BILL

There is a man called Bill Parker who lives in Lancashire, he has for many years been healing and praying for the sick, the distressed, the depressed and distraught. Distance is no object, for this gentle man practices absent healing. He uses this, without any fee, for all who care to contact him. Bill’s method involves prayer and he reads aloud the names of all those that have contacted him and says prayers that they be healed. I have referred many of my friends and clients to Bill Parker and he turns no one away. Many tell me that just speaking to him brought a sense of peace into their troubled lives and some report actual physical healing has taken place following Bill’s powerful prayers. One man contacted Bill when his wife was ill in Preston Royal Hospital. So sick was she that only her husband was allowed to visit. That night Bill said a special prayer for the lady asking that she be healed. Within a week he received another call telling him that the very next day the hospital doctors were amazed at her recovery and she was now to be discharged with instructions to rest.

I recently spoke with Bill and he told me that his prayers are directed both to God and the spirit world. He has, he believes, a number of healing spirits that work with him the most notable being an American Indian called White Eagle. The spirit of this native American Indian appeared to Bill one night in his bedroom wearing a full headdress of feathers tipped in blue.

In the USA Dr. Elizabeth Targ is studying the therapeutic effects of prayer on AIDS and cancer patients. That sounds reasonable enough. The presence of a compassionate person reciting soothing prayers has apparently helped some patients, if by nothing more than a placebo effect. Measuring that effect might be useful, but Targ goes a step further. She is investigating what she calls "distance healing," in which those offering the prayers are far removed from the patients, who themselves are not even aware that incantations are being recited on their behalf.

It's an effect that would seem to defy reason — yet Targ reports striking results. In a 1998 study, after selecting practicing healers from a number of traditions — Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Indian shamans — she supplied them with the first names, blood counts and photographs of 20 patients with advanced AIDS. For an hour a day, over a ten-week period, the healers concentrated their thoughts on the pictures of these patients, but not on those of a control group of 20 other AIDS patients.

According to Targ, the prayed-for patients had fewer and less severe new illnesses, fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations and were generally in better moods than those in the control group. The technique, she believes, can even work on nonhuman species. In a speech, she described an experiment performed by another group in which remote healing was used to shrink tumors in mice. And, she reported, the greater the distance between healer and mouse in that experiment, the greater the effect! The connection, Targ suggests, "could be actuated through the agency of God, consciousness, love, electrons or a combination." (Source: TIME Magazine CNN)

A rather more cynical consideration of the power of prayer is to be found in The Skeptic’s Dictionary by Robert Todd Caroll: ‘Prayer is attempted communication with supernatural beings or metaphysicial energies. The word derives from a 14th century French word (preiere) meaning "to obtain by entreaty." The most common use of the word "prayer" is asking a supernatural being for some favor or entreating an invisible force or energy to fulfill one's desire. This type of prayer is called intercessory prayer (IP) because it is done to ask a supernatural being or energy to intercede on behalf of oneself or someone else. IP is a kind of magical thinking: the one praying tries to bring about an effect in the external world by willing or intending that effect. There are some people who believe that such prayers are effective in curing diseases, reducing crime, defeating enemies, and winning high school football games. Some religions encourage or even require parents to ignore medical treatment for their children—even if to do so is likely to prove fatal—in favor of prayer. The prayer of such people, however, is not intercessory prayer, but the prayer of total submission to the will of an all-powerful, perfect God, and faith that whatever happens does so only because God wills it.’

The New York Times in March 2006 reported that ‘prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested. Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.

At least 10 studies of the effects of prayer have been carried out in the last six years, with mixed results. The study's authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised questions about how and whether patients should be told that prayers were being offered for them.’ (Source: New York Times: Benedict Carey)

The jury may still be out on the scientific evidence of the power of prayer but as far as Bill Parker is concerned he knows that it works. You can contact Bill direct by telephone 01995 670124.

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