Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them? For thousands of years some people have believed so. But new Brandeis University research in the June 2009 Journal of Religion shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer — the prayer of strangers at a distance — actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.

Intercessory prayer has been the subject of scientific study since at least the nineteenth century, when an English scientist, assuming that kings were prayed for more often than others, sought to find out whether those prayers were answered. He concluded that they were not, but that prayer might be a comfort to the people praying anyway.
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Evidence is growing that suggests our well-being is influenced by our spiritual and religious beliefs and practices.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind, studies the effects of spirituality on the human brain. He and his team of researchers have noted that during prayer the frontal lobes become engaged, affecting focus and concentration. And in very deep prayer the parietal lobes become disengaged, helping us to feel detached from time and space, leaving behind our everyday concerns.
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According to this Wired Magazine article, Dr. Sha Zhi Gang, an acupuncturist in Toronto, is a unique spiritual healer who claims "the Divine" has given him the power to download "soul software" into individuals seeking his help to heal a range of ailments.
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