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Did Prayer Cure His Cancer? Or Was It Positive Thinking?

Did Prayer Cure His Cancer? Or Was It Positive Thinking?

Last updated on: July 3, 2026 at 5:11 am by Tom Rapsas

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Did Prayer Cure His Cancer? Or Was It Positive Thinking? 2026-07-03T05:11:32-06:00 Tom Rapsas

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A 30-year-old neuroscientist’s inoperable brain tumor miraculously disappeared. Was it prayer or manifestation? Image by Gemini.

At 4 AM one morning, Joshua W. Brown’s wife awoke to a terrifying sound. She turned on the light to find her husband lying on the bedroom floor—unconscious, violently shaking, and foaming at the mouth. He was suffering a grand mal seizure.

Though he would later have no memory of the event, Brown was rushed to the hospital. There, emergency room scans revealed a devastating diagnosis. He had a large, cancerous, inoperable brain tumor. In his words, “I had just read my death sentence at 30 years old.” To make matters worse, his wife was heavily pregnant with their first child.

Brown was a neuroscientist and well versed in the workings of the brain. Yet he could find no conventional medical solutions to the tumor in his brain. So, he turned to his faith. Twenty years later, in the book Proving a Miracle: Unlocking the Power of Prayer to Heal, Brown makes a startling claim: Prayer completely cured him.

At first, he was skeptical—could prayer really work?

One morning Brown was invited to attend a meeting with a local group of Christians from several different churches. They believed prayer, specifically group prayer, had the power to heal the sick and even cure diseases like cancer. Brown, a regular churchgoer himself, was still skeptical. In his words:

They seemed to see supernatural intervention as such a common and likely occurrence that their first response to my illness was to begin praying rather than commiserate or suggest medical interventions or special diets. I was tempted to excuse myself and go on my way, but the scientist in me wondered: Why did they seem to expect healing to occur? How would that work?

After attending a few of these prayer sessions, Brown starts to believe that a change is happening within him. While early on he “felt anxious and awkward and skeptical from the weirdness of it all,” he began to develop a renewed sense of hope. He writes that after one three-hour prayer session:

An ineffable sense of peace cascaded down. It was as if all my anxiety had fled and had been replaced by utter calm and relief. I sensed profound love, not just from the people who had prayed with me, but directly from God.

Against all odds, the tumor begins to shrink.

After several intense healing prayer sessions, Brown had MRI scans to monitor the growth of the tumor. Instead of the tumor growing or spreading as was expected, the imaging showed the mass was shrinking. A few scans later, he received confirmation that the tumor tissue had completely disappeared, leaving behind only inactive scar tissue. Joshua Brown’s cancer was miraculously cured.

The neuroscientist part of Brown wasn’t sure what to make of it. He wanted to know if his faith had healed him and found there was little study on the efficacy of prayer for healing. He observed “there’s still remarkable resistance in both religious and non-religious communities to accepting prayer as a therapeutically beneficial treatment.”

Brown himself became involved in several studies that showed group prayer healed the sick and the visually and hearing impaired—but how it worked remained something of a mystery. As far as his own cure, Brown can only speculate, writing,

The prayers often left me with a sense of profound peace. I cannot say for sure, but that reduction in stress might have helped my cortisol levels and strengthened my immune system to carry out immunosurveillance to fight the tumor.

Did prayer eradicate the tumor—or could it be something else?

As I read the book, I began wondering: Was it really prayer that cured Brown of his tumor? Or was it his belief that prayer worked? If Brown didn’t believe in the power of prayer, would he not have been cured? On the other hand, would he have had the same outcome if he simply had a mindset that believed in a positive outcome?

Late in Proving a Miracle, there’s evidence that there may be more to Brown’s miraculous healing than prayer alone. He mentions the book Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything by James R. Doty, MD. In case you’re not familiar with manifestation, here’s how the website The Good Trade explains it:

Manifestation refers to the act of transforming thoughts, beliefs, or desires into physical reality. It is heavily tied to the concept of the Law of Attraction, which suggests that focusing your mental energy on specific goals will help you attract and achieve them.

No praying involved. No God involved. Or at least not the God we know from religion.

Doctor Doty has a slightly different take on manifestation.

As it turns out, while Brown is a neuroscientist, Doty is a neurosurgeon. While his book Mind Magic was published long after Brown’s recovery, his core premise provides a clue as to what might have happened during and after Brown’s group prayer sessions.

Doty believes that manifestation is more than sending good vibrations out into the universe. It’s about intentionally reorganizing the neural pathways in your brain. It’s a process Doty explains in the book and includes directives like “clarify what you truly want,” “remove the obstacles in your mind,” and “deeply embed your intentions into your subconscious.” The scientific explanation goes something like this:

Deep, emotionally engaged visualization can stimulate the release of neurotransmitters and signal molecules that promote cellular repair and reduce localized inflammation, maximizing the body’s internal healing environment.

Could this type of profound mindset shift, whether prompted by intense group prayer or deep meditation on manifestation, dissolve a tumor? Are prayer and manifestation simply two different words for the same mysterious mechanism?

Whatever the answers might be, know that Brown is now 53 years old and completely recovered. He runs his own cognitive neuroscience research laboratory in Bloomington, Indiana. He’s also living proof that sometimes the impossible happens—even when we can’t totally explain why.

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