Sincerely I appreciate the reply from Breakthrough, I can see wholeheartedness and encouraging thoughts in it.

Let me prime a little bit more on this very question I brought about.

It was few months back, when I was still a busy medical student burying myself in piles of books preparing for exams.

While in one night, when I saw a HUGE acne grew right on my forehead, a thought raced through my mind: Why dont I pray for its healing? Even though I don't believe it will disappear out of nowhere, why not praying for an at least accelerated healing ?

Then the question came. Can we or have we ever try accessing the effacacy of prayer?

Since the start of the year I ran the habit of reading weekly medical journals - just to update myself on the current state of the art management going through the field. Half of the contents are usually Randomised Controlled Trials . The prinicles of these trials are pretty much like the Controlled experiments we did in high school science, the difference being we try to recruit a certain number of individuals, and to eliminate their background differences - we randomise them into treatment group & control group. This virtually makes drugs (or prayer) being the only examinable component.

Of course I don't have the ability to run a large trial. I attempted to run a small Case-series on myself.

From Janurary onwards for 5 months, there were in total 8 ances grew on my face. Alternately I pray for them (sincerely), and jotted down their duration to heal. Here comes the result.

Days to heal for Prayed ances: 4,6,6,8, mean=6d
Days to heal for Unprayed acne : 5,6,5,5, mean=5.25d

This is a pretty retarded experiment - sample size is small (ances are uncommon entities to me, and I dare not to talk my roommate into the trial, he will definitely send me to psychiatry ward immediately, haha), and there is no definite objective measurable endpoints. Anyway, let's put these aside, at least from the results, I don't see drastic improvement.

This elementary work kicked off my passion on this very topic, and I shall come to it later.