Does prayer heal non-human species?

Studies on human subjects examining the effects of prayer on healing have produced mixed results, with a dozen or more studies showing the beneficial impacts of prayer on human health, and several others showing no effect whatsoever.

These study result differences might conceivably be explained by variations in human beliefs, attitudes, and other psychological factors that are difficult to control under experimental conditions. Some people who know they are being prayed for, or intuit the attention, may trigger placebo effects that accelerate the healing process.

But what about prayers directed at non-human subjects that ultimately recover without the benefit of placebos or a belief in the power of prayer?

A study of distant prayer’s effects on wound healing in non-human primates, published in the December 2006 issue of the peer-reviewed Alternative Therapies journal, avoided the issues surrounding the unpredictability of human variables. A science research team at Jackson State University, under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, divided 22 bush babies –primates similar to monkeys—into two groups. One group was prayed for daily over four weeks by experienced distance healers, while the control group received no prayer attention at all. It was a well-designed double-blind, randomized study the likes of which had never been conducted before.

During captivity, bush babies tend to over-groom themselves from boredom and stress, causing wounds of various sizes and severity. It is akin to obsessive compulsive disorder in humans, but much more physically self-destructive. After four weeks, the researchers in this study found that the prayed-for-animals had markedly improved wound healing in comparison to the control group, as measured by wound size, severity, a reduction in wound grooming time, and a greater increase in red blood cells and hemoglobin. The prayed-for-animals apparently experienced an enhanced oxygen delivery that could account for the accelerated wound healing.

“These findings indicate that the phenomenon of prayer appears to be effective in species other than humans,” concluded the researchers. How can we account for this high strangeness? Is the study simply flawed in some way? If not, what sort of invisible mechanism is at work? A clue might be found in some other pieces of tantalizing research.

Healers Channel Light Through Their Hands

All of us are constantly transmitting light through our fingers and the palms of our hands, though it is invisible to the unaided eye. Using a powerful photon counter, a team of photonic scientists in Japan measured these light emissions in 2005 and found that all humans release streams of weak photons through their fingernails, fingers and palms.

Another team of researchers in Germany, at The International Institute of Biophysics, discovered a correlation between a person’s health and the level of photon emissions from their body – the weaker their immune system, the weaker and more erratic the emissions of light.

These findings lend support to an even more intriguing pair of laboratory discoveries. When bio-energy healers, using techniques called Reiki and therapeutic touch, are engaged in their healing rituals, surges of both light and electrostatic charges have been recorded as emerging from their hands for periods ranging from one to twelve seconds in duration, with a voltage range of from four to 221 volts at a time.

A lab study utilizing Ohio State University Nuclear Reactor Laboratory personnel found “consistent and dramatic” fluctuations in the gamma rays (high-frequency electromagnetic fields) throughout the bodies of all ten test subjects receiving hands-on healing. These anomalous alterations in electromagnetic fields provide some of the strongest evidence yet for the healing force of nature being harnessed by ritual and intention practices, prayer being one such mechanism, using the human body as a conductor to activate cellular and molecular processes that may be beneficial to healing and health.

It is only speculation, of course, but could prayer, the setting of an intention and its targeting to a living entity in distress, be another much more subtle way of harnessing this electromagnetic activation of cellular and molecular processes?

We Are Programmed For Regeneration

Regeneration has been genetically programmed into us as evidenced by how we regenerate cells in our body every day that we are alive. Every seven years our bodies have been completely regenerated at the cellular level. For this reason alone, radical regeneration cannot be dismissed as foreign to our potential or even to our experience.

We even see the negative effects of radical de-generation on public display when stress and grief age people prematurely, transforming dark hair into gray or white almost overnight, and manifesting wrinkles and other effects of accelerated aging.

Self-limiting beliefs and attitudes seem to be one reason why some people relinquish their grip on life long before their ‘ body warranty’ is set to expire. Other people infuse their body and spirit with boundless hope and faith, often charged by prayer or meditation practices, that extend their life and enhances the quality of their experience from living.