50% of American adults rely on prayer for healing! There are probably more people in Australia than we thought, who do so, too. What does this mean for OUR Government as it considers our health needs? Read below what my colleague, Ken Girard has discovered about this phenomenon in the US.
According to an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor (“Does prayer exist, in Washington’s eyes?” June 17, 2011), one-half of American adults rely on prayer for healing. Yes, one-half! That’s significant from any perspective. However the same editorial goes on to state:
Yet the federal government recently decided not to study prayer as an alternative to medicine – as it had done for years.
Why this decision? Why would our government consciously ignore a means to health that so many of our population find useful?
The editorial relates that the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine references research that:
…claim prayer is outside the “mainstream” of unconventional healing practices and is based on “belief” and not “scientific laws.”
The NIH’s position is problematic for me, given that there is research currently being done that is demonstrating a connection between thought and health – between an individual’s attitudes and their physical well-being.
This goes beyond mere “belief.”
If it is evident that outcomes are being and have been affected by the mental states that individuals hold – and it has – then isn’t this a question of recognizing the scientific laws that are in effect, laws that may not yet have been observable under current common practice?
Isn’t the history of scientific endeavor littered with abandoned theories and “laws” that were once considered absolute and later proved to be untenable?
I would hope that the NIH is not claiming that all laws that operate throughout the universe have been discovered.
From my own work as a Christian Science practitioner, I have seen the positive effect of the operation of spiritual principles – prayer-based principles that Mary Baker Eddy discovered and elucidated in the late 19th century. Principles which recent research is beginning to take into account in the universal quest for health, well-being, and spirituality.
To ignore such a phenomenon and its potential for good by labeling it a “belief” would appear to me to be akin to Columbus’ critics claiming that his confidence in the possibility of the circumnavigation of the globe was fantasy.
Are we so enamored with a particular limited view of the scientific process that we aren’t willing to explore the vistas that may lie beyond that view?
