During the past twenty-five years, study after study has shown that seriously ill patients who are prayed for--including those who don't know about these prayers--fare better than those who are not prayed for. The man who has done the most to integrate the results of these studies, Dr. Larry Dossey, former chief of staff at Humana Medical Center in Dallas, sums them up in two words: "Prayer works." Or, as Dossey's admirer Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School puts it, "If spirituality was a drug, we wouldn't be able to make it fast enough."
Randall Sullivan, The Miracle Detective, p. 381.
