Half-Life

Do you think there has been anyone in the history of human beings who have been cured of cancer? We're talking miraculously cancer is gone mentality. Do you believe it has ever happened? if so, how do you believe it happened? God? Coinicidence? Chance?

Tercel

Spontaneous recovery from cancer, though rare, happens often enough that it's a recognised medical phenomina. Of course, it's hard to know whether to interpret this as meaning that all alleged miraculous healings of cancer should be given a naturalistic explanation. But if the spontaneous recovery "coincides" with a prayer session or other things then it obviously depends how far you're prepared to stretch "coincidence".

There was a women at my church who had terminal cancer, and while she was being prayed for she had a vision and she understood that the cancer had been caused by a curse and that she had been released from it, and independantly one of the people praying declared she had been healed. When she went in the next week for a scan, the cancer was gone.
Coincidence? Power of the mind? Quite possibly. I'm very skeptical by nature, and I love to play devil's advocate. (Hehe, actually I've just come from talking to a pentecostal guy (who's really into listening to God speaking and healing etc) who I spent a full hour with, asking all the most challenging questions to his position I could think of)

But when I hear stories (that I judge are reasonably reliable as to their truth) of many many other people whose spontaneously recovery "coincided" with a session of prayer, I must wonder how far coincidence stretches.

On the other hand, I have seen plenty of people prayed for and NOT recover. -Including another woman at my church who had cancer and died. And I must wonder at that too.

My 2c anyway...

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Tercel ]</p>

lpetrich

That's such a pathetic sort of miracle -- why not any really big ones, such as creating a giant cross made out of diamond and placing it on top of the Kaaba in Mecca?

curbyIII

You seem to have a meager grasp of basic statistics.

My great-unlce started drinking at 10 and smoking at 13, he continued to drink and smoke heavily throughout his life and he lived to be 97! That proves that smoking and drinking are not actually bad for you (in fact they are good for you as he lived well beyond the average life span of a person) and this anti-smoking/anti-drinking health thing is a massive conspiracy.

Seeing one person recover from cancer after praying means absolutely nothing. One person is an insignificant statistic. If you want to consider this at all, gather a lot of data. Get 2 groups of 10,000 people with cancer. Have 1 group pray, and have the other do some placebo equivalent to praying (doing nothing is probably acceptable). Then see what percentage of people recover in each group. If there is a significant difference in the percentages then there is something worth investigating.

Automaton

Praise the LORD for the loving miracle of cancer!

brighid

I am just giving some anecdotal evidence here because I am not currently well versed on such things. My mother worked as a psychiatric nurse for many years and she worked with the most difficult patients. She told me of many incidents with people with multiple personality disorders who displayed (and these things were confirmed with medical tests such as cat scans, x-rays, etc.) very different medical conditions in each personality. In one particular case a patient had a tumor in one personality, but when she was in another the tumor was no longer there and could not be found through any medical testing. Psychosomatic illnesses are not a phenomena and the power of the mind is often underestimated in illness and the ability to heal. Our minds play a much bigger role in determining the outcome of recovery and I think that all phenomena have a natural explanation, regardless if we are currently able to establish the criteria to make an actual determination.

Brighid

Vorkosigan

Strikes me as a bit absurd. How many times did she pray and was not cured?

Or look at it another way. Suppose the cancer patient prays every day. One day the patient has remission. What are the odds that the cancer will go into remission on a day that the patient prays? Seems to me you've got the link backwards. Properly viewed, the problem disappears.

Vorkosigan

Mad Kally

You hear many, many stories? Do you hear them at church functions? That's not the way it happens in real life. I'm a hospice nurse and my job is to help people die with as much dignity and respect as possible. (in their homes)

Some people have hallucinations due to lack of oxygen to the bain and/or the use of heavy duty narcotics before they die. Prayer does NOTHING for these people. They all die the same.

There's no such thing as miracles. Sometimes people have spontaneous remissions and sometimes people don't. Whether or not they are religious makes no difference. By the time they meet me, I'd like to see a cancer patient get cured! (fat chance)

As was mentioned earlier, many many people have psychosomatic disorders, also called somatoform disorders. Just because they originate in the brain doesn't make them any less real to the patient. Spontaneous remissions can be very dramatic when people think their mythological guy in the sky did it. Of course, all of this stuff takes place before they are deemed terminal..

How far can you and your fellow xians stretch your wishful thinking? How reliable are these stories you hear so much about? You don't know do you?

Kachana

Temporal sequences of events are akin to correlations in that they do not imply causation. In personal testimonies of miracles for instance all we have is the observation that B happened after A (e.g. cancer disapperars after prayer), which a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

The way to get around this is to experiement using control groups, where one randomly assigned group is prayed for and the other randomly assigned group is not. One then measures the differences between the groups on some relevant criteria (e.g. health) and aim to reject the null hypothesis that the groups are from the same statistical distribution using some agreed upon probability level.

This is they way to do it without falling prey to the following which all invalidate the conclusion:

Misrepresentative sampling.
Lying.
Misattribution.
Concentrating on hits and ignoring misses.
Non-objective measurements of outcomes.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.

When examined in conditions where valid conclusions can reasonably be drawn, the effects of prayer on miracles disappear, just like the effects of psychic phenomena and healing crystals disappear when looked at properly.

southernhybrid

Supposedly, one of my grandmother's had a spontaneous recovery from cancer. She was not at all religious, never attended church or spoke of God. She was extremely strong willed and determined however.

We are just beginning to understand some of the ways that the brain releases chemicals under certain circumstances which may aide in healing. There are also other natural ways which may have a positive impact on healing, i.e. eating foods high in antioxidants, avoiding or learning positive ways to cope with stress, since stress has a negative impact on the immune system. Eventually we may learn why some people have these unusual recoveries and I'd even give some credibility to the possibility that prayer might help. Not because of god but perhaps because the mind, while in the state of prayer, meditation or other forms of relaxation may alter brain chemistry in ways which foster healing. Also people with positive support systems seem to benefit from the emotional support from others. If nothing else it probably helps them relieve some of their stress.

There has been some research* which supports the idea that a person's emotional state affects their immune level. In fact there is even a newly emerging field called: psychoneuroimmunology. Although it will probably take a lot more research before some of these concepts are given credibility, it is interesting to speculate about. One study* showed a positive correlation to men with AIDS who had a high amount of assertiveness. These men had, as evidenced by lab values,
higher immune levels.

*The Owner's Manual for the Brain, Pierce Howard PhD, p. 272

The point I'm making here is that there are natural explanations for many of the things that now seem supernatural. We just haven't figured them out yet. It's silly to assume, IMO, just because we don't know why something happened, it must have been due to a supernatural being. After all, even if their were such a being, it seems pretty cruel, and stupid that he would reward one terminally ill person with recovery and another would be allowed to die. As in the case of my grandmother, who was really a pretty rotten human being who didn't have much to offer anyone. Why would god give her a spontaneous recovery? Oh, but I forgot, God works in mysterious ways.