Prayer May Hurt Not Help the Sick
From the Independent Online Edition:
“We are praying for you … you will be in my prayers.” In this ostentatiously religious country, such phrases drop routinely from the lips of presidents, politicians and ordinary people when wishing someone well before an operation. But do prayers make any difference? If a major scientific study here is to be believed, the answer is, no. Indeed, if a patient knows there is organised prayer on his or her behalf, such intercession might actually make matters worse.
These are the main, if highly tentative, findings of one of the most ambitious exercises yet to evaluate the power of therapeutic prayer. The $2.5m (£1.4m) study was done over a decade at six major US medical centres and involved 1,800 patients who had heart bypass surgery.
This is just the type of response you can expect from those who put faith above science:
“God must be smiling broadly,” said Sister Carol Rennie, the prioress of St Paul’s Monastery in St Paul, Minnesota, one of three praying congregations. “It [the study] tells me frankly that God’s way of working with people is a mystery, and that technology can’t determine the effects of prayer.”
The New York Times (reg. req.) also reported on this major study.
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