The Exorcist Files - Supernatural Healing and The Evidence For Miracles with Dr. Joshua Brown

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Are supernatural healings happening today? Science can't prove God was the cause of the healing, but it can show something miraculous happened. Dr. Joshua W. Brown is a professor of Psychological and Brain Science at Indiana University, where he directs the Cognitive Control Lab. He also co-founded the Global Medical Research Institute which performs peer reviewed research on claims of miraculous healing to support the idea that these things are in fact happening today. Today we dive into the placebo affect, healing in response to prayer, Josh's testimony of being healed of a malignant brain tumor, and his own personal experience contending for healing with others. Want to listen to the Exorcist Files Ad Free and get access to exclusive content? Support the show by joining the Vault. It helps ensure we keep making incredible content. Pre-Order Dr. Brown's book at https://joshbrownneuro.com/ . We loved it. Live Better Longer! For a limited time only, our listeners  are getting 20% OFF at BUBS Naturals by using code EXFILES20.Cowboy Colostrum- https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/EXFILES for 25% off. Use our code EXFILESFastgrowingtrees.com and use code EXFILES for 20% off! Ollie. Feed the Obsession. Go to ollie.com/exfiles and use code exfiles to get 60% off your first box!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to The Exorcist Files, where we are not drunk off wine, as the scripture say, but instead of the spirits, or sparkling water in my case. Today, we're getting back into miracles. Healing and deliverance, oh my. With me today is my dear friend, Dr. Joshua Brown. He is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. He's also the founder of the Global Medical Research Institute, which actually applies peer-reviewed protocols and studies. to accounts of miraculous healings. But perhaps most importantly, he is an alumnus of the Exorcist Files, our own in-house resident neuroscientist, if you will, because let's be honest, every good show about deliverance needs one.

So get those synapses and neurons firing as we play Hungry, Hungry Hippocampus today. Please welcome our very own Doc Brown back to the show. Welcome back. Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, great to be back with you. Hungry, Hungry Hippacampus. I know. Your insight, it's terrible.

I honestly haven't heard that one before. Well, may it be true for most of this interview. Now, it's funny, I've known you for years, and I just put two and two together as I was prepping for this. How often do you get called Doc Brown and have any connection to Back to the Future? Pretty much never. I mean, except for right now,

but I've been called Encyclopedia Brown. I've been, well, actually, I've been called many things, some nicer than other. Okay. Well, I just, I thought of that. And I also thought of this, too, because in, of course, back to the future, Christopher Lloyd's character, Doc Brown, he actually injures his head. He falls and hits his head and thus comes up with his breakthrough invention, the flux capacitor solving time travel. You're a neuroscientist. I know you have a field of interest in how the brain stores memory and how people can avoid cognitive impairment. Are you aware of anything in the literature where someone hits their head and develops a breakthrough in quantum science? Uh, no. I mean, that's not how that works. There are, occasionally there are situations where someone has a head injury and that will lead to changes in perception. And every once in a while, those changes in perception can be sort of interesting, but usually just lead to impairments. But, you know, of course, that doesn't make a good movie plot. It's a much better movie plot if you hit your head or get bit by radioactive spider or something that suddenly gives you superpowers, right? Absolutely. Well, Dr. Brown, we're going to talk about your incredible book, which I had a chance to read an advanced copy of, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We're going to figure out how we can, if it's possible, to prove miracles today. But before we start, it is a little bit of a new tradition on this show. You are a Protestant, and you have extensive experience, praying for people and seeing all sorts of amazing works of God all around the world. And you've worked with a lot of different Christians from different backgrounds. What is something that you appreciate about your Catholic brothers and sisters. Oh, I think the top of my list would be exactly why we're having this conversation,

which is the appreciation of deliverance and exorcism. And this was something that, you know, if you've listened to the past episodes with me on it, you understand that deliverance was a big part of my healing journey very early on. So I had to sort of look, you know, look around and look hard to find people who could help me with that when it became clear that that's what I needed. So I think within various Protestant traditions, there are certain Pentecostal and charismatic segments where that's more common, but it's not at all, in my experience, universally appreciated in different parts of Protestantism. I think there are a lot of places where it is, for sure. But I've, you know, I've definitely enjoyed listening to Father Martins talking about his exorcism experience. And I think

I've said this before on the show that, you know, I learned from that and I appreciate it. And I think it compares in a lot of ways with my overall experience with deliverance ministry over the years. And because I experienced deliverance ministry early on. And once I realized, I'd been had, and I would have been dead, most likely, from this attack, it sort of generated this holy anger, as it were. And I was just really angry that the enemy would do this to people in such frequency. And it also just struck me that in so much the church, there's not a lot of teaching. There's this sort of implicit idea that if you leave the enemy alone, he'll leave you alone, as if somehow by paying attention to the possibility that we could need deliverance,

where somehow we're empowering the enemy. And it's, in my experience, is exactly the opposite. And all that to say, I appreciate the focus, the teaching, the exposition, because I think it's an essential minister. and one that's probably one of the least understood and least practiced. You know, I could tell lots more stories, but I think it's a huge service to the church to bring a lot of this to light and to just talk about it.

Amen. Well, thank you. Thank you, Doctor. So actually, I was going to say this for a little later, but you did bring it up. Now, you shared your testimony on the show in our episode, gosh, with season one back in 2023. But could you give our new listeners or those who, may not remember a brief primer on your story and your testimony and how it kind of brought you to this moment because you have a not only experience of the miracle you have you know firsthand experience with

the adversary and uh saw victory in that yeah so the short version is in in summer of 2003 my wife was pregnant with our first child in four days before she gave birth i had a seizure i ended up in the hospital and we both ended up in the hospital at the same time and when my daughter a newborn daughter was two and a half weeks old, I was diagnosed with brain tumor. And being a neuroscientist, I was not a very good patient. And I knew that this was really bad. And most likely I was going to die and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Where really got weird was, without going into details, Candy had had a dream shortly before that, heard the name of a particular name of a spirit and came in. And one morning as I was waking up and was like, does this mean anything to you? And I said,

know, but felt very agitated. So she said, well, if there's a spirit by this name, just leave him alone in Jesus' name. And at that point, I started manifesting violently. And remember, I'm a neuroscientist. I was doing brain imaging research, trying to build computational models of different parts of the brain. And here I am. I'm fully conscious. And Candy would say, leave him alone in Jesus' name, and my head would just involuntarily whip around at her and scream no. And, you know, it's like if someone taps your kneecaps and you have a sort of a reflex knee jerk, it felt like that, except my whole body's doing this. And reacting violently, you know, I tried to say the name of Jesus. I couldn't. And, you know, we got thrown into the whole deliverance thing

quite unexpectedly. We weren't looking for it. Candy had this dream that kind of cracked the thing open. And that began a search for spiritual healing, for deliverance, for physical healing. Candy and I spent the next year in particular just traveling everywhere, trying to find a miracle, understand how this all works, how deliverance works. I got a lot of deliverance ministry. It took about five months, and there was finally a big showdown, and I got free. But it's a weird situation to be living. that and at the same time working as a neuroscientist, the book, Proving a Miracle, really came out of

all of that experience. It's the sort of the question of what do you do with all the questions of science and at the same time, all the experiences and all the things that we're seeing in terms of deliverance and miraculous healings? Like, how do you reconcile those? Can you? And that's really what this book is about. Yeah, and just, you know, to put a bow on it, too, you know, so people know, as to quote, it's not, quote, all in your head, you had a, what was almost for sure, right, a malignant brain tumor, and your deliverance coincided with a healing that there is verifiable imagery of that now only remains a scar where there was once thought to be a deadly tumor that, you know, had a, I think you said it was a survival rate of something like 2% or something. It was like within a couple

years, you were almost certainly going to be gone, right? Yeah. I mean, the average survival rate varies, but it's generally a few years. There's not really, like you can have surgery and radiation and chemo, but that doesn't, at least at the time, it didn't statistically prolong people's lives. And I was open to it. I would have had treatment, but the doctors said, well, it wouldn't necessarily help you all that much. Let's, let's wait and watch. And if it gets really bad, we'll do treatment. but it was sort of more of a palliative thing than a curative thing. And so I thought, well, why should I have surgery if it's not even going to help all that much? Like, if I'm still going to die, like, why should I go through that?

So I was certainly open to medical treatment, but it just didn't seem to be worth it at that point. And here you are two decades, two days later, and you're healed. Yeah, it's 23 years later, and I'm still fine. I haven't had any symptoms since early 2004. That was my last seizure. And I've been fine ever since. So, you know, I went looking for a miracle, you know, prayed desperately for a miracle, went anywhere.

I heard miracles were happening in the name of Jesus and saw a lot of wild stuff. So, you know, I went back and looked through the literature, scientific literature, years later. And I realized there was about like a one in 500 chance that what I had might not have been as bad as it seemed, but that chance was so small that the doctors are like, no, this is a tumor. You know, it's not how it works. So, you know, in the end, like, all I know is I had this diagnosis and I went desperately looking for a miracle and a lot of dramatic things happened as I got prayed for at a certain point after the last dramatic deliverance I had in early 2004, there were no more symptoms after that. Now, I don't know if I actually asked you this in the

last interview. Obviously, there's no way to prove this definitively, but are you of the opinion that whatever was demonically assaulting you was actually causing or one of the culprits and connected to your brain tumor? I think so. And, you know, this is not... And it's hard to say, obviously. It's not something you can prove, right? But it's hard to miss the connection, right? I mean, I'm fine. And then I have a seizure, never had a seizure before my life. And suddenly they have a seizure. I get diagnosed with something. And then next thing, we're praying for healing, and then a demon manifests. And of course, I grew up in a church where the theology was, if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation. Old things are passed away. All things are become new. And so,

therefore, a Christian can't have a demon, which in hindsight, I don't think necessarily follows logically. The joke goes, you know, someone desperately calls a minister in the middle of the night and says, Pastor, I have to know, can a Christian have a demon? And the pastor says, you know, woke me up for that. I mean, a Christian can have anything they want. And flams the phone down. So, you know, if you have an open door, right? I mean, Paul writes to the Christians in the Ephesians, right? Don't let the sun go down on your anger and don't give the devil a foothold. Well, that's written to Christians. So I kind of had to change my whole theology about that, that question. Can a Christian have a demon? So, no, I can't, you know, I can't prove that it was a demonic

cause of the brain tumor. But what I do know is that all that manifestation happened in a way that's coincident. And also the deliverance was more or less coincident with the symptoms stopping. And now I'm healed. So there's this little scientific saying that correlation doesn't equal causation. So that's why I say you can't prove it. But the coincidence is hard not to notice. Let's just state for the record here, because I want to try and offer some hope to people right now. Obviously, a lot of the miracles that you document in this book. They are by definition miracles and they're rare. We know that miracles are definition rare and so we're not going to see them as much as we'd like. But sitting where you are right now, someone with a PhD, a very a learned doctor, to quote Ron Burgundy,

you are steeped in data and you are a person who is naturally skeptical and a scientist. What can you say right now to the skeptic out there who's just having such a tough time accepting that miracles are happening today, especially in the context of physical healings? Yeah, well, first of all, I'd say, and this is one of the things I mentioned in my book, and that is that not everyone gets a miracle, and I don't know why I got healed, and my friend, my good friend, the best man in my wedding, died of colon cancer shortly after I was healed. I don't know. I don't understand it. But as to the question of do miracles happen? One of the things that I look at in the book is exactly this question, because I think people have a lot of

questions about this. And a lot of them are along the lines of, well, if you say someone was miraculously healed, what does that mean? Like, how do you know it was a miracle? I mean, people claim to experience healings, but could those be placebo effects? Could those be mind-body effects? In the end, I found that there were some cases of healing where we looked at all the medical records, we ran them by multiple medical specialists, and there was simply no explanation. And I think the Catholic Church has a well-developed sort of framework for vetting miracle claims, and that's with the Lambertini criteria. And that's been a useful point of reference for us in the Global Medical Research Institute as we researched claims of miraculous healing. So when we take supplements,

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checkout. That's 25% off when you use our code X-Files. That's EX Files at cowboy colostrum.com slash X-Files. Could you define the, I want to call it the Lamborghini effect, but that's a different effect. But could you defy, because I actually found this fascinating that it was actually a Pope, a Cardinal and then ultimately a Pope who actually came up with this protocol. And for anyone who's like, oh, the church is so against science, I found this such a refreshing anecdote to show that they actually take it very seriously. Yeah. Well, so Cardinal Lambertini, before he became Pope, was instrumental.

He didn't develop the criteria that are now known as the Lambertini criteria, but he helped develop them. They were based on some earlier writings in the 17th century from some earlier Catholic philosophers and theologians. And he developed them and really applied them to the evaluation of miracle claims at the time. So there was, especially then, I think now the situation, the procedures are a little different in the dikastry for the causes of saints. But at the time, it was very much like a trial, like a legal trial, where you have the advocate for the claim that this was a miracle, and then you have the devil's advocate.

And that's literally where the term came from. The devil's advocate was the one in the miracle investigation who tried to argue that, no, this wasn't a miracle. And therefore, the person should not be beatified or should not be canonized. So that's where we get the term. Cardinal Lambertini served in the role as a devil's advocate and really took a critical eye to this. And I think I haven't personally met Jacqueline Duffin, but Jacqueline Duffin, but

Jacqueline Duffin is a hematologist, oncologist, who was asked to look at some blood samples that showed what was invariably a fatal blood cancer. And she looked at them and made a report, well, it turns out it was commissioned by the Vatican in the course of investigating a miracle. And, you know, I don't want to speak for her too much. But in her book, she says that she was basically impressed with that. And even though she didn't identify herself as a believer, she was still impressed and then spent a long time looking in the Vatican Secret Archives looking over the cases of miracles and concluded that miracles happened, maintain that she was still an atheist, but that the miracles happened. And I think that's, to me, that's what I would hope to see.

In other words, I would hope that claims of miracles are properly the domain of medicine and science, and they're empirical claims, they're historical claims. You can investigate these. And that's part of what we do with the Global Medical Research Institute is to look critically at these things and play devil's advocate in the sense of not just accepting claims of miracles at face value, but really looking into them and asking, are there other potential explanations for these? If you haven't done that, you can't make a strong acclaim that this is really a miracle. And I think it's even a further question of, if something passes the test, it's a miracle. That is, it meets the Lambertini criteria. And by that, I mean that essentially the person had no medical hope of recovery, and yet they were healed completely,

permanently, instantly, and there's no possibility of some known physical explanation for how that recovery happened. That's a miracle. Now, I think it's important to point out that that doesn't mean that somehow, sometime in the future, we might never find a physical explanation, a medical explanation. But we can say at least as of the time of the investigation, there's there's no possible mechanism. So I think the way the Vatican approaches that with a kind of critical eye and making a good faith effort to try to disprove the miracle claim makes the ones that pass that much stronger. The other part I think that's left out of that kind of five-fold criteria as well is that it has to be a theological miracle. And that's what gets really interesting is, I mean,

it's amazing that someone gets healed and a tumor disappears and the blood is suddenly, you know, healthy, but the fact that what the Vatican's doing is they are tying it to these people who made pilgrimages or asked these people who they believe by faith are in heaven and time it. And that's when we had on Senior Sarno on the show to talk about this. And he said, yeah, we also want to show that there's proof that someone sought the intercession of this person. And I find this whole I find the process just riveting and the fact that more people aren't talking about it. And it's cool to hear that you and obviously the Jacqueline Duffy as well found this process robust and rigorous. And I've always wondered because, like, are we just going to sit with this? I mean, it's just

a thing. It's just out there. And we're like, what are we going to, are we going to talk about this? This is really cool. I do want to mention because you, you have so many incredible cases in this book. Let's just give a couple examples. You're talking about stuff that is, these are impressive healing. So maybe we could start with Marsha. I found this one just very moving, someone who suffers from juvenile macular degeneration and cannot see. So could you share her inspiring story. Yeah, so this was a case we came across in the course of, you know, we looked at many cases over the years with the GMRI and we continue to look at cases. But this one in particular is a woman who was around 1959, so, you know, decades ago. And in fact, she just recently passed away, I think,

a year or two ago. And she was 18 years old, lost her eyesight over the course of about three months. and went from normal vision to blind. So she was examined, and the examining physician noticed that there was clear damage to the back of both of her eyes. And so because of that, she was diagnosed with juvenile macular degeneration. Based on the records, we believe was a particular type of juvenile macular degeneration called Stargert's disease. The bottom line is, once the retina is damage, that is the back of the eye that turns the light

into nerve signals. Once that's damaged, it doesn't regenerate. There's zero hope that it will ever regenerate. It just does not happen. And to this day, there's no cure for it. So at that point, she entered a school for the blind. She learned how to read braille. She walked with a cane. And she got prayed for a lot, apparently without effect. And she even went to, I think it was, I want to say it was one of the healing evangelist meetings in the 1960s. And she wasn't healed there. But shortly after that, she and her husband were about to go to bed one night and they're praying. And her husband prays as he, I guess, often did. You know, God, we know you can do it. We know you can heal her eyesight. Would you do it tonight? And she opens her eyes and she can see. So she looks at her husband who she had never seen, right?

she married this man not having seen him. And she said, well, the girls told me, you look, you know, you're handsome, but, you know, they weren't lying, which of course is the response you'd hope for, right? The righteous marry by faith, I guess, right? Well, yeah, I don't know. I mean, in her case, anyway, her husband's a pastor, but she had a daughter and she'd never seen her kid. And so, you know, there on the dresser was a picture of her kid.

And she's like, that's my baby. So from that day, she could see. And keep in mind, she had been examined multiple times. I mean, this was documented because when she enrolled for the school for the blind, she also had to get examined again. And the doctors confirmed that, yes, the back of her eyes are basically ruined. And that's why she's blind. So after that, she and her husband had quite a ministry. He passed, I don't know, some years ago. And like I said, she passed a year or two ago. But they had quite a ministry. When we came across her case, we asked her to get new pictures taken of the back of her eyes. And I had a professor of ophthalmology look at the images of the back of her eyes.

And what he said was, you can see a tiny little bit of scarring where it looks like there was damage, but it's not damaged anymore. So the thing is, and one of the things that I talk about in the book is, well, what about, you know, was it somehow a psychosomatic condition? Was it somehow? Is that a conversion disorder that you called? Yeah, so it's often called conversion disorder. So it turns out that there are cases of blindness where someone goes blind and usually it's, you know, over the course of a few days or something. And it's usually because there's a lot of stress in their lives. It's most common in women ages 10 to 35. They will be truly blind. It's called conversion disorder because the term was coined to indicate that the emotional trauma of whatever is going on gets converted into physical symptoms. And so that's how you can end up with this blindness.

And they really are blind, right? They're not faking it or making it up. But with psychotherapy, you know, basically finding ways to manage whatever the emotional difficulties are, it'll often resolve. What's the physiological cause? Is it stress or is it like, say, because I know you have a really beautiful story where you were in Cuba and you prayed for a girl you called Christina who wasn't receiving healing. And then at some point you discovered that she, her husband,

had been arrested and taken from her and there's a traumatic event and a lot of emotional duress and that actually coincided with her loss of eyesight. So you prayed for her after dealing with that emotion, as she found healing, which was so beautiful. First, what is the physiological thing that you think's happening when someone has a conversion disorder? Well, I think to this day, we don't know. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, I mean, we don't know. What we do know is that these symptoms, and they can also include like, you know, what appears to be kind of a paralysis or, you know, other like motor symptoms. We do know that they coincide with this, you know, sort of extreme emotional duress, as you say, but we don't know what the biological or physiological mechanisms of that are.

And that makes it hard to really diagnose or to know how to treat other than to provide, you know, psychotherapy and, you know, social and emotional support. And that often is very, effective. I think in that case, in the case of, you know, the woman I call Christina, it was very dramatic in the sense that, you know, we're in this church in southern Cuba, not far from Guantanamo Bay. And, you know, we've just been a week in Cuba and we've seen all kinds of miracles. I mean, I'd just seen someone who was walking down the street with a cane, totally blind, prayed with them. He gets his eyesight back in the span of about 10 to 15 minutes and, you know, decides on the spot that he would like to be a Christian and follow Jesus. So I'm seeing these dramatic things

happening. And, you know, what's going on medically? I don't know. I mean, I'm not in the position to be able to examine them in any detail, you know, nor do I have the deep training to do that, you know, in an official capacity. So we've seen all kinds of miracles, tumors dissolving. And so we get to this church and we start praying with people. There's a bunch of us praying for healing. And all people are experiencing all kinds of dramatic healings. And so my friend and I are praying with this woman and nothing seems to be happening. You know, after like a half an hour, she's like, well, I still can't see any better. So at that point, we say, well, you know, what happened when you lost your eyesight?

And she says, well, actually, it was kind of traumatic because my husband got arrested and thrown in jail and everything was on me. And so we start praying for emotional healing. And she's crying. Finish that. And then we start to pray again. And my friend and I each put a hand on one of her. shoulders and I start to pray and I get halfway through saying the name of Jesus and it feels like

a lightning bolt hits me and I fall over. The same thing happened to my friend who was praying with her. We both fell over at the exact same time. It felt like grabbing an electrical wire and she was the only one still standing and her eyesight was instantly restored. And so after that I stood all the way across the church and she could count my fingers. She could see very clearly after that. It was instant. you know, is that a miracle, or was it conversion disorder? Did she have a psychosomatic thing going on? And I think ultimately, I don't have enough evidence to say one way or the other. I mean, I can say it was quite dramatic. It was instant. It was complete as far as I can tell. I didn't see her again after that, so I don't know how lasting it was. But I think you still have to ask the question. So could you explain that as a kind of a psychosomatic or, you know, conversion disorder, which can be resolved as the emotion, stressors and trauma are addressed. So, you know, those are two cases of blindness. I think, one, the case of, you know, whom we'll call Marcia, it was very clearly caused by an organic disease process. There was visible damage to the back of the eye, which fully accounted for why she was blind. And so in that

case, I would say that Marcia's healing did meet the Lambertini criteria as a miracle. In the case of Christina, I don't know. I'm not sure we can say that because I did not have enough of her medical record information to say whether there was organic disease, whether there was physical damage to her visual system. But what I do know is that she was quite happy that she could see after that. Tears of joy and, you know, the emotional healing as well. And so in one sense, I think that's what mattered, at least for her, was that she was healed and she could see. You know, I totally rejoice in that. And at the same time, the neuroscientist in me wants to know. So what happened?

You know, how did that happen? And I think, you know, that happened in 2004. And it was all these kinds of experiences that just kind of simmered around in my mind. Like, so what's really happening medically with these? And how can we understand it? And that's ultimately what led to the book. So conversion disorder or juvenile immacular degeneration, I know not. But what I do know is I was blind and now I see.

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There must have been an expectancy there because I got to, I'm going to just go on a limb and I'll say this true for me. If I'm praying for healing for 30 minutes for someone and we're not getting anywhere, at some point I'm probably saying, all right, Lord, you know, maybe not today. But I love that you tried a different tact. And we had a prominent deliverance minister talk about this framework where many times he says he believes that sin and trauma and just things we talk about, a demonization can also cause just illness by themselves and not just you don't need an evil

spirit to necessarily instigate illness. And I thought hearing what we're just, I'm very fascinated that there's a at least a scientific explanatory framework for these conversion disorders. And it makes you wonder, you know, just given the incredible powers our minds steward and the effects that can have that with significant sin and trauma and wounding, right, that can also be the cause of illnesses in our bodies. And really makes you think about St. Paul all's admonition to take every thought captive, to give it all to God, to unite your suffering to Christ, and really, really treat this, you know, as a sacred place, you know? Yeah. Well, and I think absolutely. And about the middle part of my book, I spent a good

number of pages exploring the ways in which spirituality, engaging with the faith community, is just generally good for one's health. So things like forgiveness, things like gratitude. I've published brain imaging studies looking at the effects of gratitude on the brain. Their lasting effects. All of these can affect health in ways that don't necessarily require a metaphysical explanation. And I think that's important in its own right. And it's also important for bracketing the question of, if we're looking at a particular case of healing, is it a miracle or how else could it be explained?

Well, if we're going to try to explain it, we have to have categories and frameworks. that might fit. And so part of what I've tried to do in the book is to go through those categories and ask, how might the practices that we often do as Christians like going to church, forgiving people, maintaining hope, prayer, like how might those contribute to health in a way that doesn't require a kind of supernatural explanation? And that doesn't rule it out either. But I think that that's important both for understanding just the effects of spirituality on health and also for really taking a critical eye to claims of miracles. Because if you're going to claim something's a miracle, the lower you set the bar,

the less the term means, really. Sure. I don't want to gloss over this too because you have so many incredible miracle stories too. But, you know, lest you think it's reserved to eyesight and hearing, which we have talked about with you and your wife, Candy, on the show before. you have some fascinating cases around digestion. I know we've had a lot of people write in about gastrointestinal illnesses, and I find these particular, at least one of these miracles, particularly interesting too, because anytime

there's anything regenerative, right, that's as a Christian, I'm always, you know, I love, obviously, pain subsiding, I love a tumor disappearing, but it seems to be, like we're always looking for the withered hand being restored or the amputee, and while we don't have any of that in your book necessarily, we do have two really interesting cases. Did you tell us about Derek and Peter? Yeah. So one of them was a case of gastroparesis. So that means a paralyzed stomach.

And this was a boy who was born essentially with a paralyzed stomach. He couldn't keep food down. He just vomited up and was losing weight. And after a lot of medical procedures, eventually they did what's called manometry, where they put a little device down his throat and measure the contractions of the stomach. because normally you eat or drink and it sits in your stomach for a little while and then the stomach contracts and pumps it into the intestine. His stomach didn't do that. It just sat there and until he vomited. There are some cases where that's caused by a virus and those usually resolve within a couple years.

But he was 16 and I'd live with this all his life. So eventually he had to have several tubes put in his abdomen, one to inject food directly into a small intestine, and the other to vacuum anything that he inadvertently swallowed out of his stomach. And so he lived with these tubes. And as a teenager in high school, this guy's got Matrix-style tubes going into him. Something like that. Yeah. So he just kind of lived with it. And what happened is he was at a, he went to prayer meeting where there was a guy who was ministering who had been crushed by a semi-truck. So this guy's whole midsection had been crushed down to where there was an inch between the bottom of the truck and the pavement. And his stomach was crushed down to one inch. And it basically destroyed most of his intestines.

So he was put back together surgically, you know, trauma surgery had various surgeries. But because most of his intestines were gone, he couldn't absorb nutrients. And he kept, you know, he would eat, but it would go right through him and he would lose weight. It's called short bowel syndrome. So he was at a prayer meeting at one point. He gets prayed for and he has this feeling like a garden hose uncoiling inside of him. We looked into his case and basically the surgeons didn't want to put it in writing, but what they communicated to us was that, yeah, he only had about a third of his intestines left.

And when we opened him up later, there were many, many more feet of intestines there after that prayer experience than before. You know, if you're a doctor, you don't necessarily want to write that in a medical report because, you know, there's no billing code for, and then a miracle happened, right? You mean, you just get lots of questions that as a doctor, you'd rather not answer and rather not have to answer. So anyway, but he was healed in from that day he gained weight. So now he's ministering.

He's writing this, you know, healing prayer service, and 16-year-old boy comes up and they start, you know, comparing notes. And so the boy gets prayed for. And while he's getting prayed for, the tubes in his stomach start vibrating. That night, he went out and ate a meal. And for the first time, it just went right through him, you know, in a good way. And so from that day, he was healed. And three months later, he had the tubes removed. That was it. And that was over 10 years ago now. And he's been fine since that day. So, you know, we looked at the medical records and we confirmed that gastroprone. Precious wasn't just a temporary thing. It was consistently written in his chart for, you know, the whole time until he was 16. So, you know, the medical notes after that don't say much other than, you know, something the effect of, well, his symptoms have apparently resolved, right, which is kind of an understatement. But, you know, we talked to multiple professors of gastroenterology at a major medical center. And we said, you know, is there any way this can happen medically? And they all said, no. that never happens. Are there any cases, I know humans don't bear the resemblance to iguanas and our tails regenerating. Is there any plausible mechanism or known exceedingly rare cases of organs or tissue regenerating like small intestine? Well, certainly some tissue can regenerate. Sure, of course. But on that magnitude, I don't know of any precedent for that, nor any reason to think why that

could be possible, not like many feet of intestine regrowing. Yeah. I mean, we're talking like this much was just like new intestine growing. It just, yeah, it's just wild. It doesn't happen. So that doesn't happen. And then I love that the faith was also contagious in this too, because these miracles seem to be get miracles too, right? You read about these stories and suddenly it empowers your mind to believe. And that's one of the things I think is so important about your book is what are just the downstream, just even clinical effects of having your mind open to the possibility of miracles? And I remember you were on, I believe it was Justin Briarly's show, and you were debating someone about miracles. And your opponent said something so astounding, which was essentially,

I'm paraphrasing, but there is no amount of evidence I would accept as a, like it just, it can't happen. There must be an explanation. I'm curious, is that the consensus of a lot of your peers or when you show these cases to other these subject matter experts, what is the reaction to stuff like this? Well, I think, you know, a fair amount of skepticism for sure, which, you know, it's not unreasonable. Everyone has their own threshold for what will constitute sufficient evidence to support the claim that a miracle happened. That, you know, and I go into this in the book about, you know, where do our beliefs come from? Like, where, how do we form these beliefs, about miracles and whether they happen and whether they don't happen. And ultimately comes from

people's experience in life. And the thing is, some of that's emotional, right, in the sense that for some people, you want miracles to, you know, to occasionally happen. And for others, the thought that a miracle would happen feels threatening to a worldview. And so therefore, of course, if that's the case, then it's much easier to put just put a really high threshold on what constitute sufficient evidence than to have to wrestle with claims that you don't necessarily want to wrestle with. And I get that, right? I mean, we all have things that we believe and that we'd like to believe. Because everyone has a different threshold, there are some people for whom no amount of evidence will be sufficient. I'd like to think that it's a reasonable position to say that

there should be some amount of evidence that would be convincing. And I think it's a mistake ultimately to say that no amount of evidence could ever convince me. Because at that point, what you have is faith, which is fine, but I think you just have to recognize it as such, right? If I, if I were to say, I don't think miracles happen and no amount of evidence could ever convince me, that is a statement of faith. And so for me, you know, I've seen enough miracles happen. I'm open to the possibility that there is enough evidence to convince me that any particular case is a miracle. But I don't assume that that's the case. And I still set a fairly high bar on what as sufficient evidence to make the case that some healing truly is a miracle.

I think it's reasonable to have a high bar, but to say that no amount of evidence will ever convince you. Or that, you know, even if we don't understand how something could be medically possible, how some healing could be medically possible, that there must be an explanation. Well, that's also a statement of faith. And there may be. but to assume that that's the case is a statement of faith. So it seems abundantly clear that there are multiple mechanisms, and I love this about your book, you point out, that God can heal us through this.

I mean, you could say, oh, it's just a natural cause because the eye healed itself or whatever. You're like, that is still, I mean, when I think about the complexity of the retina and just the anatomy and the physiology and the way it responds, even to trauma and the blood clotting, it seems no less miraculous to me, despite whatever mechanism God chooses to heal,

or through the wisdom and incredible, brilliant surgeons or doctors or the technology that we have today. I mean, it is interesting to talk about these categories and miracles. But what I find super compelling about all this, and I think is hard for some of your contemporaries who just outright reject these miracles, no, miracles, no matter how rare the healing is, is that a lot of these happen as a result of something that, I don't know if you all coined this phrase, proximal intercessory prayer. And the fact these miracles accompany situations where people are having hands.

laid on them and prayed for, specifically in the name of Jesus, and then these things happen. I don't know in any other facet of your life where you would divorce the seeming cause and effect there. So talk to us a little bit about proximal intercessory prayer and what you've seen from that in regards to these cases. Yeah. So I think there's a history some decades ago, and as recently as 2006, there was a famous study of the Herbert Benson study of cardiac patients, looking at whether if you pray for someone from a distance and, you know, the person being prayed for for healing doesn't even know they're being prayed for. Is there an effect? And those studies have been kind of controversial. The one 20 years ago, the Benson study, was a large study well-powered and ultimately found that there was no effect. And furthermore, if you knew you were getting prayed for, you were actually slightly more likely to have complications. Now, the main issue, my wife Candy Gunther Brown points out is that the people doing the praying didn't actually believe in praying for healing. They didn't actually believe that God heals. So if you're trying to study the effects of praying,

you know, in faith for healing, the design wasn't quite, that wasn't it. So that's distant intercessory prayer where, you know, you're praying from a distance, person being prayed for doesn't know they're being prayed for. Proximal intercessary prayer is a term my wife coined, which describes this in-person prayer. where you know you're praying for someone and they know they're being prayed for. So there's, you know, in medicine, if you want to try to see if there's some effect, you usually do what's called a randomized controlled clinical trial and you blind everyone to who's getting one intervention or placebo. And the nature of in-person prayer is that you can't.

You just, you know, you're being prayed for. You know you're praying. So that's the in-person prayer. So one of the things that GMRI did about a year and, year or two ago was we funded a clinical trial at the University of Maryland where we actually had patients who came in for their regular doctor's appointment. And we screened them to see if they had pain or anxiety above certain threshold levels. And if so, we said, okay, when you're done with your regular doctor's appointment, would you like to participate in a research trial? And, you know,

we'll give you a few bucks. So if they said, yes, then we flip a coin. Heads, they would get prayed for after their medical doctor's appointment, just for like five minutes in person in another exam room in the medical center. And if the coin flip was tails, they'd go off and listen to like relaxing music for five minutes. And so we followed them for upwards of two months afterwards. And the people who got prayed for had dramatically lower anxiety

than the people who listen to music. And they had much lower pain scores, even weeks later, after a five-minute in-person prayer intervention. versus the people who listen to music. Anyway, that study will be published in around about May, actually. So that's coming out. So I think, you know, now for that, does that mean that God, you know, miraculously healed

all the people in the medical office? It could, but I don't think we have to conclude that. I mean, for one, the people knew they were being prayed for. So to the extent that things like social support and someone expressing care and concern for you is, is comforting, that that in itself might have had some effect. And I think, you know, historically, there were, there are movements within Christianity that opposed medicine. You know, they say, well, you can't go to the doctor if you have faith. You know, going to the doctor is not having faith. You know, I think that those days are mostly over. Nowadays, I think within the church,

there's generally an appreciation of medicine. I, for one, appreciate medical care, right? As you have a good reason to. Now, Josh, I want to ask you, because obviously this trial that you just did, it does bring up the question of, it wouldn't necessarily be placebo because they know they're getting prayed for. But it does invite the question right about if you have someone praying for you

and you believe in the power of prayer. And I want to get into this because in your book, you have this absolutely fascinating chapter. And you point out, placebo is often sort of like derided and as sort of like some like sham sham, like kind of like, you know, deceitful thing. And it's actually sure.

shockingly powerful. And so I'm hoping, could you give us a little primer on the placebo effect? Because I think this really connects to faith as well, because there is an element. It doesn't replace the supernatural power of faith. But it is so interesting to me that our bodies have these mechanisms where we believe things. And it can have these incredible effects. And I found this study a little late, but nonetheless, I am absolutely blown away by this. So could you walk us through placebo and then use this minusical surgery study to show how powerful it is. Yeah. So first of all, I think there's there's kind of a somehow a reluctance to acknowledge placebo effects. In medicine, they're kind of like the, you know, the unloved stepchild.

Within Christianity, it's sort of like, you know, oh, no, you're going to try to dismiss the power of prayer by, you know, invoking the word placebo. And so the Christians don't like the word placebo. doctors don't necessarily like it. But the fact of the matter is, placebo effects are real. And if we're going to have a conversation about miracles and the effects of prayer and do that rigorously, we have to talk about it. And I think we should talk about it. So first of all, placebo effects are real to the point that, for example, if I tell you

that I'm going to give you this pill and this pill is going to make whatever your pain is less, in studies that have done this, upwards of like three quarters of people will say, yes, that pill made the pain hurt less. So that right there is a real effect. And not only that, but, you know, when someone overdoses on like opioids, suppose they overdose on fentanyl, that can kill you. And so the emergency treatment for that is to give someone a drug called naloxone or Narcan. And that will reverse the opioid effects. It will reverse the effects of the drug and it can save what someone's life. But it also blocks the pain relieving effects of the drug because opioids, of course, or pain relievers. And so it turns out that if you give someone a pill and you say this pill is going to

make it hurt less, and then you give them Narcan, it reduces the placebo effect of the pill. In other words, you might believe the pill is going to make it hurt less. And it normally would, but because you took Narcan, the Narcan is blocking the placebo effect. In other words, the placebo effect is a real biological effect. And you can... It's not magic. Just because you think it, it's not magic that the sugar pill. It's a physiological response that's happening in your body in relation to the fact that you are believing something, right? Correct. Yeah. And so you can explain, I think, a certain amount of pain relief with that. And I think, you know, then the question is not whether that's a factor. The question is how much can you explain with that and how far can you push it? So what you mentioned

with the meniscal tear. So this is a wild study that was done some years ago in Scandinavia, where the question was, if you, you know, have a knee injury, you tear your meniscus and you have surgery, is the improvement that you experience due to the fact that you had the surgery or due to the fact that you know you had the surgery, okay? In other words, is the effect of it in your mind? Does knowing that you had the surgery make you expect that it's going to feel better? And therefore, because you can't see your meniscus, right? You're like, oh, I just, they sewed back up. I don't know if my meniscus. I don't know what they did do it. Yeah. So what they did is they had people who had torn meniscus and they go in for surgery. They're on the table. The surgeon opens, you know, does the arthroscopic surgery and looks in there and says, okay, you know, is this a torn meniscus? And if yes, then they, the nurse opens an envelope and half the envelopes randomly say do the surgical repair and half of them say, don't do any surgical repair. Just close it up. And so now you have two groups of people randomly assigned to either get the meniscus repair surgery.

or just go through the motions. They get the incisions, but they don't actually get the repair. And now, you know, to be clear, the patients all agreed to this. They were willing to take this chance. So they followed both groups for like, I think upwards of a year after that. And there was really no difference between the groups. They all recovered pretty well. And so that raises this what seems like an absurd question that I posed earlier,

which is, is the improvement from the meniscus surgery because the meniscus was repaired or because the patients knew that they had had surgery? And at least in that study, it appears that simply knowing you had surgery, which you expected to help you, led to about as much improvement. Now, I'm not at all claiming that all surgery is effective just because you know you had surgery. Not at all. And I'm not a doctor and I'm not giving medical advice. You know, you should follow your own doctor's medical advice. But nevertheless, I think this kind of study is another one that demonstrates just how powerful some of these placebo effects can be. And I think as Christians, there's no need to feel threatened by that. I think what it can do, you know, knowing that,

understanding that can help us think through carefully. And I think the fact that you experience benefits from going to church, from having engaging in prayer, from doing the things that as Christians we do, I think the fact that those can be helpful without necessarily invoking a supernatural cause is not necessarily a bad thing. And I think it also makes it a bit more credible when you can say, look, we've considered all of these different factors which are real. And yet there are cases that even with all of these potential explanations, we can't explain. Yeah. And also, it's interesting on the deliverance side, right? because in the movie The Exorcist, the doctors actually recommend an exorcism for Regan saying, oh, there's no way it can actually do anything. But if the victim believes they are being assaulted by demonic spirits, they will respond to it.

So I imagine in light of this study on meniscal tears that even the skeptics should be open to the idea of an exorcism in particular cases, right? Because there could be a profound placebo effect, you know, for at least them. I mean, obviously we believe it's something more profound. But yeah, I mean, that base says you would say that's probably like, that's another area ripe for placebo effect, right? Is deliverance? Yeah, potentially. And I think the fact that you receive a treatment that you expect will help you

and you experience help from it, I mean, that could be placebo effect. I've seen a whole range of cases where sometimes it seems that you probably could explain that as some kind of mind-body effect, like a placebo effect. There are other cases where I think you can't explain them in terms of placebo effects. And this is where the cases that, like we talked about, like with Marsha, where the back of the eyes is damaged. If the back of the eyes is just wrecked, no amount of wishful thinking is going to cause that to regenerate. That's just not how it works. So I think there are cases where I think placebo effects and mind-body effects and such are not enough to account for it.

Now, that raises a further question. Is it completely impossible that will ever find some way to explain these things? I don't know that I'd say that either. But I think it is safe to say that there seems to be no possible explanation in these cases. And that's after having consulted with a number of medical specialists in those particular diseases. So do miracles happen? Yes. Do miracles happen in a way that can't be explained by placebo effects, mind-body effects?

I think so. can some experiences of healing be explained? I think they can. So Josh, I want to ask you because there's some practical takehomes from all this. And there's actually a study before we leave placebo that I found super interesting. And it was these Catholics were in a study that they would receive, I believe it was like a little shock or something. And they were given a card of the Virgin Mary to look at. And then they also had atheists look at a card, but it was a woman, but similar to the Virgin Mary, but obviously not.

And the Catholics, while receiving the shock and looking at this image of the Virgin Mary, experienced less pain, felt more at peace, et cetera. And this really, and you point this out in your book, it makes you wonder about the Christian martyrs and these accounts we have of people just stoically and just serenely walking into their demise. And it makes you wonder about what practices we can incorporate as Christians to utilize the gift that God has given us in our physiology responding to it. Like, I mean, it's really interesting view of like a sacramental worldview. if we're designed to interact with our environment to help us live more Christian lives.

Yeah. So, I mean, in that study, they had two groups of people. One were atheists and the other were Catholic Christians. Each of those two groups was further divided into two groups. Some of them were given a picture that was immediately recognizable as the Virgin Mary. And others were given a picture that looked very similar, but would not have looked to them like the Virgin Mary. The Catholic participants who were looking at the picture of the Virgin Mary said that they felt cared for, among other things. They reported less pain from the pain stimulus. They also showed changes in the level of activity in certain regions in their brains. So it was definitely measurable neural effect.

The same kind of effect was not seen in the atheist participants. Now, what do we make of that? I wouldn't conclude that that means that, you know, God's necessarily supernaturally in Irving. I think we can't rule that out either, but we can't claim that just on the basis of that evidence. But what we can say is that there are definite effects at the level of the brain, where if you are sort of contemplating the Virgin Mary as a Catholic, then that can have a kind of calming effect at the level of the brain.

So that was a published brain imaging study. Wow. See, I find this so interesting because obviously we don't follow the practices that the church fathers in the Bible recommend us do and tell us to do, you know, just because we understand they might have a downstream effect, right? That's not why we follow the, we don't need an explanation of each one of the commandments on how it benefits us to follow it. But don't you find it interesting and encouraging, in fact, that many of the things God would have us do, if Paul's telling us, you know, exhorting us to keep our mind, focus. on heavenly things and be anxious over nothing, right? To dwell on what is good and upright and pure and, you know, to encourage each other to be constantly singing psalms. And you wonder, I mean, obviously, he's probably not thinking of the effects of these studies, but do you find

it encouraging that there are a lot of practices that our physiology just seems wired to respond to in positive ways? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good thing. I mean, there have been very systematic reviews of the effects of spirituality and religion and spiritual orientation on health outcomes. And they're almost completely positive in the sense that spiritual practices, attending religious services, prayer, all these things tend to have positive correlations with health outcomes. There are a lot of things that we sort of do without necessarily knowing why exactly we're doing them. I mean, to take a sort of basic example, people throughout history didn't necessarily have kids because they sat down and weighed the pros and cons.

You know, they just, you know, people reproduce because it's kind of a, you know, there's an instinct to do that. And likewise, there's a strong instinct to have a very strong affection for, you know, your children. And of course, that's good for procreating and, you know, keeping the be fruitful and multiply command. But it's not necessarily something you sit down and reason out. you do it because you sort of have an instinct to do it. And it turns out that that's, you know, serve some useful purposes. So I think, you know, this is a whole other discussion that's probably for another time. But in the end, spiritual practices, belief, all of those are basically good for your health. And I'm certainly not the only one to say that.

I have curious, too. I know you're not Catholic, but I've been lately carrying a last couple years a rosary in my pocket. And while I haven't been praying the rosary, I've been really enjoying using the beads and the tactile sensation of praying and repeating even certain prayers, et cetera, like the earliest Christians would. And I've heard, I forget where it was, but independent of any preternatural or supernatural value would place on the rosary and any spiritual power it has, are you surprised at the idea that that would actually be really beneficial to a lot of people, given the combination of praying and meditation and tactile integration. Is that like kind of seem like a perfect positive storm for the mind?

I mean, I don't know that I make a strong neuroscience claim out of it, but, but I mean, it certainly makes sense. I mean, the things that, you know, whatever is good, the exact wording escapes me, but, you know, set your mind on these things. You know, I think there's a reason why we meditate on the scripture, right? The man thinks in his heart so is he, right? The things that you fill your mind with are, that's what you become. So of course it makes sense to meditate on scripture, to pray.

That will affect who you are, right? It will affect your personality, your outlook on life, the things that you engage in. I mean, this is, this general principle is known in terms of the brain. So there's this whole concept of neuroplasticity, which I think gets, it almost becomes invoked as like this, you know, panacea. But neuroplasticity at its core is simply an effect. fact by which the more you experience something, the more your brain allocates its real estate to represent that thing that you're experiencing. So in other words, the more of your brain becomes dedicated to representing that. So if you pray the rosary a lot, there will be more

of your brain that represents that, you know, and likewise, whatever you do, more of your brain will represent that. So it does shape who you are, how you think, even the structure of how your brain represents information in general. And so, and again, I think that's often invoked as a kind of cheat code to, you know, sort of you can hack your brain and this sort of thing. And I think that's probably a bit of an overstatement. But yeah, the effects are very real. Yeah. And is it true, too, just from a neuroscience standpoint, too, that I've often been, I've often thought about this, that is everything sort of forming us? And that's why as Christians, we need to be vigilant and judicious about what we are steeping ourselves in because it seems like if our brain allocates more to,

it's like that which we focus on. And again, going back to Paul's admonition and why he is so encouraging to be always singing hymns and having songs and reading the word daily is that that principle is true that we're just, we're literally building our minds and we can, you always see these studies, right? Meditation transforms brain in seven days. And I think you and I even jokes about it. Well, anything done for seven days will change your brain, you know, if you're done with enough intent, right? But if it's to renew your mind, it sounds like we can play a pretty active role in that, correct? Yeah. I mean, you can choose what you engage in.

Whatever you do, it'll affect you. So absolutely. So yeah, choose wisely. I'm curious, you know, one thing that I really admire about your story and I've been in seasons like this myself where you went after healing. You know, there's a really interesting. You see a lot of people respond differently. There's a weird tension about God, I'm asking and I'm contending for a miracle. And we see this in scripture, right?

we see Luke 11, my favorite verse and all the Bible, like shameless audacity of going after God, the persistent widow, constantly asking, Abraham negotiating with God. And yet you also have this waiting on the Lord and trusting and just saying, yeah, your grace is sufficient for right now. But talk to me about your advice for people who may be stuck right now. They're in between a miracle and that hope is maybe fading a little bit. How can they contend like you did? You went to so many prayer services and so many things. that's hard, obviously, when you're waiting, you know, because the disappointment can pile on.

But what's your advice to people to balance that contending for a miracle, but also trusting in God and saying, hey, this, you know, he is sovereign and in his timing. Yeah, so a couple points. Then I'll leave you with a story. I think, first of all, there's basically two ways you can view the problem of evil. One of those is the blueprint view. And that's sort of like the, I think Calvinism is probably the purest form of that, where everything that happens is by definition, the will of God. And that being the case, the best you can do is sort of make peace with it and submit.

The alternative view is the warfare view. That is that there is a kingdom of darkness and there is a kingdom of heaven. And when Jesus came, he confronted the kingdom of darkness. And, you know, verse John 3.8 for this cause was the son of man revealed that he might destroy the works of the devil. You know, it says Jesus went around doing good and healing all who are oppressed by the devil. And now, I wouldn't say that every sickness is necessarily the work of the devil. but the way Jesus ministry is framed, that was essentially what he was doing. That healing and deliverance was an expression of this warfare, this clash of kingdoms.

So when I was in the middle of desperately seeking a miracle, I sort of adopted that warfare view. It was the view that there's a battle and battles have casualties and I'm going to do my absolute best to press in and treat this as a battle. And I think that was helpful in a lot of ways. Now, there were certainly disappointments. You know, I got a lot of prayer. And months later, I went back and got another MRI. And I thought, you know, let's see what the Lord has done. You know, let's see what. And I got the results back. And they said, well, you still got a brain tumor. It's as bad as ever. And, you know, it's, sorry about that. And so what do you do with that? Oh, it was crushing. So I totally get that. I mean,

I've been there. And it was horrible. And at that point, I had. had a decision, right? Do I, do I sort of give up and get ready to die? Or do I say, you know, no, there are no guarantees, but I'm just, I'm either going to get healed or I'm going to die trying, but I'm not going to give up. Every person has to make that decision for themselves. And I think in a sense, there's almost, like, hope is, hope sometimes carries a cost, because if you expect nothing, you can't be disappointed. And yet, pressing in and persevering and not giving up can also have benefits. So years ago, after I was healed, we would have people come over to our house all the time,

multiple nights a week, just asking us to pray for them. And we prayed for as many people as we could all the time. And, you know, we had little kids running around and full-time jobs. And it was – but, you know, I just – I wanted to do it. And, you know, we still do that. And so there's a – this young man who came, he said, can you pray for me? because, you know, I'm in the military and, you know, I blew out my back. And the doctor said, you know, here's your pain pills.

You have no hope of recovery. We'll just keep you on pain pills and, you know, try to manage it. So I said, well, I'd be happy to pray for you. So we spent like an hour one night and we prayed for him, everything I knew to pray. And at the end of it, I said, you know, how is it? He said, well, it still hurts about the same. And I said, well, I won't give up if you won't. So if you want, come back tomorrow night and we'll pray some more.

So he did. And we prayed like another hour in some. And I said, so how is it? And he said, it still hurts. So I said, well, I won't give up if you won't, you know, come back again. So he came back the next night. And we prayed it, I don't know, it was probably closer to two hours. And by the end of that, I said, okay, now how is it? And on the third night, he said, it hurts even worse after all that. Okay. Now, what do you do with that? And I said, I'm still not giving up. I will not give up if you won't give up. And so he came back the fourth night. We prayed all the pain left. And it was gone. And I said to him, now, the unclean spirit goes out of a person seeking rest, finding none, and tries to come back. So I said, if it comes back, you speak to it and you resist the devil,

just like Jesus resists the devil, you know, with the word of God. I saw him like, I don't know, a month and some later. And he said, yeah, about three weeks after that, you know, I was totally pain free, He totally healed. I was on a long drive and it started to hurt again. And they said, so I did what you said. I spoke to it. I said, the name of Jesus, get off of me. And he said, and it left. So, so, you know, Luke 18, Jesus told them this parable that they should always pray and never give up. And then, you know, he tells the story of the persistent widow. And then he says, but when the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth? And I think there's hope can carry a cost. there is risk. But I think my experience is that when you press in, there's often a reward because

it says he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. What I've seen, if I had given up after the third night of praying an hour and some for the sky, would he have been healed? I don't know. Wow. Amen. That's one of my favorite verses to you, right? You will seek me and you will find me when you seek me with your whole heart. And I've often asked myself, do my seeking God with the same fervor that I'm seeking my Chipotle label come news on most days, you know, and that's a fair question. But wow, Josh, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing and just appreciate your ministry and your work. And we need more neuroscientists out there in the Pentecostal praying field. So I hope you're raising up the next generation of charismatic neuroscientists, you know.

I am doing my best. Amazing. Well, Josh, thank you. This has been amazing. Your book is available. for pre-order now. Folks, I read this book. I don't read. I get sent so many books. I can't read all of them. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. If you like the science, if you want to find out whether or not you need menisical surgery, you should talk to your doctor. But if you want to read about the crazy studies, they're all there. I mean, we only covered the tip of the iceberg. This book is fascinating. And Josh obviously shares a lot about his own personal story in there as well. And it's a beautiful book. And you did a fantastic job, Josh, just blending science and faith and just playing the skeptic as well. I really appreciated the book, and it's filled with incredible stories.

So a great encouragement for everyone. So, folks, I personally recommend it. I had a blast reading it. Go order now. We'll link to it in the show notes. That's Proving a Miracle. Dr. Joshua Brown is available for pre-order now, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, wherever you get your books. Josh, thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate you and your family and your ministry. And we'll see you out here on the People's Republic soon, hopefully. All right. Well, thanks, Ryan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.