Rethinking Prayer and Health Research: An Exploratory Inquiry on Prayer's Psychological Dimension

A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”,“intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s psychological dimension as a way to unite such elements opens new fertile perspectives on the academic study of prayer and health. In this context, it is suggested that a consistentinterdisciplinary research agenda is required in order to understand those biopsychosocial factors interconnected within the process and outcome of prayer before attempting to decipher the big answers laying dormant probably within the transpersonal and spirituallayers of human experience.