In addition to conventional medical care and alternative therapies, approximately one-third of adults used prayer to help them through various health issues. Experts stated that even though there isn’t any known therapeutic power of prayer, it has been linked to more positive health outcomes.

Prayer has been a highly practiced form of spirituality in the United States, but very little information is known about its relationship to health concerns.

According to a study on the wide use of prayer and its application to health concerns conducted between October 1997 and including 2,055 people aged 18 and older:

• 35 percent of the people surveyed used prayer for health concerns.
• 75 percent used prayer as a way to seek recovery from a health condition.
• 22 percent directed their prayer for specific medical conditions.
• 69 percent of those praying for specific medical conditions claimed they greatly benefited from the use of prayer.
• Participants of the study who were female, over the age of 33, attended school beyond high school, diagnosed with depression, experienced frequent headaches, and had allergy problems reported an increased tendency to use prayer.

Overall, the study concluded that those who used prayer in their lives, along with medical care, expressed greater levels of satisfaction with their health. However, they rarely brought up the topic of prayer to their physicians.

Experts recommended physicians take patient’s spiritual beliefs into consideration when trying to find out how and why patients react to illness and health the way they do.

Archives of Internal Medicine April 26, 2004