Pain is one of the most common reasons for seeking healthcare. Inadequate pain management negatively impacts numerous aspects of patient health. It had been found that multidisciplinary treatment programs, including psychosocial interventions, are more useful for pain management than purely biomedical treatment or pharmaceutical treatments alone. Recently, researchers showed increasing interest in understanding the role of spirituality/prayer on managing the pain experience.  A recent study has determined that engagement in religious practices, such as prayer, show a positive impact in managing the pain experience.

Benefits of Praying

None of this emerges from a vacuum. Prayer is the most common form of complementary medicine in the United States. A 2002 National Health Interview Survey, one of the most comprehensive datasets on complementary medicine use ever conducted, found that prayer specifically for one’s own health was the single most-used CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) therapy in the country – ahead of herbal supplements, ahead of chiropractic, ahead of meditation – relied on by 43% of Americans, with 62% of this group identifying as Christian.

People have not been waiting for researchers to give them permission. They have been doing this for a very long time. What is newer is the willingness of clinical medicine to ask whether it has anything to add to the conversation beyond skepticism.

A recent randomized controlled trial conducted at the University of Maryland School of Medicine has found that a five-minute session of proximal intercessory prayer (PIP) — in-person prayer offered by a trained volunteer — significantly reduced pain and anxiety in primary care patients compared to a music control group.

Key Findings of the study include:

• Pain: Prayer group participants reported significantly greater pain reductions immediately after the session and at the two-week follow-up compared to the music group. The difference was not statistically significant at six weeks.
• Anxiety: Prayer group participants showed significantly greater reductions in anxiety scores immediately after their treatment. This effect persisted at two and six weeks suggesting durable effects lasting at least a month and a half.
• Safety and acceptance: No participants reported adverse events. Ninety-seven percent of prayer recipients were neutral, agreeable, or strongly agreeable to having PIP available as part of future medical visits.
• Who benefited most: Black participants reported larger reductions in both pain and anxiety following prayer — a finding the authors consider particularly meaningful given documented inequities in pain treatment and the high rates of prayer use as complementary medicine among Black Americans.

Prayer is the most common form of complementary medicine in the United States, used by 43% of Americans with 62% of this group identifying as Christian. Despite this widespread use, rigorous clinical trials of in-person intercessory prayer have been scarce. This study is among the first well-powered randomized controlled trials of proximal intercessory prayer conducted in a standard primary care setting.

What It Could Mean for Primary Care

Rather than replacing traditional treatments, the authors indicate that this type of brief, faith-based intervention could be integrated into primary care settings to help manage pain and anxiety. That framing is careful and correct. No one in this study is suggesting that a five-minute prayer replaces a prescription, or that patients with chronic conditions should stop pursuing conventional care. The word used throughout is “complement” – something added to the existing toolkit, not a replacement for it.

The findings suggest proximal intercessory prayer may be a low-cost, non-pharmacologic complement to standard care for a wide range of patients. Low-cost is not nothing, particularly for the population most likely to be sitting in a family medicine waiting room. Interventions that require no equipment, no insurance authorization, and no specialist referral have a different kind of accessibility than most additions to a care plan. The study also reported that the intervention was very well received. Most people, it turns out, are not offended by the offer of prayer. They’re just not used to being offered it in a clinic.