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UNITED STATES. The power of prayer has been put to the test in a unique ten-year study involving members of three church congregations and 1,800 patients recovering from heart bypass surgery who were strangers to them.

One third of the patients were told that prayers were being said for them; one third were prayed for but not given that information; and the final group were not prayed for. When the recovery of all three groups was monitored a surprising result emerged. Not only was there no evidence of the first and second groups recovering faster than the third group, but the first group – those who knew they were being prayed for – experienced more complications than the others.

“Did those patients think, ‘I’m so sick that they had to call in the prayer team’?” wondered Dr Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at the Integris Baptist Medical Centre in Oklahoma City, and one of the study’s co-authors.

Congregations at St Paul’s Monastery (St Paul), the Community of Terersian Carmelites (Worcester, Massachusetts) and Silent Unity (Kansas City, Missouri) started praying for the patients the night before surgery and for two more weeks, asking God to grant “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications”.

The study, funded in large part by the John Templeton Foundation, is believed to have cost $2.4 million. The result was published in May, in the “American Heart Journal” and on its website.

Interpreting the results is difficult. Dr Bethea has concluded that “intercessory prayer under our restricted format had a neutral effect” and admitted that the study “did not move us forward or backward” in understanding the effects of prayer.

Among those who have commented on the results is Dr Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioural medicine at Columbia, who told the “New York Times”: “The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion.”

Paul Kurtz, professor emeritus of philosophy at the States University of New York at Buffalo, and chairman of the sceptical Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) took a different view. Asked why there was no evidence for the power of prayer, he responded: “Because there is none. That would be one answer.”

Posted on Monday, September 04, 2006
Category: Health

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