Do you believe *Prayer Chains* work in a person' healing of illness or disease?

Question

Here is just one case in many.. Unless you are a physician on this site, I think you will have a hard time disputing this:
Perry was with his daughter just after she gave birth to baby Talyah six weeks early.

They were facing disaster, as the baby was born with a hole in her heart and her blood wasn't flowing right.

They got a prayer chain of Bethel people praying all over the city as they themselves stood by the baby, desperately pleading with God.

Then the doctor -- an unbeliever -- suddenly shouted as he was doing an echocardiogram on the baby's heart, "Would you look at that!"

Amy Goodall watched with the doctor as the hole in her baby's heart disappeared on the echocardiogram.

She said, "And he's all 'look at that! This heart, it's healing right here in front of me.'"

One of the doctor's reports before all this discussed the hole in Talyah's heart, but another report after the healing makes no mention of the hole, because it had indeed totally disappeared.

Answer 1

I totally believe in the power of prayer. It isn't the "prayer chain" however that yielded the results in your illustration. Anyone can pray. You can get lots and lots of people to pray, but if they are not sincerely trusting God for His best and for His will to be done for the good that He intends to come out of whatever situation, then the prayers will do no good. No, the reason this baby was healed was because God willed it to be. It was the obedience of believers and their faith that God would heal, combined with it being the will of God that this baby's heart be healed, that caused the healing to take place.

God could and does heal all the time, without the prayers of many. Still, there are many times when God will allow a devastating thing to happen, when He has full knowledge that people will be praying for healing. God might have already intended to heal to begin with, BEFORE people began to pray, but wanted people to pray for healing to show obedience and faith and also so that others will know that the healing which took place was as a direct result of God's intervention. God is honored and glorified this way and many who might not believe in God will have other explanation for the miracle they witnessed but to believe it HAD to be God.

Praise God for the miracle you described in your question!!! That's amazing!!

Answer 2

Yes, but not because you are praying to "God".

As a Wiccan, I have learned that all life contains energy (think the force from Star Wars, it makes my answer shorter). If enough people focus enough positive energy on something, the result is usually what you would call "miraculous".

Example, my nephew, who will be 3 next month, had a very hard start in his life. During labor, there was a bad reaction to the epidural, and we nearly lost him and his mother, my sister. For 4 days after his birth, he fought for his life. He had pneumonia, and was so sick that every time someone touched or held him, his little heart went into distress. On Friday, we were told that if things did not improve in the next 24 hours, we needed to prepare ourselves for the possibility that he would not be coming home. I went to a friend of ours, a fellow witch and told her all of this. She took my hands and said, don't worry, this is not his time, he will be fine. The next morning, he was well enough to go home. Many months after this, I asked her about it. She said that she went home that night, and asked the Goddess to protect him. My whole family and I willed him to stay with us. Now, you would never know he had been sick a day in his life.

Answer 3

Yes, but not all the time. If you get eough people praying for the same thing at the same time the energy in that area can change by so much that you can do almost anything.

I think they did a study not to log ago aboutpeople meditating on peace in Baltimore or another high crime city and the crime rate for that day dropped.

Prayer is a powerful thing and can work but its not a replacement for seeing a doctor.

Hope that helps
Blessings

Answer 4

There have been times when people have gone into remission, or mysteriously healed from illnesses that they were thought to be doomed from. In a lot of cases, their recovery was attributed to prayer. There have also been cases where people have gone into remission or mysteriously healed from the same types of illnesses, and no prayer was involved at all. People do make recoveries against the odds, but there's no proof that prayer has anything to do with it. If prayer *did* have something to do with it, then how come there are so many people dying despite having their entire families and fellow church congregants praying for them? You have a thousand people who die despite prayer, and then one person recovers and it's supposed to be "proof" that prayer works? With odds that bad, it can’t even be considered *evidence* that prayer works.

Answer 5

I do believe prayer works...I am a witness to it in a little boy named Alex Hargenrader, who at 2.5 yrs old was diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma. Through much prayer - worldwide - he is cancer free today. He endured 2.5 years of treatment, but his recovery is even listed by his oncologist as a miracle.
God works through men - doctors. Prayer does not absolve doctors from doing their work; however, God can certainly make it work or not work. God can also take a hopeless situation, and give hope. Conversely, healing may not always be the will of God...we all need to be open to that. Elihu's speach to Job tells us that God can speak to us through many ways, including sickness.

Answer 6

There has been a full double blind scientific test of the effects of prayer on healing. The results were that being prayed for made no difference whatsoever to recovery unless you knew you were being prayed for, when you do worse that if you were not prayed for. The researchers believe this was down to "performance anxiety".

Anecdote proves nothing - I know a 90 year old who smokes 20 a day, but it does not make cigarettes safe. Research shows that prayer does not work.

Answer 7

Nothing miraculous about that at all. Atrial Septal Defect is not uncommon and acconts for ~4 to 10% of all congenital heart defects. NOTE: The hole usually closes before the child turns two years old.

This is not God, it is nature.

http://www.texasheart.org/HIC/Topics/Cond/aseptal.cfm

Edit: Sheesh, for someone who supposedly works in health care you would know a thing or two.

Answer 8

If it happens to me, I want the doctor that flipped the echocardiogram over and demonstrated that the baby wasn't, in fact, dying. Save your prayers.

Answer 9

God is so powerful ... & He hears ALL prayer.
i know of a similar incident in our church ... the baby was born with a serious thyroid condition, so we prayed for the baby for 3 weeks. the parents came back to church to give the report that the baby was healed & the docs had no explanation for it.
praise God!!!

Answer 10

What do you mean, we'll have a hard time disputing it?! It's an ANECDOTE! I could tell that I prayed to Ra so my friend's leg could regrow and would you believe it, it did!

If prayer chains, or prayer generally, worked (they/it doesn't, ever) they could be measured and verified and found to work under test conditions. If prayer works for curing cancer, amputated limbs could be prayed for to regrow. Prayer is wishing really, really hard for the laws of the universe to be held in suspension to satisfy one or two people's personal agenda. It doesn't happen.