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

Next study: Don't pray

[ccady]

Now they need to have another study: tell patients that they are being prayed for , yet don't do it, and see how well they fare. My guess: they'll have increased recovery.

obvious answer

[moof1138]

This one is really straightforward to explain. You see, in addition to prayer by the One True Religion, the prayers of infidels were also mixed in. Since the prayers of infidels are actually prayers to the Dark One who does the opposite of what was asked, these amount to anti-prayers. Hence they cancelled out their results.

Re:obvious answer

[Tyreth]

From a Christian perspective there are a few thoughts, but one of them is not "do not put God to the test". If prayer really is supposed to aid most (or even a measurable percentage) people, then it should be able to be proven - whether through intentional or accidental experience. For example, someone is missing a foot - they are prayed for and the foot grows back.

It doesn't go without saying though, that God is not a neutral, unintelligent force that is manipulated by the hands of men. Many people treat prayer like a magic spell, a way we can force His hand to our will. The truth is (from a Christian perspective, obviously not from a New Ager or others who believe that all things make up God) that if a person's time to die has come, they will die. I am of an increasingly minority view in Christianity today. After the New Testament was completed, the spiritual gifts (healing, prophecy, miracles, etc) ceased. Their purpose for that time had been completed, and they ended - as had happened in times before. Then over the next 400 years, culminating with Christianity becoming the official religion of Rome, the supposed miraculous increased in number. But these were not the true gifts - they were pseudo miracles, hypnotism, trickery and deception.
This experiment confirmed what I already believed - that prayer is our chance to worship God, to make known our heartache, and pray for His intercession in ours and other's lives. We can request from Him a miracle for healing or other things. In reality, such true miracles are very rare. As someone said, for the few thousand that Jesus fed miraculously, millions still have to cook their meals every night. The miracles are a sign of His power, but by no means common.

The truth is, I don't expect God to make much of a difference for all those prayers made, regardless of whether it's a test or just a ministry, regardless of whether they are all from the "One True Religion" or not. If God has any power at all, then we are His servants, not the other way around.

Not scientific at all

[pmz]

How would a scientist claim that he removed a deity from the control group? How could the scientist prove this?

woo!

[kurosawdust]

Oh YEAH! In your FACE, Mrs. "Please God help my kid beat cancer"! Woo!
*does endzone dance*
Who's the man?
Who's the man?
Not God!
YEE-HAW!

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.

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.