your prayers are desperately needed

I know I've been absent for awhile from the blogging world, catching up on photography stuff and the like, but I make this exception for something very important, baby Lane who needs you!

This is baby Lane who is 6 months old. Thursday, August 19th, he was life-flighted to Columbia from Jefferson City in an induced coma after an accident involving a fall. He has had a lot of internal brain bleeding and seizures and, if my information is correct, has yet to wake up. They think the emergency surgery they did last night may have stopped all external seizures but he is still in really rough condition. His parents and family are beside themselves. Any prayers would be greatly appreciated for this little one.

For those that doubt the efficacy of their prayers, I give you this excerpt from a study on the effects of prayer!:

In 1998, Dr. Elisabeth Targ and her colleagues at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, conducted a controlled, double-blind study of the effects of "distant healing," or prayer, on patients with advanced AIDS. Those patients receiving prayer survived in greater numbers, got sick less often, and recovered faster than those not receiving prayer. Prayer, in this study, looked like a medical breakthrough.

In 1988, Dr. Randolph Byrd conducted a similar study at San Francisco General Hospital involving patients with heart attack or severe chest pain. He found that patients receiving prayer did much better clinically than those who did not.

Currently, Dr. Mitchell Krucoff at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, is studying the effects of prayer on patients undergoing cardiac procedures such as catheterization and angioplasty. Patients receiving prayer have up to 100% fewer side effects from these procedures than people not prayed for.

These are impressive double-blind studies, meaning that no one knows who is receiving prayer and who isn't. This eliminates or at least reduces the placebo effect, which is the power of suggestion or positive thinking. However, the studies I find most impressive are not done on humans. For example, when bacteria are prayed for, they tend to grow faster; when seeds are prayed for, they tend to germinate quicker; when wounded mice are prayed for, they tend to heal faster. I like these studies because they can be done with great precision, and they eliminate all effects of suggestion and positive thinking, since we can be sure the effects aren't due to the placebo effect. Mice, seeds, and microbes presumably don't think positively!

(If you want to read more on the effects of prayer, go to this page http://www.dosseydossey.com/larry/QnA.html I haven't read it all but you are welcome to explore!)

Your prayers are effective and greatly coveted, whomever you are! Please take a moment (or two or ten!) and pray for baby Lane.