Is The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study a real miracle?

Common questions

Is The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study real or fake?

Miracles Jar's verdict is Explained: it happened — nature explains it. It happened — and nature accounts for it. On the evidence, the record is strongly attested.

Has The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study been explained?

The event appears to have happened, but a natural explanation accounts for it — the leading account is spontaneous remission & the body's own recovery. It reads as remarkable rather than miraculous.

What is the evidence for The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study?

Miracles Jar weighs 3 sources for this case. Points that support the claim: 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. Points that cut against it: 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; and 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.

What is the natural explanation for The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study?

The leading natural account is spontaneous remission & the body's own recovery. Diseases sometimes resolve without treatment, or despite it. “Spontaneous” rarely means “no mechanism” — more often it means a mechanism we are only beginning to instrument. The full breakdown shows where that explanation holds — and where it stops.

When and where did The Dutch Healing-After-Prayer Study happen?

It is said to have occurred reports collected from 2015; assessments 2016–2021; published 2022–2023 in Amsterdam University Medical Centre (VUmc), Netherlands.