Scientists have just launched a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to determine if prayer intervention can improve the health of cancer patients.

The project was centered on African-American women in the early stages of breast cancer, since they "have a higher propensity to use spiritual healing than white women," according to the report in Research News.

One task of the research project is to learn if a statement from the Epistle of James can be "scientifically validated," the journal said. It reads:

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him (James 5:14)

The study is being conducted by Dr. Diane Becker of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. and Dr. Harold G. Koenig of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Koenig, an associate professor of medicine and psychiatry, has been studying the effects of religion on health for 15 years.

• Researchers are randomly recruiting 40 patients with early breast cancer that has not spread or metastasized to other organs or areas around the breast. The study will begin one or two months after surgery and radiation treatment.

• The participants would then meet a "comfort leader" who is a cancer survivor with strong religious convictions and has been specially trained in working with women recovering from breast cancer.
  

• The "comfort leader" will help the patients to organize and run a prayer group that may include five to eight friends or members of her church. For 24 weeks they were to follow a special prayer guide containing messages from the Bible. This type of prayer was practiced in the Medieval Church and then almost forgotten until three Trappist monks in Spencer, Mass., rediscovered it in the 1970s.

The patient and her group will then pursue an ancient Judeo-Christian way of communicating with the Divine. It is called Centering Prayer.

• At any given time, participants of a Centering Prayer session choose only one sacred word from Scripture. This word (e.g., grace, love, mercy, or Jesus) would serve as a symbol of the supplicant's consent to God's presence and action.
  

• Patients and their groups are to meet twice a day at a quiet place for at least 20 minutes.
  

• They are to close their eyes and silently think the Scriptural word they had previously agreed upon.

The idea is that they would be resting in God. Should their thoughts drift, however, they would return to their chosen word to focus once again on the Divine.

The method differs from the ritualized and conversational prayers of traditional Christianity and also meditation as practiced by eastern religions. In Centering Prayer sessions, participants "avoid analyzing their experience, harboring expectations or aiming at some specific goal such as repeating the sacred words continuously, having no thoughts, making the mind a blank, feeling peaceful, consoled, or achieving a spiritual presence," Research News writes.

"Those who guide centered prayer groups warn that often a person will feel tingling as the body relaxes," the paper reported. "This is just tension slowly oozing away. " Another attribute of "deep spiritual attentiveness" is that one's extremities feel heavy.

Dr. Koenig hopes that the findings from this study "will give women and their religious communities a powerful tool for combating breast cancer." He said he believed that "getting the patients' minds off their disease makes a big difference."

In addition, the Centering Prayer sessions can battle stress caused by cancer, by giving the patients "a sense of hope, social and psychological support, a positive belief system, and a sense of personal control through prayer" the report states. Researchers hope that if their study shows positive results, prayer may be able to help people with other diseases influenced by immune system activity, including AIDS.

Research News - November, 2000