Prayer Study Results: Prayer Fails--Again!

[Doug]

ANOTHER FAILURE OF PRAYER
In what’s called the largest study of its kind, using some 1,800 patients at six medical centers, researchers have found that asking people to pray for heart bypass surgery patients – without the patients' knowledge that this was taking place – had zero effect on their recovery, and in fact, another group of patients in the study who knew they were being prayed for, had a slightly higher rate of complications! The project was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. They were quick to emphasize that their project wasn’t intended to test whether God exists, or whether he/she/it answers prayers. That would be too much to ask…?

Of course, the usual cop-out was offered: Critics said that the question of God's reaction to prayers can't be explored by scientific study. If not that way, how?

The full report was published in the American Heart Journal. Dr. Herbert Benson, director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and lead author of that report, notes it is not the last word on the effects of intercessory prayer. Questions raised by the study, he says, "will require additional answers." I agree. How about the question, “Why do we continue to beat this very dead horse?”

From: here.

DOUG
A search of the American Heart Journal turned up the study published in April 2006 in the companion journal Medline:

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer.
Benson H, Dusek JA, Sherwood JB, Lam P, Bethea CF, Carpenter W, Levitsky S, Hill PC, Clem DW, Jain MK, Drumel D, Kopecky SL, Mueller PS, Marek D, Rollins S, Hibberd PL
Am Heart J
Apr 2006 (Vol. 151, Issue 4, Pages 934-42)

[Savonarola]

Let's send this discussion back to the original mention from April of last year.

Thread closed.

--Savonarola, Religion moderator