From long time ago, there have been accounts of faith healing. In such cases, a seemingly hopeless medical case is suddenly cured by prayer or even the touch of a faith healer. This phenomenon has baffled scientists again and again, and no medical explanation has ever been found to most of them.

Leo Perras can walk today even though he was a hopeless cripple for years. He was healed by a modern day miracle working, Father Ralph Di Orio, whose ministry is still going strong.

Father Di Orio was conducting his healing services at St. John’s Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, when he first met Leo Perras. Perras, from the nearby community of Easthampton, had been crippled in an industrial accident years before when he was only eighteen. Surgery failed, leaving him paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. Muscular atrophy eventually set into his legs, which damaged them even further and left Perras in considerable pain. He was taking pain medication daily when he sought out he New England priest.

When he first met Father Di Orio, Perras had been confined to his wheelchair for twenty-one years. The priest prayed over his visitor during the service, and the results were nearly instantaneous. The paralysed man got up from his chair and walked out of the church.

The man’s physician examined the patient shortly after the healing and found that his legs were still atrophied, making it physically impossible for Perras to walk, but he did. His legs strengthened over the next several weeks.

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Dr. Randy Byrd, a cardiologist and a devout Christian was so intrigued by the possible power of prayer that he decided to conduct an experiment to test it. he began by programming a computer to chose 192 cardiac patients while an additional 201 similar patients were chosen to serve as his control group. Byrd wanted to see if those patients who were prayed for would recover from cardiac surgery better than the controls. He didn’t perform the praying himself, but asked selected people and prayer groups across the country to participate in the study. The participants came from several different denominations, and were provided with the names of the patients, but never met or otherwise contacted them. The patients themselves did not know that the study was in progress.

The experiment was completed in a year’s time, and Byrd reported the results of his study to the American Heart Association. To a statistically significant degree, he told the group, prayed for subjects required less postoperative antibiotic treatment and developed less pulmonary edema. He also found that fewer prayed-for patients died during the study, although this trend was not statistically significant.

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Pierre de Rudder, a Belgian, fell from a tree and shattered his leg. The damage was so extensive that the leg could not be reset. His physician wanted to amputate the limb, he refused, and suffered from the pain for eight years before he decided to visit the city of Oostacker, the site of a shrine in honour of Lourdes.

Riding to Ghent by train caused de Rudder intolerable pain. He was even lifted onto the train by three helpers, and the discharge from his injury was so objectionable that he was nearly thrown off.

Needless to say, de Rudder was in a terrible state when he finally arrived in Oostacker, but he made his way to the shrine when he began to pray. That was when a sudden ecstasy overcame him and he stood up and walked without the help of his crutches.

De Rudder died in 1898, and a Doctor had his body exhumed two years after so that he could more closely examine his former patient’s legs and their primary bones. Photographs of the bones clearly showed, that new bone was used to fuse the irreparably broken leg.

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Some religions teach that we can send a healing force over considerable distances. This belief, which pervades many world cultures, was recently put to a scientific test.

Dr. Robert Miller designed the test. He began by recruiting eight healers, four Science of Mind practitioners, two were psychic healers, and others were Protestant ministers. The healers were asked to treat high blood pressure patients, who were not told they were part of the experiment.

The patients were secretly selected, and the healers never met the patients were provided with details about them. each healer treated six patients located randomly in the United States. Forty-eight patients were treated during the course of the project, while another forty-eight served as the control group. Not even the doctors knew which patients were selected for the experiment. The doctors were merely asked to monitor their patients’ blood pressures.

The healers were instructed to treat the patients in any manner they wished, and most of them did so by visualising the subjects in perfect health.

The experiment was a modest success, with 92% of those who received faith healing showed a reduction in blood pressure, though 75% of those in the control group improved as well.

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