research on the power of prayer

[warthog]

here

I think having a strong belief can lift your spirits and give you hope. Prayer can help you obtain a closer inner peace.

Tch, it doesn't make an atom of difference in itself. It's not possible to do proper research on something like this anyway: just because the fish-heads prayed for some patients and not others doesn't mean that other people might not have been praying for the non -prayed for. You'd also have to factor in controls for things like: do the patients have family, friends, or other support networks (with or without religious involvement). Even the theory that having a religious delusion, whoops, belief, makes you live longer is a bit dubious: it's more about the fact that most practitioners of religion go to religious meetings regularly and have more contact with other people than some of those who don't believe in any supernatural stuff.

Actually, I don't see how prayer for sick people can be made consistent with Christianity.
To be sure priests encourage it, but given a perfect loving, god without limits, he will do the right thing, whatever that is.
A perfect loving God ain't gonna change his mind because you want him to.

That's CS Lewis isn't it?
As I recall he said "I don't pray for what it does for God, but what it does for me "

However the OP was about the effect upon others, which various studies have shown to vary from essentially zero, to noticeably negative.
That result is consistent with the Abrahamic view as rather elegantly explained by Douglas Adams as in:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

Actually, it wasn't that which led me to the view that the Christian God cannot have free will, let alone be nagged into submission.
It was a SciFi story by Larry Niven (Protector, a classic). He postulates an extreme upgrade to humans where they become very much smarter. Such people find themselves with fewer choices, since most of our "choices" are based upon ignorance of what their consequences might be. Enough that if we understood more of what we did, we simply wouldn't do most of them.
His logic is impeccable, but his information theory and biology suck big time.

Not sure about creative realisation, since you'd get bogged down in nonsense like "auras", "energy fields", etc.
However, it is well known that people can be trained to directly exert control over a wide range of bodily functions.
With simple (if boring) techniques you can get people to lower their own blood pressure etc.
It's not popular because there is no group of charlatans to push it like there is for crystals, angels, etc. It would be a hard sell., people seem to want some ancient mystery, rather than a computer screen and gear that's much like what you get plugged into at hospital.

Biofeedback has been advanced as a reason why humans live longer than they "should". We live a large number of heartbeats, (slow metabolism animals live longer, but slower), even when there is no medical technology helping.
It sort of makes sense, since if there was no evolutionary reason for this ability to control, it would be dangerous to leave around where monkey curiosity would push the button marked "do not press this button"