The Healing Power of Prayer: The Surprising Connection Between Prayer and Your Health

At times this book, co-written by a pastor and a physician, seems like two separate treatises. The first third convincingly lays out evidence from dozens of medical studies about the mind-body connection, while the rest is a fairly generic guide to prayer in the Christian life:""what it is, how to pray, what happens when we pray, and how to pray more effectively."" However, the book's first part alone is worth the price of admission--it is filled with astonishing facts and statistics about the need for spiritual awareness in maintaining and regaining health. There is, for example, startling evidence of how stress disables the immune system, and how individuals with a strong religious orientation are statistically more likely than other patients to recover from a life-threatening illness. Prayer, according to the authors,""has the potential to produce healing along with drugs, surgery, and other therapies,"" and should be considered a vital component of recovery.