Mishnah Berachot 5:5 - R. Hanina's Healing

There is a very interesting mishnah about healing found in Berachot mishnah 5:5 (translation is mine):

Some who prays and makes a mistake: it's a bad sign for him. If the prayer leader [shaliah tzibur – emissary of the public] makes a mistake, it's a bad sign for all who are led because those who send an emissary are just like him. It's it said of rabbi Hanina ben Dosa that when he would pray for the sick, he would then say: this one will live, and this one will die. The said to him: From where do you know? He said to them: if the prayer is fluent in my mouth, and I know that it will be received, but if not, I know he will be consumed by the illness [literally torn apart or devoured].

My first response to this was of course that's how it is. If R. Hanina was connected to God, he will know when his prayers are having an effect and when they aren't. By connecting to the sick person and then praying, he knows if the person can heal or not.

I had a teacher in school who described a certain type of pulse that indicated that the patient would die in the next few days, and that he had felt this pulse in the past and the patient did pass away soon after. When I asked another teacher about it, he described a different pulse, but said it doesn't work that way in reality, only in theory. I asked a third teacher, and she said that was bunk, she'd worked on terminal patients who died shortly after she saw them and she felt nothing in the pulse. My conclusion was that the first teacher had a gift for knowing when a person would die, and the tool he used for it was the pulse.

Similarly, R. Hanina had a gift for knowing when a person would recover or die, and the tool he used was how well his prayer for the patient came out of mouth.

People have different “tells” for when the spirit world is communicating with them. When I started this work, my tell was pressure on the left side of my head. Whenever there was spiritual energy in the room, my head would feel like someone was pressing on the side. Others feel it in different places in their bodies, or they just know. After a while, I learned to distinguish between my imagined or internal feelings, and those that were connected to the spirit world. At first I relied solely on my “tell”, but after a while, I started to recognize the qualitative difference in my feelings.

R. Hanina's “tell” was how well his mouth worked when he said the prayer. The text asks "From where do you know this?" R. Hanina answer is a response to this question, and he is telling us about his indicator or "tell" for his receiving a message from the spirit world and God. It is unclear if is when he said the prayer itself or just the person's name, though he knew that if he stumbled during one of them, the prognosis was poor.