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In earlier posts, I’ve talked about three “cameras” that provide revealing angles onto prayer practices: before-and-after medical records, surveys, and clinical studies. Each of these three approaches takes a “snap shot” of a single moment in time to ask whether people perceive themselves to have improved following prayer and/or whether there are objective signs of improvement.
This post turns to a fourth, complementary, camera: long-term follow-up observations and interviews of people claiming healing experiences. This fourth perspective is like a video. The advantage is that this approach helps to answer the question of whether healing experiences exert lasting effects. The downside is that it is often difficult to measure or quantify changes, or conduct statistical analyses, in the manner possible with medical records or clinical trials. It is though possible to observe people’s alterations in demeanor and behavior and interactions with other members of their social networks—sometimes over quite extended periods of time. I have been able to follow up with some of my subjects for as long as ten years after they claimed to have had a healing experience.
If you’ve ever watched a televised healing service, you’ve probably seen someone get up out of a wheelchair and begin walking—and you’ve probably wondered whether that person was still walking an hour, a week, or a year later. You’ve probably also heard of people who seemed improved after prayer, but who subsequently appeared to be in as bad of shape as before, or perhaps even worse.
Healing in the long haul
What did my long-term follow-up reveal? Many, but not all, of those who perceived healing and/or demonstrated measurable improvements at a single moment in time continued to report healing and to appear improved weeks, months, and indeed years later. There are also individuals who appear to have relapsed, or to have “lost” their healings—perhaps because temporary improvements reflected psychosomatic changes attributable to the “power of suggestion” or a “placebo” effect. I have also followed individuals who thought they received healing, but who died from the same condition some months or years later.
For many of my informants, healing experiences exerted observable and lasting effects. Individuals who experienced healing from such a “minor” problem as back pain remembered the experience upwards of thirty years later. Often, experiencing healing prompted individuals to begin praying for the remedy of other people’s problems and more generally to express greater interest in and concern for other people, including not only family, and friends, but strangers, perhaps from another culture or nation. A single healing experience prompted many informants to radically change how they spent their time and money, and these changes were often long term. Those who recovered from the most serious health problems often exhibited the most profound and enduring alterations in behavior.
The effects of healing experiences extended well beyond the specific individuals claiming healing. Those who perceived healing often prayed for others, and in many instances those who received prayer in turn reported healing and prayed for still others, this new cohort behaved likewise, and so on. Healing experiences snowballed, producing chain reactions, and ripple effects that extended far beyond the immediate surroundings of the person who originally reported healing. Regardless of physiological mechanisms, healing experiences do in many instances exert long-term social effects that can be observed and tracked.
