Power of Prayer and Your Health

     Over the last couple of Wednesdays, I’ve been writing about different natural remedies for various maladies. The power of prayer just dawned on me yesterday, but since I am pressed for time this week, I haven’t been able to research this one. So, I don’t feel I can add this post to my series on “Natural Remedies – Coming to the Clinic”. I’m still going to share it though.

If you know me personally or have been following this blog, you know that I am a Christian so naturally, prayer is pretty important to me. I would hope it is to all believers. But what about people who believe in a different higher power, a deity other than the triune God of the Bible? Or people who don’t believe in anything at all?

Here are just a few statistics from an article I found on WebMd (https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/can-prayer-heal) :

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*      *Hospitalized people who never attended church have an average stay of three times longer than people who attended regularly.

·           *Heart patients were 14 times more likely to die following surgery if they did not participate in a religion.

·            *Elderly people who never or rarely attended church had a stroke rate double that of people who attended regularly.       

·            *In Israel, religious people had a 40% lower death rate from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Interesting. But despite my strong Christian beliefs and my belief that God hears my every prayer, I also think there’s more to prayer than what we call religion. Here’s why.

If you are on Facebook, you’ve surely seen someone post about a tragedy in their family or about their own sudden serious illness. Everyone posts back that they are praying for the situation, sending happy thoughts. Emojis of hands held up in prayer abound. Are all those people really out there praying or did they just post those things to support the Unfortunate Person? And does it matter as long as that U.P. thinks everyone cares? Know what I’m getting at?

Maybe the U.P.’s situation doesn’t get better, but at least they feel better. And once they feel better, maybe they can move on, they can deal with what life throws at them, because they think that others care.

My other thought, because I am a child of the original “Star Wars” series, is that I can’t deny that there might be something to the Force. That energy that is created by all like-minded people which reaches out and affects our lives. Or maybe that energy which God takes and lovingly hands back to us.

How does any of this affect our health and our medical conditions? Only God knows.

Ok, that’s it for my ramble. I know there is research out there that supports prayer and a belief in a Higher Power as a supplement to traditional medicine. You can do your own online search. But I think the thing to remember, as with any non-traditional form of treatment, is that prayer needs to work with your traditional health care provider. I think God gave us doctors and modern medicine for a reason.