Praying Doesn't Help

dannywalk writes "Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina have run a study to see if praying for sick people makes any difference. Apparently it doesn't. 'Before their operations, they were randomly split into two groups, and half were prayed for by Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims. However, checks revealed they had fared no better than those not prayed for.'"

Comments

What exactly makes this /. newsworthy?

[Mattcelt]

Hmmm, seems that perhaps we need a moderation system for article posters? (Score -1; Troll)

This is going to be a hugely active thread here, and it's not going to do anyone any good, because those who always believed that prayer was bunk are going to say "I told you so" and the people who always believed in prayer are going to say "It doesn't prove anything". And we're going to be right back where we started.

This one would have been better left to the religious websites, not the geek ones.

Re:What exactly makes this /. newsworthy?

[eugene ts wong]

the people who always believed in prayer are going to say "It doesn't prove anything"

I'd like to expand on that a bit.

The Bible never says that a prayer automatically translates to healing. God never promises a life of ease just because we believe. So it would be kind of like saying, "Seat belts don't help because when people drive off of cliffs, they die. Thus we shouldn't buckle up @ all.". It's a crude illustration, but hopefully it gets the point across.

As you said, this article is a troll. Therefore I rate this article as "-1 Michael".

Re:What exactly makes this /. newsworthy?

[0x20]

Your seatbelt analogy doesn't make any sense. It translates to "Prayer helps people as long as they don't get cancer. Thus we should keep praying," which is not exactly a convincing endorsement.

Not trying to be insulting, but it's this kind of pseudo-logic which misleads vulnerable people into joining churches. It sounds good - just as long as you don't think about it too deeply.

Re:They Forgot

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"Thou shalt not look to see if I am actually here." -God

Yep. Or as the article says:

Many theologians say that, even if you believe in the power of intercessory prayer, such a trial is doomed to failure because it "puts God to the test" - and there are clear instructions in the Bible not to do this.

Which neatly encapsulates the fundamental difference between science and religion; in science, you always look to see if something's actually there. And anyone who says, "I'm going to assert that this is true, but you don't get to test it" is rightly viewed with suspcicion and contempt.

Re:ok....

[bill_mcgonigle]

then why do doctors sometimes come to the conclusion that something beyond medicine was the cure in a case where a family prayed to some saint-to-be, allowing that person to be promoted to sainthood?

Maybe because they don't understand entirely how the human body works? Just because a doctor doesn't understand something doesn't mean he ascribes it to supernatural powers.

eg - a family has a seriously ill child, and prays to a man/woman who has already died but worked (in a religious context) toward improving the lives of children. child recovers, and doctors are unable to explain how after investigating. several other cases of this results in that man/woman in being recognized a Saint by the Pope.

Correlation != causality. We have a method to see if your theory is true or not (maybe it is). The Scientific Method can develop a proper experiment, pretty much no matter what your contributary factors may be. I'm surprised there are no studies like this coming out of, e.g. The Vatican. I guess they're too busy trying to figure out how HIV passes through condoms.

Perhaps they are missing the point.

[MarvinMouse]

Being a somewhat slacking Roman Catholic, I look at the people who pray for various things, (especially other people's health), and I've realized that while I have no idea whether the prayer helps the person prayed for or not, it does definitely help the person praying. Sometimes people feel helpless, like there is nothing they can do when someone they love is dying, and prayer gives them some hope that they are doing something to help out.

As well, prayer research studies are hard to rate because there will always be questions of faith of those in the study, whether connectedness is important, and what the one "true faith" is. All of which will alway make is easy to discount/support any conclusions.

Personally, I take prayer from a very sociological and psychological viewpoint. It provides some form of hope to people who feel otherwise helpless. It gives them the opportunity to feel that they can do something, anything to change what they feel needs to be changed.

Whether it works or not, in the end, is irrelevant.

Re:Devine Healing

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Faith healing only works if everyone involved has no doubt that it will work. Meaning everyone believes the person will be healed. This is shown many times when Jesus is healing the sick, just because they believe in him. If you recall he didn't perform many miracles in his hometown because no one there had believed he was the Christ. If you would like some scripture references let me know and I will post them at lunch.

The power of the great and powerful Oz only works if everyone involved has no doubt that it will work. Meaning everyone believes the person will receive a heart, a brain, or courage. This is shown many times when Oz is helping Dorothy and her friends, just because they believe in him. If you recall he didn't help them before that because they had believed he was just a man behind a curtain. If you would like some L. Frank Baum references let me know and I will post them at lunch.

Mind over matter

[Apreche]

Being prayed for by others obviously wont help your odds in any activity. But I'm a firm believer in mind over matter. The placebo effect is great evidence of this. If someone truly believes that they will survive through some surgery, or live another day because of some deity or something, then they probably will. Their religeon, deity, values and morals could all be completely false and it doesn't matter. Because in their brain they truly believe that X will happen, it does. Because you truly believe a surgar pill is actually the perfect cure for your ailment, it will be.

That's my real problem with religeon is that it gives some imaginary omiscient being credit for the achievments of flesh and blood people.

"Save me Jebus!"

Jebus didn't save you, you saved you. Because you believed you would survive the surgery, you did. It had nothing to do with your Jebus, who is completely imaginary and such.

I probably could have gotten my point across in fewer and better words, but I'm too lazy now.

Re:Studies Showing The Opposite Too

[Flamerule]

For every scientific study "proving" that prayer doesn't work, there's one proving that it does. For example, look at this Wired article which talks about a faith healing study done at UC San Francisco Medical Center. It's just one of many.

But this one is the largest, most comprehensive ever. It's worth more than the other, smaller ones.

Nobody who believes in prayer will be swayed by this report [...]

Most people who believe in prayer wouldn't even be swayed by the destruction of the Earth and the death of all humans, so I think we can safely ignore them.

and those who don't believe won't be swayed by the one I linked to.

Uh, dude, I don't think you read that article as closely as you should have. Besides the fact that it only involved 20 patients -- as opposed to the 750 patients in this new study -- eventually it also gets around to pointing out how the study in question was illegitimate. Quote:

WHAT TOO FEW PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT TARG'S FAMOUS AIDS STUDY: That her study had been unblinded and then "reblinded" to scour for data that confirmed the thesis - and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact when it decided to publish.

And what did one of the researchers do?

[...] He had also seen which group each patient was assigned to, treatment or control, but he swore he didn't remember and maintained he was therefore impartial.

Did you read that!? One of the researchers, who had been privy to the assignment of patients into groups, then went back through the patients' charts to gather more data. Blindedness was totally compromised... and incidentally, this incident displays a more-than-cavalier attitude toward the science in the study.

[...] This isn't what science means by double-blind. The data may all be legitimate, but it's not good form. Statisticians call this the sharpshooter's fallacy - spraying bullets randomly, then drawing a target circle around a cluster.

The writer also notes:

I learned all this from Dan Moore and confirmed it with Mark Comings. Moore seemed unaware how explosive his version of the story was. "I was always troubled over the sifting it took for the data to hold together," he said. "I think Fred and Elisabeth missed the real story, which was the difference between medical science and alternative medicine. Triple-drug therapy was literally saving lives. We were only looking at secondary things."

With this information, I reread the paper with an awe for how carefully they chose their words. Only with the benefit of this hindsight do holes emerge, ones that had been clouded by the scientific language and statistical commentary.

Unbelievable. And an eminent biostatistician who looked at the study said:

Spiegel continued: "It does change her work considerably. It puts it into more of an exploratory study, rather than a confirmatory study. It would be wrong to say it'd been proven."

That's an understatement. And finally, thanks to the study's insufficiently random selection of patients, and laughably small sample size:

[...] In other words, the study provided fairly convincing evidence that if you had AIDS back in the mid-1990s, the older you were the more likely you were to die.

So this pro- faith healing study was a total crock of shit. No one's going to be swayed by it because it's imaginary, and it only demonstrated the poor science being put out by faith healing people.

Re:Seat belts

[M.C. Hampster]

Do you think that if religions were to teach faith in humanity first that it would result in a more tolerent society insofar as others' beliefs?

I'm sure it would, but is that necessarily a good thing? Is tolerance the end all and be all virtue? Should I tolerate people committing horrible acts against others? Should I tolerate falseness and lies? Tolerance without any guiding morality is no virtue.

As a Christian, I am extremely tolerant. The Bible tells me not to judge others, that is reserved for God. I can exist peacefully with all sorts of people. I believe in the freedom of religious expression. I have no problems with people of any faith or of no faith, I get along with them all. But I do believe in an all-powerful God, who has set up moral standards and sent his son to save us from sin. Does that suddenly make me intolerant? Or incoherent? Well, I may be incoherent at times, but I don't think it has anything to do with my faith :-)