Not really surprising

The largest study ever conducted on praying for the sick found that... it has no beneficial effect. In fact:

In an unexpected twist, patients who knew prayers were being said for them had more complications after surgery than those who did not know, researchers reported Thursday.

The complications were minor, and doctors surmised that they could have been caused by the increased stress on patients worried that their conditions were so bad they needed prayers.

Hmm. A Catholic priest wasn't surprised, either.

Father Dean Marek, a Catholic priest who was involved in the research, said he wasn't surprised by the results.

"I am always a little leery about intercessory prayer," said Marek, director of chaplain services at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves…. It is clearly manipulative of divine action and personal choice."

 

Also, asking an invisible man in the sky to make your friend better is just silly.

This was a randomized, blinded trial of several people having cardiac bypass surgery. Most did not know if someone was praying for them or not. The study encompassed about 1,800 people and had three groups. Two Catholic monasteries and one Protestant group offered prayers to about 2/3 of the group. 1/3 was told someone was praying for them, 1/3 was told it was likely someone was praying for them and it was true and 1/3 were told someone might pray for them but cruelly, no one bothered.

This part slays me: Researchers said they didn't ask family members of the sick people to stop praying because it would have been unethical to do so, meaning some people received more prayers than others.

The results are in. The study is over and praying for people, at least for total strangers, does not work. It was stupid to try and put some scientific scrutiny on matters of faith, which by the definition aren't supposed to bear scrutiny. Can we just move on now, and maybe fund a study in which we try to determine a way to actually do the surgery so that those in recovery suffer from fewer compliactions.

Comments

[nobody girl]

heh. i was going to blog about this (you know, the timely thing ... ), then i realized it's just one big freakin' can of worms with no end.

my favorite part of the study was that in some cases patients actually did worse with the praying strangers, because the thought of having a stranger pray for them scared them, as in "am i really this sick?"