I harbor no illusions about the impact of this study, since it simply will be argued that God imposed these lackluster results precisely in order to test people’s faith.
A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact, researchers said on Thursday.
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Among the first group — who were prayed for but only told they might be — 52 percent had post-surgical complications compared to 51 percent in the second group, the ones who were not prayed for though told they might be. In the third group, who knew they were being prayed for, 59 percent had complications.
So, really, it’s not so much that the study “failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact” but that its numbers indicate that if you’re being prayed for, you’re going to do worse than people who aren’t.
Alternatively, perhaps the study simply shows that it is prayers engaged in specifically by Catholics and Protestants that result in bad results, and so some people should start looking around for whatever religion is the right one.
Remembering the study from a while back that indicated remote prayer DOES work, I wonder if the difference isn’t that this group were told about the prayer. Could that be a confound somehow, that if you think you might get prayed for, that you semi-consciously expect it to have an effect?
Just a thought. I’m by no means a fan of either prayer or holistic medicine, but I am willing to consider the concept of directed brain energy–telekinesis, the heightened sensate powers of twins to “feel” what the other is going through, remote prayer, etc. There is so much about the power of the brain that we simply don’t understand yet.