The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study — 27 Files, Eleven 'Remarkable,' None 'Unexplained' (2016–2023)

Dirk Kruijthoff, a general practitioner in the Dutch village of Bleskensgraaf, spent more than a decade investigating reports of healing after prayer, and the result is a peer-reviewed screen of 27 files assessed by an independent medical team: 83 reports collected, 27 with records good enough to assess, eleven judged 'medically remarkable' by a five-consultant team at Amsterdam University Medical Centre — and zero judged 'medically unexplained.'

The program began with one of his own patients. Janneke Vlot had lived with post-traumatic dystrophy for 18 years when she attended a faith-healing service in 2007; she recovered, abruptly, and came off morphine overnight. Kruijthoff could not square the change with her chart, and instead of filing it away he built a study. Alongside his practice he pursued a PhD at VU Amsterdam, defended in April 2023. A newspaper announcement in 2016 brought in most of the 83 reports. The inclusion bar — a documented diagnosis, a documented change, retrievable records — cut the field to 27. An independent team of five medical consultants from different specialties assessed the files between 2016 and 2021.

What the Team Found

The findings sit in two numbers that have to be read together. Eleven of the 27 cases were judged medically remarkable: recoveries the consultants did not expect from the charts in front of them. The conditions included multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, hearing impairment, stroke, anorexia nervosa, drug-induced hepatitis, aortic dissection, post-traumatic dystrophy, and a torn rotator cuff whose owner regained full use of his arm after prayer at a service and canceled his scheduled surgery. The documented follow-up runs 5 to 33 years, with two relapses recorded.

The second number is zero. Not one case — not Vlot's, not any of the eleven — was certified 'medically unexplained.' Five consultants, looking to be surprised, declined every time to say medicine could not account for what they saw. A companion paper in the Journal of Religion and Health, working from the provisional classifications, treats 14 cases as 'possibly medically remarkable or unexplained'; the eleven is the final count, the 14 the wider provisional band, and both are in the published record.

The temporal signature sets the study apart from self-report data. In ten cases the healing was experienced as instantaneous, and in four more it began immediately after the prayer and completed over days or weeks. The authors write that this clustering was the hardest thing to frame in medical terms, and one team physician put the tension in a sentence: 'Medically speaking I have to admit that something happened that I cannot explain.'

The Case For and Against

The limits are stated by the authors themselves. The sample selected itself twice: first for people convinced prayer had healed them, then for people whose paperwork survived. There is no denominator — nobody counted the prayed-for who stayed sick — so the study can produce no rate, only existence claims. And the conditions that dominate the remarkable group are ones with documented fluctuating courses and functional components, where remission is rare but natural. What the natural reading has to absorb is the timing: fluctuating diseases remit, but the files document remissions experienced at the moment of prayer, again and again across unrelated conditions, at a clustering the assessment team itself flagged as hard to account for.

We put the probability that the eleven point beyond natural course at 12 percent. Kruijthoff's landing: 'There are extraordinary healings taking place. But that these are God's intervention, that remains faith.'