Online Prayer and Cancer Patients?
January 10, 2007 by Kristen King
Filed under Women's Health
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
I think this would make for a GREAT article to query about to mental health magazines Kristen!!
I blogged about this on January 4th (http://breastblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/power-of-written-prayer.html).
I personally think that online support is one positive thing and written prayer is another (that’s how I conceptualized the concept at least).
Both help cancer survivors … in very different ways.
It doesn’t hurt to give it a try!
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