Prayer heals when it’s close-up and personal, and there’s a study to prove it.
It’s not just any kind of prayer, but “proximal intercessory prayer,” or PIP — when one or more people pray for someone in that person’s presence and often with physical contact — that was found by a team of doctors, scientists, and religious experts to have remarkable results in healing some patients.
A team of medical doctors and scientists led by Indiana University professor of religion Candy Gunther Brown found in the study, conducted in rural Mozambique, that prayer brought “highly significant” improvements to hearing-impaired participants and significant changes to the visually impaired.
Fourteen hard-of-hearing and 11 visually impaired study participants were recruited at meetings of pentecostal Christian groups in three Mozambican villages and one town.