Christians have been claiming that prayer heals for decades. New-agers (and now the entire Oprah-watching demographic) believe in "The Secret" which revolves around the power of thinking positively. Does Positive Thinking (capital letters definitely intended) really improve your life, quality of life or even have the power to heal other people? A recent NPR article explores the answers to these questions in fascinating detail.

Shari Kaplan is an example of a patient who believes in the power of positive thinking. Fifteen years ago, Shari was diagnosed with HIV, but has never taken any medication for it. Fifteen years later, she is still healthy and her HIV has not yet developed into a full-blown AIDS diagnosis and Shari does not believe that it will due to a combination of prayer and meditation also loosely termed as "positive thinking".

Gail Ironson, a researcher, has been investigating the causes for this in Shari and other patients like her. Through her research, she has found that "those who turned to God after their diagnosis had a much lower viral load and maintained those powerful immune cells at a much higher rate than those who turned away from God." According to Ironson, this was the case even in patients who were otherwise depressed, but found solace in sort of spirituality.

Ironson, however, does not go so far as to say that praying for someone else can positively affect another person’s health and/or body and claims that none of her research has supported this conclusion.

Other researchers are not so sure.  This is where the article  gets a little weird and involves the always-strange arena of quantum physics. Marilyn Shlitz is another researcher who performs studies to determine if  couples deeply in love can create arousal and thoughts of the other person when they concentrate intensely on an image of that person, even when the person is in another room or far away. This is indicated by an increase in both blood flow and perspiration in the partner. Her results have been overwhelmingly positive in this regard and have demonstrated a seemingly definitive correlation between the concentration of one partner and the physical response of another.

Some are attributing this and similar results to the theory of  "Quantum Entanglement", which has been demonstrated on the subatomic particle level.  Entanglement is the theory which indicates that two particles are still connected once they have been separated.  Researchers such as Shlitz believe that this "entanglement" could be extended to those in close relationships.

Yet, other scientists are not convinced, claiming instead that this is unequivocally not how entanglement operates,.