Prayer for Healing

My grandmother died of cancer at 40 because they relied on God for healing. By the time they took her to the doctor it was too late. The doctors did the best they could. They butchered her and sent her home to die... and left my teenage mother scared for life.

My folks learned their lesson. Namely: do not wait on God. Get to the doctor. Then pray. Such devotion. What is the message? God is completely unreliable to trust for the big stuff, however once under the care of human physicians God is strong to "guide the surgeons hand" and facilitate recovery.

What does science say about prayer?

Is the Bible a reliable guide for maintaining good health and expanding our knowledge? Within 2 Chronicles, we learn of Asa contracting an unspecified foot disease. “Yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians” (16:12). The passage clearly displays a negative attitude toward Asa for trusting doctors more than God. According to the author of this passage, we are to believe that God is a better source than a physician for curing our ailments.
Recall the prayer experiment proposed all the way back in The Psychology Hidden Behind Christianity. God does not have a higher success rate than physicians for curing diseases. Even so, the Bible wholeheartedly endorses prayer as the more powerful force. Unfortunately, many smaller denominations of Christianity secretly follow this “no physician” guideline. It doesn’t work, and that’s why it’s illegal to enforce it on minors in most of the civilized world. There has never been any scientific study indicating an act of God has facilitated a recovery from sickness. A person will surely die from a fatal ailment if they refuse medical treatment, regardless of whether or not this individual prays to any god. Even so, most Christians believe praying to their god will prompt a divine intervention that has some unknown and immeasurable positive effect on the outcome. While prayer and faith may comfort a patient enough to facilitate recovery, the acts of the divine are worth nothing if no one’s paying attention. Such a misguided belief is blindly illogical, patently absurd, and without a place in reality.

from: http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter14.html

"One of the Proverbs offers the universal answer for any nonsensical statements found within the Bible. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (3:5)"

The answer for everything. It absolves scripture from any error, being wrong, or even sheer stupidity.

Want some more?

Matthew 21:22 is Jesus’ most damaging statement against the legitimacy of Christian faith. He says, “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” In other words, you will receive anything you pray for as long as you believe that you’ll receive it. That statement is undeniably false, and we can easily demonstrate it as such. Apologists have tried to justify this statement over the years by postulating that Jesus’ statement is true only if the request is in God’s will. However, there is no biblical text supporting the inclusion of God’s will into the words from Jesus’ mouth. He says if you believe, you will receive. End of story.
If a request were already in God’s will, however, what impact would the prayer truthfully have? If the request isn’t in God’s will, he won’t answer it no matter how much one prays. Thus, God’s will, not prayer, is the sole determining factor for future events. Once again, since it’s impossible to shift from the future that God envisioned at the beginning of time, prayer can have no effect on the outcome. Even so, Jesus repeats this promise no less than three additional times in John’s Gospel (14:12-14, 15:7, 16:23-24). The red text is there for everyone to see these claims. I really can’t emphasize enough how damaging these statements are toward the assertion that Christianity is a legitimate faith.

Wouldn't it be interesting to discover that God's will for healing exactly matched statistical recovery rates in the population at large? In fact, they do.