From today’s New York Times: Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer:
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of
whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago
and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject
of speculation.
The question has been a contentious one among
researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer is perhaps the most
deeply human response to disease, and that it may relieve suffering by
some mechanism that is not yet understood. Skeptics have contended that
studying prayer is a waste of money and that it presupposes
supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the reach of
science.
* * *
In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study’s authors, led by
Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body
Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last
word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results,
they said, raised questions about how and whether patients should be
told that prayers were being offered for them."One conclusion
from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be studied
further," said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist
Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a co-author of the study.* * *
In another of the study’s findings, a significantly higher number of
the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent —
suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were
uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance
finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers’ prayers also
may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety."It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" Dr. Bethea said.
(Emphasis added.)
OK — it is what it is; what’s next?
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