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Prayer Does Not Help Heart Patients
mu22le writes "A recent study conducted by the Duke University Medical Center on 700 patients, found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf.
This result seems to contradict a previous study by the same authors that reported "cardiac patients who received intercessory prayer in addition to coronary stenting appeared to have better clinical outcomes than those treated with standard stenting therapy alone"."
This comic strip is a great illustration of the kind of people you mentioned:
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.hQuantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Marshall Brain of How Stuff Works fame wrote a little book called Why Won't God Heal Amputees? (The Most Important Question We Can Ask about God).
Chapter Five deals with the title question and is especially pertinent to this discussion. There are some minor flaws with the conclusions drawn, but I have written the author about these and he intends to address them; they don't really detract from the conclusion.
A highly recommended read. A little wordy at times, but that is because it is trying to be conversational with a potentially hostile audience (I think).
What is the point of this study?
Well, given that we are a social species, and given that for the last few 10's of millions of years of our history we have lived in groups, I would actually expect some kind of relationship between "good wishes from a group" and general health. I would actually expect this sort of thing to evolve as a way of encouraging social behaviour and group membership.
What is the problem that you have with trying to study it? I actually think that you are closing your mind to something that is entirely possible and well within the realm of science. They aren't studying "god" they are studying "what effect does belief in god have on a sick person."
But it is important to 'disrespect' a belief if that belief is false.
If someone said that they believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old I couldn't disagree with them without 'disrespecting' their beliefs.
We shouldn't let people be stupid just so they don't feel bad about themselves.
If someone says "praying helps" then they are wrong. I'm sorry they're wrong, I'm not trying to be mean, but it's not true.
"I am unreligious...but what harm is praying?"
I am un-racist, but what harm is telling people about White Supremacy?
I am un-educated, but what harm is being ignorant?
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
Why does begging an imaginary authority who has the power of life and death over humanity, and therefore is essentially holding your loved one in ransom for your piety, help them?
And if a "miracle" happens, it demonstrates only one of two causes:
1. God's love is a popularlity contest, and those who get the most prayers get the most miracles, which seems to the be logic of those who ask others to pray for them and anyone who uses religion as a means to power.
2. God's love is fickle, distributed in a way you can't predict, so "mysterious ways" is the operating assumption. In this case prayer is futile, and somewhat presumptuous. Who are you to tell God what to do?
Oh, I get it, I miss the point. People pray because it makes them "feel" better. So, why exactly does begging in a state of helplessness make people feel better? Is that a value we wish to impart on our children? Is that the kind of behavior God wants?
OK, I'll take you up on that dare. My father underwent heart surgery a couple of years ago to get a new valve, and while it wasn't life-threatening (it's pretty much a routine thing these days), I still was very worried indeed.
But I didn't pray or say "a few words to [g]od", simply because no gods exist. There is nothing in the universe like that, and to me, the idea is just as silly as the notion that there are - say - invisible pink unicorns secretly running the world. (And given that at least judaism, christianity and islam are ultimately based on the delusions of a late Stone/early Bronze Age shepherd, that's probably not surprising, either.)
If somebody prays because it personally makes them feel better and takes away their sorrows... great, let them pray! But there are also many others who realise that praying isn't actually gonna change anything about the facts and that there's noone "listening" and who thus don't pray even when in distress. Maybe you're somewhere in between, but that doesn't mean everyone else is, too.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Remember that there were different results when the patient was told they were being prayed for.
Exactly.
The mind is a powerful thing. Thought precedes all action.
I saw on TV the other night where health insurance companies are starting to give patients CDs with soothing positive thoughts and the amount of medication the patients needed was less, they stayed less in hospitals, etc.
Meditating people can do stuff like walk on fire and sleep outside in the freezing cold with only a thin sheet for cover.
Hell, some people's minds tell them that they are billionaires while others just bitch about not having any money. On average, the people whose brains tell them that they are poor are over stressed and less healthy too. Go figure.
In mathematics, this would be called "intuition", not "proof". (And in anthropology, I suppose, "intuition" - or an extension thereof - would be called "religion".) What the GP was probably implying - as an analogy, obviously - was that to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4 you need to make deductions that are ultimately based on axioms. Without these, things as basic as "equality" are uncertain and undefined, and you can't actually prove that 2 + 2 = 4.
When you say that the King of the Potato People is just as likely to exist as any other God, you are basically regarding the world from an atheist perspective, making the assumption that the world is wholly explainable and that all people who claim to have had spiritual experiences are wrong. (If you were not making the latter assumption, you would have to admit that I could claim that the King of the Potato People would be more likely to exist if he had told me(directly or otherwise) that he did. The same argument, obviously, could apply - and is slightly more relevant - for the Christian God, or any other actively worshipped deity. Atheist mock-deities such as the IPU, the FSM, etc. and your (to my knowledge improvised) KotPP differ from the true religions in that nobody seriously claims to have any kind of divinely inspired faith in the former. (This is obviously an assumption made on a sociological basis, but one in which I feel fairly confident.) )
Now, an atheist perspective is a perfectly valid perspective from which to view the world. But don't start thinking that it is the only valid perspective, or that you have somehow "proved" that one god or another doesn't exist, or that belief in gods is somehow "objectively" absurd.
(By the way, knowing that this is Slashdot: I'm not saying that use of mathematical axioms is equivalent to religious beliefs. That was an analogy. (Oh, and I know you all know what "analogy" means. That was an attempt at a snide joke.))
Because some people, convinced that prayer will cure them, will decline medical treatment. There's a certain Christian sect that acts this way, though the name escapes me at the moment.
Anyone that believes in "blind faith" - the type of faith that essentially amounts to wishful thinking - is a religious nut in my opinion.
That's very nice, but what you fail to comprehend is that EVERY SINGLE PERSON OF FAITH makes the same sort of judgement about people whose faith differs from their own. You think it's unacceptable for atheists to reject your view of religion but at the same time it's OK for you to reject other religious viewpoints.
You are self-inconsistent. Unfortunately for the human race, unlike THGTGG, you don't now vanish in a puff of smoke.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I've been content for the past several years to just read /. and never participate, but I want to respond to this issue. My youngest son spent the first 3 years of his life undergoing a series of open heart operations at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. I am a christian, and I believe in prayer. We received emails, letters, phone calls from people we didn't know, all over the world, who were praying for my son. Belief in prayer requires a belief in God, something that many slashdotter's seem to think is naive, and pointless. In my time at CHOP, and the Ronald McDonald House, I saw several kids not make it. By our last visit, I felt like we were running a gauntlet. I really think that my own sanity was starting to fray. Maybe prayer didn't affect my son's survival, maybe it did. I don't understand how it works. I do know that it helped me survive: just knowing how many people cared about my son, and were asking God to spare him; I knew that there was nothing I could do for my son, that I was helpless in this situation. I had to give it to God, the surgeons, the cardiologists, the amazing nursing staff.
Does this make me weak-minded? Am I foolish to have faith?
The problem is that no Christian who is not completely theologically naive is going to suppose that their prayer can make God do something. God does what God chooses to do, according to his own logic. That's why the Lord's prayer opens with (my translation):
There is, right from the start, a recognition that the answer to prayer is at God's will (or whim if you prefer).In other words, prayer is not a deterministic process. You don't push a "pray" button and reliably expect a certain action from God. God's will is much more important than the will of the person praying. Because of this, prayer is not really susceptible to statistical analysis: God knows not just what you're praying, but why, and he has his own agenda that's perhaps rather different from yours. Worse, this sort of analysis generally cannot distinguish between "impossible" and "rare". Perhaps God only answers prayers for Anabaptists, or Pentecostals, or that truly dedicated fraction of the church that actually has better morals, lower divorce rates, and is what really keeps the church going. This sort of "fringe" reaction is going to be quite difficult to detect in the sort of study done.
Why pray then? Perhaps for the same reason that death row inmates keep petitioning the governor, even though clemency is rare indeed: ultimately, there are circumstances in which only God has the power to do something, and once in a great while he does, for reasons that we find inscrutable. More importantly, for we Christians, Jesus told us to. Of course, just like that death row inmate, we don't /only/ pray. We pray and pursue every other option that we believe can help. But neither do we give up prayer just because it rarely "works" according to our agenda.
One effect, incidentally, is that of maintaining hope. When a person loses hope, they've lost everything.
Now this, of course, leads to a much more complicated problem (viz. theodicy, the study of why God allows suffering and evil.) But I'm certainly not going to tackle that in a slashdot post.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Now, praying may not help the patients. Actually, it won't. Provided that God exists (if he doesn't, the whole thing is moot anyway), he could have avoided the harm in the first place, so why should he change his mind? After all, according to all records he's supposedly omniscient and able to transcend space and time, so he knows things before they happen, and thus he would know whether the person repents or not without the need to resort to cheap tricks like that.
It helps the patient's friend and relatives, though. They feel useless. Helpless. Unable to help their friend/relative. Hell, how do YOU, ordinary person, want to help a human in a serious medical condition when trained specialists, i.e. docs, can't do much? So praying might not help the patient, but it sure as hell helps his peers, giving them a way to deal with it and feel less helpless. Whether God exists or not doesn't even matter. It's something they can do to feel less useless and helpless.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The experiment is to see if THIS prayer had an effect, and it doesn't.
Specifically, this experiment showed that THIS prayer by THESE PEOPLE had no effect. If you use the Bible to analyze prayer, it's not what is said inasmuch as who is saying it. So this test did a good job proving that God didn't listen to these particular people.
Is hope good?
The study in this article didn't account for normal friends-and-family prayers, it only varied the presence of arranged prayers from strangers (who probably had ulterior motives). At most this study might show that "prayer bulletins" and praying for complete strangers isn't particularly useful. The study says nothing about prayers from loved-ones, which many people would say are the most sincere and thus the most useful.
Practically speaking, it's impossible to do a scientific test that would clear up this issue for everyone. You're never going to convince loved-ones to *not* pray for the patient, so double-blind studies are out. And post-analysis of outcomes for religious vs. non-religious patients/families would be contaminated by the differences in the patients' own beliefs and attitudes.
Prayer did affect six month mortality.
"...six-month mortality was lower in patients assigned bedside MIT, with the lowest absolute death rates observed in patients treated with both prayer and bedside MIT..."
So the death rate is the same right away but six months later, if you were prayed for, you have a much better chance of being alive. You will also have less of a chance to be re-hospitalized.
As a physician myself, I find it interesting that the authors chose to pitch this as a failure for prayer rather than a success.
Calling atheists fanatical dogmatists is not as good an argument as you think. When making an claim as to the existence or causality of something, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to claim that unicorns or fairies existed, the burden of proof would be on me, and that proof had better be fairly convincing.
No attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, inductive or deductive, has ever held up, despite the attempts of hundreds of thousands of scholars and researchers over thousands of years. This failure is not because the establishment would not accept the proof; don't forget that until the end of the 19th century scholars were overwhelmingly favourable to religion, with only a few exceptions. And what we find, when these pro-religious scholars attempted to find evidence for their beliefs, are bold claims that at last, they would have the proof--followed by embarrassed silence. When meticulous records were discovered detailing the events of Judea in the time of Christ, or Egypt in the time of Moses, no trace of either of these figures discovered. This does not mean that they did not exist, but it does mean that the grandiose miracles and events depicted in the Bible didn't happen. If they had, the record keepers of the day would have noticed.
Naturalistic atheists aren't fanatical, they're just fed up. I know a guy who is a dedicated conspiracy theorist. I have taken the time to show him the evidence that contradicts all of this, pointed him to sites and books, explained the science, shown him historical records. I've actually done a lot of work to present the facts. He has only read a few cover blurbs, some web sites, and cannot even be bothered to formulate coherent rational arguments. He hasn't even read the books he hands to me as "proof". When I go back to him and tell him that the book doesn't say at all what he claims, he admits he hasn't read it and then claims it was written by an illuminati shill.
I got fed up. I got tired of the bullshit, of the sloppy thinking, of the unfounded claims, and I got fed up with doing all the work of researching and spoon feeding knowledge to someone who couldn't even be bothered to look for it himself. I am sick of the laziness, the willful ignorance, the deliberate stupidity. But what I am sick of most is the utter contempt for the truth that this person shows.
This is how religious believers appear to naturalistic atheists. I understand what your saying because I used to make all the same arguments--I was a believer too. But the arguments fell apart, and I could not honestly continue to believe in or encourage people to believe in something which had no evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it was a cognitive error. And I do not in any way consider by loss of religious belief unfortunate. That you cannot disprove the existence of God, or the effectiveness of prayer, isn't saying much. You also cannot disprove the existence of the invisible, insubstantial, oderless and silent dragon I may claim to have in my basement.
I don't actually care whether you believe in God or not. What I cannot stand is the utter contempt for the truth shared by fundamentalist Christians, conspiracy nuts, new age flakes, professional psychics, and all the rest. I'm tired of them sitting around with their heads up their asses, demanding that we spoon feed them proof of reality in tiny, sugarcoated bites so that their delicate minds can cope with it. Go and believe what you want. We are the least of your problems. You have a militant religious faction in America who wishes to create a theocracy, a state religion, and who currently have the ear of the president and many of the people in the ruling party. As the people who landed on Plymouth rock knew, a state religion is almost never your religion. If you want to make a difference, don't bother arguing with atheists. Go and argue with your fellow believers, because they do care what you believe, and some of them want the power to force you to believe exactly as they do.
As a psychologist in training (can't use the appellation just yet) I have to take exception to that statement. It's false.
The ability to maintain a belief despite outside influences (whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader) is not gullibility. I think that's what was meant by true belief. I'm not certain.
Gullibility, however, is a very testable question. In some ways it is more of a measure of how readily one accepts new beliefs or statements and has nothing to do with ones ability or propensity to maintain those beliefs. A person who is highly gullible may be just as likely to abandon their newfound 'truth' just as quickly as they found it. In fact, this is suggested by the definition of the construct.
I think the parent was correct--there is not a scientific measure of true belief. There is a measure of religiosity, however, and I think this may be fairly close.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
This study does at least show that, if whatever pertinent deity exists, it cares more about its ego than the needs of people who may die as the result of an illness.
Ah yes, once again, the ugly specter of poor wording and the Problem of Evil rears its head. (*)
You've got an implicit assumption going from this study to your conclusion: you're assuming that it was possible that these people would survive.
In fact, this is pretty common with prayer: we assume, implicitly, that the impossible is possible, and that said impossibility has no consequences other than the immediate action. That is, it's possible for said sick person to just magically become okay, with no drawbacks. This is pretty silly. The person praying doesn't know what's wrong with the sick person. They're just assuming that it would be better if they survived than if they died. That's an unfounded assumption.
Note that this isn't presuming that prayer does nothing. It just can't change the inevitable. It's only our (false) hope that allows us to believe that certain things aren't inevitable.
If I were God, I'd be incredibly insulted by your statement. You're presuming a lot of knowledge about the Universe that you simply don't have. How, precisely, do you know what the needs of the person who was ill was? And, presupposing that the person's death was inevitable, how do you know that that person's death wasn't made a ton easier by said deity?
(*: The relation to the Problem of Evil is pretty straightforward. You're presupposing that "omnipotent" strictly means "able to do anything". This, unsurprisingly, causes problems with your logic, because "able to do anything" isn't a well-formed set. If you instead say that God is omnipotent, meaning "able to do anything that is possible" that clears the situation, and the resolution that I mentioned above - that there was nothing that could be done with regard to the ill people - is pretty clear.)
I don't see it as particularly inconsistant. Did he say that everyone should have a accepting of all beliefs equally?
I don't believe in Santa Claus. I do believe that the earth is round. And in my opinion adults who believe the opposite are rather nutty. Not just because the beliefs are different from mine, but because those particular beliefs are SO unsupported by evidence and logic. (And unlike conventional religious views, the believers don't have the excuse that they are exposed an extremely high level of social pressure to beleive in them)
Does that make me bigotted or inconsistant?