which is a disease. It's the second most common arthritis in this country. More than a million people have it and it really affects your living, you know.

Gordon Robertson: Oh, it's terribly painful.

Dr. MacNutt: It's awful. The only thing you can do is give pain medication and anti-inflammatory medication. So I met Dr. Matthews not too far from here, in Fairfax, Virginia, about five years ago and he's an epidemiologist. That's a doctor who does research. And he wanted to do this for a long, long time. So we got together and decided, how can we do this? And he knew Sally Marlow of a pain arthritis clinic in Clearwater, where the patients could come from. And we worked all this out where we would pray for these patients and see what happened.

Gordon Robertson: All right. So you prayed for 40 people three days in a row...

Dr. MacNutt: Yeah.

Gordon Robertson: ...and then took a six-month break and then prayed for them again?

Dr. MacNutt: No, another group.

Gordon Robertson: Another group.

Dr. MacNutt: Another group.

Gordon Robertson: All right. So you prayed for 40 people for three days straight. What happened?

Dr. MacNutt: Well, this is what happened. It's amazing. It was not just something psychological. But one of the criteria was that if you were one of these arthritis patients, you had to have swelling in at least nine joints, measurable swelling in nine joints. The average age of these patients was 62. So they were well up there. And a number of them had artificial joints.

And when you looked at the group, humanly speaking, this is not the kind of group you'd really like to pray for. One man was like this and so I figured when I prayed, what he wants is, you know, to straighten out his neck. And when I finished, there wasn't much change. And he said, `Well, you know, the doctors fused my neck in this position.' So that was the kind of group it was.

Gordon Robertson: All right.

Dr. MacNutt: But when we began, the average number of swollen joints was 9.8. When we finished, it was 3.1.

Gordon Robertson: Wow.

Dr. MacNutt: That's an extraordinary change.

Gordon Robertson: So that's a two-thirds reduction in the symptoms of the disease solely as the result of prayer. That's an astounding result.

Dr. MacNutt: It is.

Gordon Robertson: I mean, if you had a new drug introduced into the marketplace, it would be a best seller because of those kinds of results.

Dr. MacNutt: Well that's what Dr. Matthews said. This would be first page news in medical journals if this were a new drug. The wonderful thing, of course, prayer doesn't have any harmful side effects like most drugs do. You can't go wrong with it. Can't go wrong.

Gordon Robertson: Well, it does lead to self-denial. What else did you counsel? There was not only prayer, but you've identified some hindrances to healing that keep people from being healed. How did you deal with those issues?

Dr. MacNutt: Well, we gave six talks in these three days. So it wasn't just the prayer. It was perhaps a change of attitude. Like the first talk was about Jesus as our Savior. That was the first talk. Then about the obstacles: a lack of forgiveness, unforgiveness, and how that can affect you. And we led a prayer to help people forgive their enemies. We talked about involvement in the occult, that this could block everything.

So we had six talks on different things that would help or hinder. So what the doctors would say -- and naturally a scientist would say -- we have other factors in here, like the placebo effect. It's not only the prayer. And that's true. But we hope that the fact that it's incurable, no matter what it is, the putting together of these things, faith, forgiving people, a loving community -- but what we thought was the main ingredient is the prayer.

Gordon Robertson: One other thing. And you brought up the placebo effect. I don't know of the placebo effect decreasing by two-thirds any illness.

Dr. MacNutt: No. No.

Gordon Robertson: And also, the results were permanent, that the three-day...

Dr. MacNutt: It was gone.

Gordon Robertson: ...three days of prayer resulted in permanent remission of the symptoms, which, again, the placebo effect doesn't do.

Dr. MacNutt: Yeah. One of the things we couldn't do was maintain contact with these patients. It was like we were an intervention. After that, we had to disappear.

Gordon Robertson: You had to leave, right.

Dr. MacNutt: And they studied these patients for 12 months at three-month intervals. And if it was just a drug -- like if you had pain in your joints and you took Advil, whatever, you'd...

Gordon Robertson: Twelve hours later, I'd have pain again.

Dr. MacNutt: ...figure--12 hours later, you'd get another. But the amazing thing was that the effects continued. In fact, according to Dr. Matthews, they not only continued in some cases, they increased.

Gordon Robertson: Then of the 40, you had two that were remarkably improved to the point of cure?

Dr. MacNutt: Yeah. And this was all videotaped. We still can't show the videotapes because the rights are owned. But we've seen them privately and I still tear up at the end when I see these two patients and the change. And not only those two, but also others. There's just a remarkable change.

Gordon Robertson: Well, Francis, I could talk to you about healing forever, but we've got to move on. If you'd like to know more and you want to learn more about healing, I encourage you to get Francis' book, "Healing." It's a classic; over 350,000 copies have been sold. I highly recommend that you get a hold of a copy. In addition, we'll also have a small booklet available for free called "Can I Be Healed?" And you can obtain that by calling our counseling center: 1 (800) 759-0700. So give us a call if you'd like to know more. Francis, thank you so much for being with us.

Dr. MacNutt: Oh, well, thank you. It was a pleasure.

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