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Praying For Someone Appears To Have No Effect!!!

Praying for someone who is ill and preparing to undergo a risky medical procedure appears to have no effect on the patient's future health.

That is the finding of one of the largest scientific investigations of the power of prayer conducted to date. Scientists said the study, published yesterday in The Lancet, will undoubtedly renew debate over whether prayer has a measurable effect on illness and even whether it is a suitable subject of scientific inquiry.

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina recruited nearly 750 people undergoing heart-related procedures. Religious groups of different denominations were randomly assigned to pray for the health of half the volunteers. The other half received no organised prayers.

Researchers found that the prayers, offered by representatives of Xtian, Mu slim, Je wish and Bud dhist faiths, had no effect on whether patients experienced post-procedure complications such as heart attack, death or readmission to the hospital.

The researchers did find that another non-traditional intervention, MIT therapy, which involves playing music and administering therapeutic touch at the bedside, did have a slight beneficial health effect.

Volunteers who received MIT therapy had less emotional distress before their procedures and slightly lower mortality rates six months after admission.

Recent research on prayer has been highly controversial. Most studies have focused on intercessory prayer - petitions made directly on behalf of someone else - as opposed to patients praying for themselves.

While some studies have found measurable clinical effects, critics say they are often riddled with statistical flaws.

Some prayer studies are difficult to interpret. For example, when researchers at the University of New Mexico looked at the effect of prayer on recovering alcoholics, they found that patients who knew they were being prayed for actually wound up drinking significantly more at the end of the six-month study.

"Nobody disputes that religious practices bring comfort to people in times of illness," said Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University in New York and a frequent critic of prayer research.

"The question is, can medicine add anything to that? It trivialises the religious experience to think you can subject it to the measurement of science."

In a standard clinical trial of a new drug, for example, researchers monitor how much medicine a volunteer receives.

"But how do you define a 'dose' of prayer?" Professor Sloan said.

The Washington Post