Recently there was a claim that prayer has cured HIV in some cases and that this was documented.
Are there any documented cases of this actually happening?
Can prayer cure HIV?
Is it dangerous to suggest prayer can cure HIV?
HIV cured from prayer?
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DanieltheDragon
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HIV cured from prayer?
Post #1Post 1: Wed Apr 01, 2015 10:48 am Otseng has been banned
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benchwarmer
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Re: HIV cured from prayer?
Post #2If prayer can cure HIV, then why is there still HIV? To be more general, if prayer can cure, why are the hospitals so full of sick people? There sure is a lot of praying going on when you go to one. I've never seen anyone suddenly get up and walk out after being prayed over.DanieltheDragon wrote: Recently there was a claim that prayer has cured HIV in some cases and that this was documented.
Are there any documented cases of this actually happening?
Can prayer cure HIV?
Is it dangerous to suggest prayer can cure HIV?
If prayer does work to cure people of illness, it only works sporadically.
Now we will hear about how the 'prayer' and/or the 'prayee' must be in good with God for it to work. If the person being prayed over must be in good with God, why are they sick in the first place? Why do they need someone else to point out to God they are in need of healing? If the person doing the praying must be in good with God, then why aren't they praying over everyone in sight that needs healing? They could clear a hospital in couple of days.
As a method of healing it's worth a shot I suppose, but it's certainly not reliable as the only method.
Re: HIV cured from prayer?
Post #3[Replying to post 2 by benchwarmer]
The “Berlin Patient� Timothy Ray Brown, received a functional cure for HIV back in 2007. He remains the only individual to have been completely rid of the virus, but scientists were not sure which aspect of his treatment was responsible for curing him. No prayer was involved.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me ... cured-hiv/
The “Berlin Patient� Timothy Ray Brown, received a functional cure for HIV back in 2007. He remains the only individual to have been completely rid of the virus, but scientists were not sure which aspect of his treatment was responsible for curing him. No prayer was involved.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me ... cured-hiv/
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DanieltheDragon
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Re: HIV cured from prayer?
Post #4Did it have something to do with the natural immunity from the donor of the bone marrow?H.sapiens wrote: [Replying to post 2 by benchwarmer]
The “Berlin Patient� Timothy Ray Brown, received a functional cure for HIV back in 2007. He remains the only individual to have been completely rid of the virus, but scientists were not sure which aspect of his treatment was responsible for curing him. No prayer was involved.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me ... cured-hiv/
Post 1: Wed Apr 01, 2015 10:48 am Otseng has been banned
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agnosticatheist
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Re: HIV cured from prayer?
Post #5If it is the natural immunity, why arent we using this on a regular basis to cure people?DanieltheDragon wrote:Did it have something to do with the natural immunity from the donor of the bone marrow?H.sapiens wrote: [Replying to post 2 by benchwarmer]
The “Berlin Patient� Timothy Ray Brown, received a functional cure for HIV back in 2007. He remains the only individual to have been completely rid of the virus, but scientists were not sure which aspect of his treatment was responsible for curing him. No prayer was involved.
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me ... cured-hiv/
If it turns out there are one or more gods, then so be it.
If it turns out there are no gods, then thank reality that no one is going to suffer forever.
If it turns out there are no gods, then thank reality that no one is going to suffer forever.
Post #6
NOTE: NO PRAYER!
From Science, 25 Sept 2014:
Today, researchers point to three different factors that could independently or in combination have rid Brown’s body of HIV. The first is the process of conditioning, in which doctors destroyed Brown’s own immune system with chemotherapy and whole body irradiation to prepare him for his bone marrow transplant. His oncologist, Gero Hütter, who was then with the Free University of Berlin, also took an extra step that he thought might not only cure the leukemia but also help rid Brown’s body of HIV. He found a bone marrow donor who had a rare mutation in a gene that cripples a key receptor on white blood cells the virus uses to establish an infection. (For years, researchers referred to Brown as “the Berlin patient.�) The third possibility is his new immune system attacked remnants of his old one that held HIV-infected cells, a process known as graft versus host disease.
In the new study, a team led by immunologist Guido Silvestri of Emory University in Atlanta, designed an unusual monkey experiment to test these possibilities.
Bone marrow transplants work because of stem cells. Modern techniques avoid actually aspirating bone marrow, and instead can sift through blood and pluck out the stem cells needed for a transplant to “engraft.� So the researchers first drew blood from three rhesus macaque monkeys, removed stem cells, and put the cells in storage. They then infected these animals and three control monkeys with a hybrid virus, known as SHIV, that contains parts of the simian and human AIDS viruses. All six animals soon began receiving ARVs (which respond better to SHIVs than SIV itself), and SHIV levels in the blood quickly dropped below the level of detection on standard tests, as expected.
A few months later, the three monkeys that had stored stem cells underwent whole body irradiation to condition their bodies and then had their own stem cells reinfused. After the cells engrafted, a process that took a few more months, the researchers stopped ARVs in the three animals and in the three controls. SHIV quickly came screaming back in the three controls and two of the transplanted animals. (One of the transplanted monkeys did not have the virus rebound but its kidneys failed and the researchers euthanized it.)
The team, which publishes its work online in PLOS Pathogens today, concludes that conditioning by itself likely cannot rid the body of the AIDS virus. Silvestri explains that the monkey study was a proof-of-principle experiment that cleanly isolated the effects of conditioning alone. “There’s no way to do this in humans,� he says.
“It’s an important study and it’s a very useful model,� says Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wasn’t connected to the research.
Kuritzkes and colleagues are particularly interested in the experiment because two of their own HIV-infected patients with leukemia received bone marrow transplants from donors who did not have HIV-resistant cells. For several months after stopping ARVs, HIV remained at bay in both men, raising hopes that the resistant donor cells were not a factor. But the virus eventually returned in each patient. Kuritzkes suspects that the transplants did reduce the amount of HIV left in the patients’ bodies—known as the viral reservoir—but the virus resurfaced because it continued to copy itself and eventually overwhelmed the immune responses against it.
Although the study shows that conditioning by itself likely cannot eliminate an HIV infection, the study leaves open the possibility that graft versus host disease played a central role in Brown’s cure. Unlike Brown and Kuritzkes’s two patients, the transplanted monkeys received their own stem cells, which did not trigger a graft versus host response. “At the end of the day that might be an important component,� Silvestri says. He also thinks it might help reduce the reservoir size to treat monkeys with ARVs for longer than a few months.
Silvestri hopes to do future monkey experiments that test the different variables, including transplanting the animals with viral-resistant blood cells that mimic the ones that Brown received. “The best scientific studies raise as many questions as answers,� says Steven Deeks, a researcher and clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, who has treated and studied Brown. “Unfortunately, the heroic efforts that went into this study failed to provide a definitive answer regarding the riddles of the Berlin patient. The model will likely need to be further optimized, and at the very least, the macaques treated with antiretroviral therapy for longer periods of time. But I am confident the team will figure this out.�
From Science, 25 Sept 2014:
Today, researchers point to three different factors that could independently or in combination have rid Brown’s body of HIV. The first is the process of conditioning, in which doctors destroyed Brown’s own immune system with chemotherapy and whole body irradiation to prepare him for his bone marrow transplant. His oncologist, Gero Hütter, who was then with the Free University of Berlin, also took an extra step that he thought might not only cure the leukemia but also help rid Brown’s body of HIV. He found a bone marrow donor who had a rare mutation in a gene that cripples a key receptor on white blood cells the virus uses to establish an infection. (For years, researchers referred to Brown as “the Berlin patient.�) The third possibility is his new immune system attacked remnants of his old one that held HIV-infected cells, a process known as graft versus host disease.
In the new study, a team led by immunologist Guido Silvestri of Emory University in Atlanta, designed an unusual monkey experiment to test these possibilities.
Bone marrow transplants work because of stem cells. Modern techniques avoid actually aspirating bone marrow, and instead can sift through blood and pluck out the stem cells needed for a transplant to “engraft.� So the researchers first drew blood from three rhesus macaque monkeys, removed stem cells, and put the cells in storage. They then infected these animals and three control monkeys with a hybrid virus, known as SHIV, that contains parts of the simian and human AIDS viruses. All six animals soon began receiving ARVs (which respond better to SHIVs than SIV itself), and SHIV levels in the blood quickly dropped below the level of detection on standard tests, as expected.
A few months later, the three monkeys that had stored stem cells underwent whole body irradiation to condition their bodies and then had their own stem cells reinfused. After the cells engrafted, a process that took a few more months, the researchers stopped ARVs in the three animals and in the three controls. SHIV quickly came screaming back in the three controls and two of the transplanted animals. (One of the transplanted monkeys did not have the virus rebound but its kidneys failed and the researchers euthanized it.)
The team, which publishes its work online in PLOS Pathogens today, concludes that conditioning by itself likely cannot rid the body of the AIDS virus. Silvestri explains that the monkey study was a proof-of-principle experiment that cleanly isolated the effects of conditioning alone. “There’s no way to do this in humans,� he says.
“It’s an important study and it’s a very useful model,� says Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wasn’t connected to the research.
Kuritzkes and colleagues are particularly interested in the experiment because two of their own HIV-infected patients with leukemia received bone marrow transplants from donors who did not have HIV-resistant cells. For several months after stopping ARVs, HIV remained at bay in both men, raising hopes that the resistant donor cells were not a factor. But the virus eventually returned in each patient. Kuritzkes suspects that the transplants did reduce the amount of HIV left in the patients’ bodies—known as the viral reservoir—but the virus resurfaced because it continued to copy itself and eventually overwhelmed the immune responses against it.
Although the study shows that conditioning by itself likely cannot eliminate an HIV infection, the study leaves open the possibility that graft versus host disease played a central role in Brown’s cure. Unlike Brown and Kuritzkes’s two patients, the transplanted monkeys received their own stem cells, which did not trigger a graft versus host response. “At the end of the day that might be an important component,� Silvestri says. He also thinks it might help reduce the reservoir size to treat monkeys with ARVs for longer than a few months.
Silvestri hopes to do future monkey experiments that test the different variables, including transplanting the animals with viral-resistant blood cells that mimic the ones that Brown received. “The best scientific studies raise as many questions as answers,� says Steven Deeks, a researcher and clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, who has treated and studied Brown. “Unfortunately, the heroic efforts that went into this study failed to provide a definitive answer regarding the riddles of the Berlin patient. The model will likely need to be further optimized, and at the very least, the macaques treated with antiretroviral therapy for longer periods of time. But I am confident the team will figure this out.�
