Sandy Hutchens Cancer Prevention, December, 2009 – “Cancer can be cured by prayer,” Cardinal George Pell told ABC. ‘And there are quite a number of examples in the books.’
Meanwhile, doctors are warning cancer patients not to put their hopes too high regarding miracle recoveries through prayer and meditation, after the head of Australia’s Catholics confidently stated that prayer could cure malignancy.
Defending the Vatican’s attribution of miracles to saint-in-waiting Mary MacKillop, Cardinal George Pell yesterday said “obviously” prayer could cure cancer and there were “a number of examples in the books”.
But cancer experts say prayer should not take priority over conventional treatments.
David Goldstein, senior staff specialist in the department of medical oncology at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital, said spontaneous remission of cancer happened in about one or two cases in every 1000.
“It would be a brave person that used prayer instead of conventional treatment for a curable cancer — it’s a complementary practice,” Dr Goldstein said.
Prayer shares some similarities with meditation, which has been shown to lower blood pressure. Dr Goldstein said it was “impossible to dissect out” whether improvements seen in patients who pray were due to these and other explainable phenomena, such as the fact people who attended church also tended to live more healthily.
Previous studies into the effect of prayer have produced mixed results. A review of 10 previous trials by the international Cochrane Collaboration found when patients were prayed for by others, they enjoyed no significant improvement in outcomes compared to others who were not prayed for.
Cancer Council Australia chief executive Ian Olver said medicine and prayer were “not incompatible” and people with faith should consider the possibility that God was working through the patient’s doctors.
Professor Olver recently conducted a study measuring the spiritual wellbeing of 509 cancer patients who, unknown to them, were being prayed for, and compared them to 490 for whom the trial authors did not arrange prayers. The study found a small but significant improvement in spiritual wellbeing, but did not measure any health changes.
Cancer survivor Ian Gawler, who founded the Gawler Foundation to promote self-help cancer techniques, said there was increasing evidence prayer had a positive effect. “When I was at my sickest, there were quite large groups of people that were praying for me, and I took great comfort from that,” he said.
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