TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Pamela Fayerman,
VANCOUVER SUN September 26, 2009

Bending down to place flowers at the graves of his parents, 87-year old Marcelo Carr lost his balance, hitting his head on the tombstone at Ocean View cemetery.

The trauma caused paralysis in his upper and lower limbs. Three months into his stay at Vancouver General Hospital, he says doctors told him to resign himself to his limitations and accept life in a wheelchair.

For Carr's 84-year old brother, Stan, the accident was just as traumatic and life-changing. As his brother’s primary caregiver, Stan is at Marcelo’s side 12 hours a day. Now, a little more than a year since the fall, Marcelo is able to walk with his brother’s assistance and his arms have also regained some function.

The men don’t discount the assistance from physiotherapists and other health professionals in Marcelo’s gradual recovery. But nothing would be possible, they say, without the healing power of prayer. It helped lift Stan’s depression after the accident. And it has given them both the physical and emotional strength to endure.

Chris Bernard, a Providence Health Care pastoral care worker at St. Vincent’s Hospital (Langara site), the long-term care residence where Marcelo now resides, is an integral force in their journey. Such workers offer emotional and spiritual support, companionship and compassion to people of all faiths, spiritualities and belief systems. Providence Health Care is believed to have the largest number of hospital chaplains in the province, in accordance with the founding legacy of the nuns who laid out its spiritual underpinnings, according to Liz Macdonald, coordinator of pastoral care services at St. Paul's Hospital.

Although Catholic icons abound in the many hospitals and facilities throughout the Providence organization, Bernard and Macdonald help facilitate multifaith prayer or non-religious reflection and meditation.

"As care providers, we take a holistic view of the patient/resident ... to ensure all the facets of their being receive attention — social, physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. In this context, healing means the return to wholeness and integration of the person. Even if the patient/resident cannot be physically cured per se, they can attain healing in other dimensions of their humanity," Bernard says.

When she visits patients in hospital who are open to praying, Macdonald, a former nurse, says “we may pray for restoration or a cure if we think there is one, but if not, we pray for strength to accept suffering, to be at peace, to accept that in life, there is suffering. We thank God for the medical technology and the skills of doctors, nurses and other health professionals and ask that God give strength.”

Bernard adds prayer brings about insight, connectedness, understanding, tranquility, reconciliation and peaceful acceptance.

Skeptics may doubt the power of prayer, but in a recent article, Jeff Levin, a leading researcher in the area of faith and healing, noted that a review of over 1,200 studies of religion and health found a positive effect of some sort (hope, optimism, physical and emotional strength and recovery) in the vast majority.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article. And for a Urantia Book perspective on prayer and health, please consider the following:

91:4.5 Remember, even if prayer does not change God, it very often effects great and lasting changes in the one who prays in faith and confident expectation. Prayer has been the ancestor of much peace of mind, cheerfulness, calmness, courage, self-mastery, and fair-mindedness in the men and women of the evolving races.

Labels: faith, health, hospital, Pamela Fayerman, prayer, spirituality

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

More doctors recommending dose of God for their patients

Tribune staff report
May 2, 2008

You might think a hospital sounds like an odd place to launch a spiritual quest. But for some patients, that's precisely where they find religion.

In fact, some doctors even rely on divine intervention to assist them in the healing process.

Tribune reporter Joel Hood's story this week about a continuous prayer week held in Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital illustrated how some hospitals recognize and embrace their role as a spiritual destination.

Dr. Yong Kim was one of the staff recruited to pray. An elder at his Korean Methodist church, Kim spent several hours praying for his patients' recovery. He told Joel that prayer is vital to a patient's recovery.

Kim is one of a burgeoning number of doctors who factor prayer into treatment, said Dr. Robert Klitzman, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. In interviews with 50 doctors, Klitzman learned that many are oblivious to patients' spiritual needs until they become patients themselves.

Has the threat of a serious illness prompted you to reassess your relationship with God? Do your doctors tend to your spiritual well-being too?

Labels: doctors, God, health, hospital, Joel Hood, prayer, spirituality