Evangelical preacher Darlene Bishop believes prayer can cure cancer. She wrote a book about it, and she convinced her brother to abandon conventional cancer treatment so he could fully pursue the power of prayer. Sadly, his pursuits were unsuccessful and he died 18 months ago from throat cancer. Now Bishop is in the midst of a multi-faceted legal battle with family members who claim she did her brother wrong. Maybe she did.

Perhaps prayer alone can't cure cancer, but a new study does indicate prayer can be of great benefit to some people following a cancer diagnosis.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin looked at transcripts from 97 breast cancer patients active in an on-line support group. They found patients who wrote more religious words -- like prayer, worship, faith, and holy -- had less negative emotions than other patients. They also had higher levels of overall well-being.

This study, also revealing prayer has the same effect regardless of specific religious practices, lends support to research showing cancer patients with positive purpose in their lives fare better through their journeys than those floundering in negativity.

There is something to be said for the power of prayer. On the morning the lump in my breast was removed, a friend rallied more than 80 friends from our local MOMS Club to say a prayer for me -- at the exact time I was wheeled into an operating room. I know nothing of the prayer they said for me, but I do know I emerged from surgery with my breast intact and with the knowledge that my cancer had not spread to my lymph nodes.

I don't know for sure what role prayer played in my good fortune -- but I don't discount that it is in some way responsible for the fact that I am alive today.

But there are other obvious factors responsible for my survival -- like chemotherapy, radiation, physical therapy, targeted drug therapy, and counseling. So I don't think prayer alone saved me. I think it took a balance of varied forces to save my life -- a balance one Ohio man was not able to achieve.

The children of Darrell Perry are filing suit against their aunt, Darlene Bishop -- Perry's sister and an evangelical preacher -- who claims both she and Perry were cured of cancer through prayer.

Perry was not cured and died a year and a half ago from throat cancer. And Bishop now reveals she was never diagnosed with breast cancer -- like she claimed at one time -- but was merely worried she may have had the disease. Yet the message in her book Your Life Follows Your Words speaks loud and clear in its message -- that prayer can cure cancer.

Perry's children says their aunt is lying and exploiting their father for her own financial gain. They have filed two suits -- one accusing her of mismanaging and misusing Perry's estate and the other alleging wrongful death for convincing Perry to pray rather than seek medical help.

The beauty of blogs and small newspapers. If you want to read interesting reporting, take the road less traveled where writers are allowed to follow the compass to places large corporate media does not seem to venture.

In Daily News Central's FDA's Ok of Cervical Cancer Vaccine May Spawn Multibillion Dollar Market is an excellent piece explaining all the major participants and motives behind the recently approved cervical cancer vaccine. While no one expects that altruism is ever at play when it comes to business, understanding the reasoning behind the actions at least gives all the rest of us a chance to understand the brouhaha this particular cancer vaccine has, and will continue, to create.

While GlaxoSmithKline has a cervical cancer vaccine they hope will be approved and available next year, Merck is first out of the gate with the FDA approval of Gardasil. The company needs this to be a success after taking a financial hit a few years ago over its drug Vioxx, a pain pill that was widely-prescribed and later withdrawn from the market over safety concerns.

In the last year, Merck has quietly spent an estimated $1 million dollars launching the Tell Someone campaign and was connected to the Make the Connection campaign, both designed to raise a general public awareness and hopefully to ease the concerns of the evangelical Christian opposition they anticipated over a cancer vaccine so closely linked to sexual activity and teenage girls. The cancer vaccine works for girls who are virgins, who are not yet sexually active. You can see the potential for religious opposition considering their only stand on prevention in general when it comes to sex is to instruct teens not to have sex.

On June 29, immunization experts at the CDC will hold a meeting to decide if the new cervical cancer vaccine should be added to a list of mandatory vaccines administered to the youth in this country. Congress will have a vote on adding the cancer vaccine to immunization programs, and the health officials in each state will decide if the new vaccine will be required. The battle over a sexually-transmitted cancer and cancer prevention for virgins has just begun.

Five years ago, President Bush restricted federal funding for any new human embryonic stem cell research. Many believe the objections are based soley on religious convictions, and without scientific or true ethical merit. The argument against Bush's stand has been that creating embryonic stem cells from a patient's tissues, correcting the genetic defects, and get the repaired cells back into the patient, opens the door to many cures for diseases. At one time or the other, Christopher Reeve, Michael J. Fox and Lance Armstrong have all spoken out against the federal funding ban -- as have many intelligent scientists and respected members in the medical community who see the devastating effects disease or profound physical injury can have on a patient.

Harvard University researchers are going around the federal funding ban by using only private funds and will begin research in an effort to clone human embryos as a source of stem cells. The researchers do not go into this lightly. They have visited the ethical issues at length and created strict standards for the research work and as they said, "to separate out all funding so that not a penny of federal money is spent on the effort." I honor and respect a person's personal religious beliefs -- there are many religions and many different religious beliefs to honor and respect -- but I do not feel it should ever dictate government policy -- especially if it means depriving patients of potential cures to disease.

Don't say I didn't warn you ahead of time we were going to hit this pothole on the cervical cancer vaccine road.  To briefly recap, last month I noticed Merck was running a television PSA, Tell Someone, in an attempt raise awareness about the virus that can lead to cervical cancer. Not once did it mention anything about the cervical cancer vaccine Merck was hoping to win FDA approval for -- and the same cervical cancer vaccine that will be available as early as next month. Let's remember this vaccine works best if administered to girls before they become sexually active. I mused that this was an intentional preemptive move on the part of Merck to the inevitable resistance from the Christian-right and other religious groups over a vaccine associated with sexual activity.

I predicted it was going to be a controversial issue and debate where sexual activity of teenage girls became the focal point and not the potentially life-saving cancer prevention vaccine. I was betting that the awareness-raising ad campaign from the drug company in the virus link to cervical cancer was an attempt to minimize the debate with an educational approach.

Sure enough, today I ran across a Reuters news article reporting just such an admission on the part of the drug company and discussion we will call the big bump in the road. Merck admits that its educational PSA was an effort to win over the Christian Right to the benefits of a vaccine to prevent cancer. Hang on to your seat -- we are coming up to the pothole.  Merck has revealed its plans to push for the vaccine as mandatory to school admission.

This is where the opposition from the Christian-right becomes more of an abyss than a pothole. The Christian Right feels the cervical cancer vaccine will lead to promiscuity and a false sense of security. Evangelical Christian groups, such as the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, believe that it should be left up to parents to decide if their daughters are protected against cervical cancer by way of a vaccine. It's all about sex. It's all about the religious philosophies concerning sexual activity and eventually -- and sadly -- little to do with saving lives or preventing cancer.

Last week, I posted on the power behind the power of prayer regarding a study basically suggesting that prayer does not help people heal, and to make matters worse, prayer seems to inadvertently act with evil-eye power, making those prayed for suffer more difficult recovery than their counterparts who were not prayed for at all. But if prayer can have a negative affect on the health of someone prayed for, then it must have the power to heal too. Yes? Yes. As Nietzsche once pointed out, good and bad cannot, and do not, travel separately, as each is merely a side to a two-sided coin. So if the study is suggesting prayer does not have any power to heal, it cancels out its conclusions by suggesting that prayer does have the power to harm. All this study provides is a reference for those who believe there is nothing beyond life but what we experience in a skin-and-bones existence, much the same as a religious text is used by those to support their take on ultimate truth. You would think we could learn to agree to disagree, because, dare I suggest, each of us is partly right and none of us owns the exclusive rights to reality and truth. But then again, what good is that perspective when it comes to pissing contests or the impassioned discourse that fuels the religious and scientifically political punditry.

In a Slate article, The Deity in the Data by William Saletan, the author asserts that the researchers of the study, many media outlets and clerics are shrugging off the study findings because the findings did not go the way most expected, or wanted. The study "cannot address a large number of religious questions, such as whether God exists, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work in the same way as prayers from other groups." To that, Saletan says bull. He presents some interesting, and entertaining, perspectives of his own. I do not think anyone is shrugging. As I see it, the power of prayer was not the real focus of the study, but whether or not God can be proven as real. Quite a task, and an unneeded one. Those who believe in the power of their God, believe in the power of their prayers. For those who do not believe, there is nothing to prove, is there? It is my guess that the researchers might not have received the same level of funding by stating the obvious hypothesis.