Lively Women

Online Prayer and Cancer Patients?

by Kristen King on January 10th, 2007

An NCI-funded study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research has been all over the news lately because it has evidently determined that praying online confers psychological benefits to cancer patients.

You can read about it at Science Daily, Live Science, Psych Central, and about a billion other places on the Web.

b5media’s own Gloria Gamat weighs in over at Cancer Commentary in this post. I left the following comment:

I’d be really interested to see the correlation between mental health benefits and non-prayer online support group activities, as well as MH and non-online prayer and non-online support group activities. I suspect that the true benefit is communicating on a personal level with others who share and can validate one’s beliefs, not specifically online prayer. I say this because prayer is a “reverent petition made to God,” which implies direct communication with a higher being, not discussion of such communication in a written forum. Both have benefits, but I think this is a case of comparing apples and oranges, not apples and apples.

What do you think?

Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King

Share This

Related Stories

Group Therapy Fails to Improve Breast Cancer Survival
More Great Reasons to Drink Cranberry Juice
Down Syndrome Prevents Cancer?
Modifying Molecules May Stop Cancer Metastasis
Women’s Health Newsflash: Breast Cancer

POSTED IN: Cancer