Jeffrey H. Boyd, a medical doctor from Waterbury, Connecticut, writes:

My first wife, Pat, had diabetes, two heart attacks, bypass surgery, two strokes, went on dialysis, went blind, and had both legs amputated above the knee. She and I went every week to a healing service at our church. The clergy would lay hands on us and pray, while Pat and I cried uncontrollably. She was never healed. There was no evidence that healing prayer had any positive effect in terms of miraculous cures. But every week this intimate prayer gave us enough spiritual strength to endure another week. Thus my own experience was that healing prayer was like manna for Pat and me. Every Sunday we were given enough to get us through. We were not given more nor less manna than we needed to survive. It was exactly like Exodus 16, and like the Lord's Prayer, "Give us today our daily bread."

In other words, Pat and I experienced healing prayer to have a curative power not in terms of a change in medical outcome, but in terms of keeping us in touch with the Lord, who spiritually sustained us. Furthermore, other people from our church were more in touch with us by virtue of us all praying for Pat's healing.