The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study — 27 Files, Eleven 'Remarkable,' None 'Unexplained' (2016–2023)
It happened — and nature accounts for it.
The account
Dutch general practitioner Dirk Kruijthoff collected 83 reports of healing after prayer, mostly in response to a 2016 newspaper announcement, and put the 27 cases with usable medical records before a five-consultant assessment team at Amsterdam University Medical Centre; the team judged eleven of the 27 'medically remarkable' and none 'medically unexplained,' while documenting that in ten cases the healing was experienced as instantaneous — findings published across peer-reviewed papers in 2022 and 2023 and summed up by Kruijthoff himself: extraordinary healings take place, and whether they are God's intervention 'remains faith.'
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Dirk Kruijthoff, a general practitioner in the Dutch village of Bleskensgraaf, spent more than a decade investigating reports of healing after prayer. The work became a peer-reviewed study 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.
The Findings
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 other number is zero. Not one case — not Vlot's, not any of the eleven — was certified 'medically unexplained.' Five consultants 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.
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 it in a sentence: 'Medically speaking I have to admit that something happened that I cannot explain.'
Limits the Authors Stated
The authors note that 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. The conditions that dominate the remarkable group are ones with documented fluctuating courses and functional components. The files document remissions experienced at the moment of prayer, across unrelated conditions, a clustering the assessment team flagged as hard to account for.
Kruijthoff's own summary: 'There are extraordinary healings taking place. But that these are God's intervention, that remains faith.'
Reviewer Notes
We weigh a claim on two things, kept separate from the story above.
Assessed by Miracles Jar AI
The most rigorous screen yet run on prayer-healing reports found eleven recoveries worth calling remarkable and zero it would call unexplained; both numbers are findings, the second is the harder bar, and the instantaneity the team could not frame is what remains on the table.
The most rigorous screen yet run on prayer-healing reports found eleven recoveries worth calling remarkable and zero it would call unexplained; both numbers are findings, the second is the harder bar, and the instantaneity the team could not frame is what remains on the table.
The question here is whether nature could explain these cases. The study identified eleven cases as remarkable but certified zero as beyond medical accounting — the team was looking to be surprised and declined every time. "Remarkable" is a clinician's surprise, not a probability claim. The temporal signature is the study's most striking output: ten instantaneous plus four immediate recoveries, a clustering the assessment team itself flagged as hard to account for. Fluctuating diseases remit, but rarely on cue. That cluster is what keeps this entry meaningfully off the floor.
The eleven (Explore) versus fourteen (qualitative) counts reflect provisional versus final classification — not a contradiction in the data. The sample was self-selected twice, with no denominator, so no rate is computable. Kruijthoff's own landing — that these cases deserve careful attention without overreaching interpretation — is the study's honest center.
The study was peer-reviewed and built explicitly to be checked rather than believed. The evidence for more than natural explanation is genuinely uncertain, with the instantaneous timing cluster as the residue the assessment team itself named.
Evidence ledger — what the verdict rests on
The program is peer-reviewed across multiple journals, ran for years under an academic medical center, and published its methods, inclusion criteria, and both halves of its findings
The rare prayer-healing dataset built to be checked rather than believed
The assessment team certified zero of 27 cases as 'medically unexplained' — every file, including the eleven remarkable ones, stayed within what five consultants could imagine medicine doing
The study's own hardest number
The sample is self-selected twice over and carries no denominator: no count exists of prayed-for patients who did not recover, so no rate of healing can be computed from it
A limitation the authors state themselves; the conditions that dominate the remarkable group also have documented fluctuating courses
In ten of the 27 cases the healing was experienced as instantaneous and in four more it began immediately after prayer — a temporal clustering the authors report they found difficult to frame in medical terms
Fluctuating diseases remit, but rarely on cue; one team physician: 'Medically speaking I have to admit that something happened that I cannot explain'
The two papers carry different counts — eleven final 'remarkable' verdicts in Explore, 14 'possibly remarkable or unexplained' in the qualitative paper — reflecting provisional versus final classification
Both numbers are reported here; the difference is the width of the provisional band, not a contradiction in the data
What would raise this score: Long-term follow-up documenting permanence, in a condition with a near-zero spontaneous-resolution base rate, would raise the meter.
What would lower it: A documented relapse, or case literature showing the condition fluctuates or remits on its own, would move it down.
How this works
We keep two questions apart on purpose — so a thin record can’t make an impossible thing look proven, and a strong record can’t dress up an ordinary one as a miracle. First: Could nature explain it? (taking the account as true for the moment.) The question is whether nature could produce this at all — assuming, for the moment, the events are true as described. Second: is there real evidence it happened? A claim only stands out when both hold up — and we never call anything certain either way. How ratings work →
The natural explanation
The leading natural account for this case is spontaneous remission & the body's own recovery. Read what it explains — and where it stops.
Sources
Tagged by proximity to the event. Primary sources are direct or contemporaneous; tertiary are downstream retellings.
- 1.Primaryacademic
The quantitative core: eleven of 27 healings evaluated as 'medically remarkable,' none 'medically unexplained,' five independent consultants, the 5-to-33-year persistence with two relapses, and the authors' conclusion that the findings fit poorly in the biomedical frame
- 2.Primaryacademic
The qualitative companion: the 83 reports via the 2016 newspaper announcement, the Amsterdam UMC (VUmc) assessment 2016–2021, 14 cases marked 'possibly medically remarkable or unexplained,' the condition list, the ten instantaneous healings, and the team physician's 'something happened that I cannot explain'
- 3.Secondarynews
Kruijthoff's background (GP, PhD at VU Amsterdam, April 2023), the Janneke Vlot case that started the program — 18 years of post-traumatic dystrophy, off morphine overnight after a 2007 healing service — the rotator-cuff example, and his 'that remains faith' conclusion
Cases like this
Nearest on the map — similar in how miraculous they’d be, and how strong the evidence is.