A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions
on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”,
“intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s
psychological dimension as a way to unite such elements opens new fertile perspectives on
the academic study of prayer and health. In this context, it is suggested that a consistent
interdisciplinary research agenda is required in order to understand those biopsychosocial
factors interconnected within the process and outcome of prayer before attempting to
decipher the big answers laying dormant probably within the transpersonal and spiritual
layers of human experience
