From: jkk@aiai.ed.ac.uk (John Kingston)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Healing Statistics
Date: 19 Aug 92 03:55:02 GMT
Reply-To: jkk@aiai.ed.ac.uk (John Kingston)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

[This is a re-post due to apparent problems with mailers]



I promised to post some details of statistics about divine/miraculous healing,
so here goes. I will be concentrating my attention on physical healings. 

How many people are healed?
---------------------------

The answer to this appears to be "about 60% of those prayed for"

- Dr David Lewis wrote a book called "Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?"
(Hodder & Stoughton 1989, ISBN 0-340-50344-0)
which I shall be referring to often. Lewis is in the Dept of Social
Anthropology at the University of Nottingham. He attended a healing
conference in Sheffield [England] in 1986, where the main speaker was John
Wimber. He collected questionnaires from people at the conference (almost
2,000 were returned) and then followed up a random sample of 100 people, of
whom 27 had been prayed for to receive physical healing. Some people had more
than one ailment, so there were a total of 35 ailments prayed for in this
sample. Of these 35 ailments, 20 showed "noticeable and sustained improvement"
when interviewed 6-10 months later  [57%]

- An Anglican vicar who spoke on healing at Spring Harvest [an annual UK
event] took a survey in his own church. 75% of people claimed to have received
healing at some time or another. Of these, 65% claimed that the healing was
permanent, 25% claimed that the condition had returned, and 10% did not answer
this question.  [72%]

- John Wimber's organisation performed research at their own conferences. They
are on record as saying that 10% of those prayed for are healed immediately
and completely, 30% are completely healed gradually, 30% are partially healed
either completely or graudally, and 30% are not healed. [40%-70%]

- Ian Andrews, a UK healer, appeared on a UK television program about a year
ago. Of the 5 people prayed for that night, 3 reported a significant
improvement in their condition.  [60%]


Why are some people not healed?
-------------------------------

No-one really knows the answer to this. To quote John Wimber, "if we could
heal people by desperation alone, then many more people would be healed
today".  

Some people suggest, or seem to suggest, that the problem is lack of faith on
the part of the person being prayed for. This is ***NOT*** a sufficient
explanation: 

- Jesus only ever criticised those doing the praying for their lack of faith
(the boy with the demon, Luke 9)

- I know of cases where people who apparently had no faith were healed
   - a 6-month old baby
   - a man who didn't know he was being prayed for

However, having faith does seem to help in the healing process. Jesus himself
told  the woman with the issue of blood that her faith had made her well. The
best short answer to the question, "Is it necessary to have faith in order to
be healed?" is "No, but it helps".



Are there any medically verifiable cases of healing?
----------------------------------------------------


Here, we run up against the problem that non-Christian doctors, like other
non-Christians, will prefer any explanation of healing, however unlikely, to a
divine explanation. Dr Rex Gardner's book "Healing Miracles: A Doctor
Investigates" [London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1986] outlines the problem.
Because some diseases are known to go into remission spontaneously sometimes,
any "divine healing" of such a disease can be attributed to spontaneous
remission. Such diseases include all skeletal disorders, as well as a number
of other illnesses. Even if a disease is only known to remit spontaneously on
a very few occasions, some doctors will prefer that explanation to divine
healing. [In fact, those few occasions of `spontaneous remission' may even have
been due to divine healing which has gone unrecorded]. Lewis gives an example
in which a baby with a cancer of the arm was prayed for over a number of
months, and the cancer faded away. Despite the fact that the baby's
most dramatic improvement coincided with a time when a Christian lady felt
led to pray especially earnestly for the baby, the baby's consultant quoted an
article which suggested that this type of cancer might "eventually regress
spontaneously" [Allen, "The fibromatoses ...", Am.J.Surgical Pathology 1,
1977]. However, Allen's article, on closer examination, suggests that the type
of tumour which this baby had was never known to regress spontaneously in 53
cases, and Allen eventually added a footnote to his article reclassifying this
particular type of tumour as a non-regressing ailment.

Another problem is that a major symptom of many medical complaints is the
patient's own report of pain (such as in one case which Lewis quotes where a
woman was healed of over-sensitive teeth). Such reports cannot be verified
medically.

The result of this is that, while some cases of healing are regarded as
"medically inexplicable", the doctors prefer to attribute the healing to
spontaneous regression, or incorrect initial diagnosis, than to divine
healing.

Some people claim that there are "no medically verifiable cases of healing"
(that is, no medically verified sudden or unexpected improvements which can be
linked with prayer). These people should read Gardner's book. 


Does God have a bias?
---------------------

Some people have wondered why many people seem to be healed from relatively
minor ailments (such as sore backs) while few seem to be healed from major
ailments (such as cancer or AIDS). Lewis' questionnaires from 1986
list over 150 different ailments which were prayed for, as well as the
subjective degree of healing received (on a scale from 1 = no healing to 9 =
completely healed). In almost all cases where 3 or more people with the same
condition were prayed for, at least one reported significant improvement, and
at least one reported little change. While there is some evidence of some
"major" conditions (such as complete deafness, blindness or diabetes) having
average scores well below 5.0, at least one person with each of the above
ailments reported "significant improvement" (7 on the 1 to 9 scale). One other
fairly severe ailment - endometriosis, a problem of the womb - reported almost
total healing in all 3 cases where it was prayed for. If God does have a bias
towards healing certain diseases, it is an inconsistent one. [Personally, I
don't believe that God has any bias, but that most of the people who are
praying may be more effective on the "minor" diseases. I won't speculate on
the reasons for that here].

Lewis' questionnaires reveal some other interesting trends. Age and social
class have a (statistically) significant effect on the degree of healing
received. On a social scale of 1 to 5, those most likely to be healed are in
social class 2 (business managers, teachers and nurses) and those least likely
to be healed are in class 1 (doctors, university academic staff, and clergy).
Young people are also more likely to be healed than older people.


John Kingston,                               | 
Knowledge Engineering Methods Group,         | The heart of every problem
AIAI, University of Edinburgh                | is the problem of every heart
E-mail jkk@aiai.ed.ac.uk, phone 031-650 2736 |