TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Wendy Cadge
June 25, 2009

Can the efficacy of prayer be determined through a double-blind clinical trial? Do studies measure prayer in ways that even make sense? Perhaps we’re learning more about medical science than about the healing power of prayer.
Image of Buddhist Monk performing healing ceremony courtesy of kevsunblush under Creative Commons license.

On March 31, 2006, the New York Times published a front page article under the headline, “Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer.” The article reported the results of a multiyear study designed to determine whether prayers offered by strangers influenced the recovery of people undergoing heart surgery—they did not.

Published in the prominent American Heart Journal, this was the latest in a line of medical research studies published over the past forty years that sought the answer to this hotly debated question.

But do these findings actually lead to a final conclusion that intercessory prayer does not help people recover from heart surgery? Can such a question be answered through a double-blind clinical trial? Is prayer “measured” in these studies in ways that even make sense?

The health care providers I interviewed for my book about religion and spirituality in hospitals asked me some of these questions; wanting to know what I thought about intercessory prayer studies as a scholar of religion. Knowing nothing about them I began to read, recently publishing in the Journal of Religion what I believe to be the first social history of medical studies of intercessory prayer.

Between 1965 and 2006, about 75 researchers working in small teams published eighteen research articles in English language medical literature reporting on intercessory prayer studies. The Cochrane Review (an organization that compiles medical studies on specific topics to offer clear recommendations) analyzed the literature—first in the 1990s, and several times since. While initially they suggested further study of intercessory prayer, TCR recently called for an end to such studies.

The efficacy of prayer as an adjunct to healing has been debated for many years. First it was thought to be effective, then, not. And now, the debate is rekindled. Please click on "external source" to access the complete article.

Labels: healing, intercessory prayer, prayer, Wendy Cadge

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Friday, June 05, 2009

Praying for peace, our soldiers and our enemies

Sunday, May 31, 2009
By Joe Orso

A certain prayer that church people everywhere seem to say always causes me to pause.

I heard it again last Sunday attending my parents’ church in St. Louis on the day before Memorial Day.

After reading a story about Jesus and giving a sermon, a deacon prayed a petition asking God to protect all of the American soldiers in harm’s way.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with praying for American soldiers...

This is a thoughtful and timely article examining prayer, and our motivations for prayer...please click on "external source" for complete article

Labels: church, intercessory prayer, Joe Orso, soldiers, war

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Prayer can be powerful

April 6, 2008

Prayer can be powerful

By Amy Olson
Wausau Daily Herald

Though a belief in the power of prayer is central to many Christian denominations and other faiths, the healing it offers might have a greater effect on spiritual wounds than physical ailments.

Eleven-year-old Kara Neumann died March 23 of complications from untreated diabetes after her parents chose to pray for recovery at their town of Weston home rather than seek medical treatment.

Mike Neill, a chaplain at Aspirus Wausau Hospital, said he'd never personally encountered a family who chose prayer as a treatment over medical care.

Neill said he believes in prayer's power, noting it has benefits "even at times when we don't see healing" quickly or in the ways we seek. For many people, however, it can help them come to terms with what's happened and give them comfort. It also enables them to turn over what they can't control to God and helps them know God is with them.

"We are holistic beings," Neill said, and a person's emotional, physical and spiritual make-up are intertwined.

Research suggests many people pray and use other spiritual practices for healing. Forty-five percent of 31,000 people surveyed in 2004 used prayer for health reasons, according to research conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine. Almost one quarter reported having others pray for them.

"There is already some preliminary evidence for a connection between prayer and related practices and health outcomes. For example, we've seen some evidence that religious affiliation and religious practices are associated with health and mortality -- in other words, with better health and longer life," wrote Catherine Stoney, program officer at the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

Still, researchers cannot determine cause and effect.

Studies suggest prayer seeking intervention -- called intercessory prayer -- has no effect as a treatment, said Dr. Steven Miles, professor at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics.

A study of almost 800 people published in 2001 by Mayo Clinic researchers found patients with heart conditions who were prayed for fared no better than those who were not. A 2006 study by Harvard Medical School researchers of about 1,200 heart bypass surgery patients found those who were prayed for had similar rates of complications within a month of their operations to those for whom no prayers were offered.

Labels: Amy Olson, healing, intercessory prayer, medicine

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Saturday, January 12, 2008

Prayer and spirituality said to aid healing

Posted on Sat, Jan. 12, 2008
By REBECCA ROSEN LUM
Contra Costa Times

Scientists are taking a hard look at the value of faith as an instrument in healing -- including the "intercessory" or healing prayers said on behalf of others.

Numerous studies show a link between faith and outlook, faith and well-being, faith and healing times.

Scientists at such prestigious institutions as California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Duke University in North Carolina, and the George Washington University Institute for Spirituality and Health in the nation's capital are exploring the relationship of prayer and faith to healing.

More than half of physicians in an April survey by a group at the University of Chicago said that religion and spirituality significantly influence patients' health.

But the exact mechanism by which it works remains elusive.

Religion can help those with chronic conditions, including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke and arthritis, say the authors of a study at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Yoga, reading of religious texts, meditation or the laying of hands have value in a clinical setting, the researchers concluded.

Hospital officials have long left patients' spiritual needs in the hands of chaplains, but they increasingly are reaching out to faith communities.

Official recognition

Parish nursing, or faith-community nursing, which combines spiritual and health services, has exploded since the American Nursing Association recognized the specialty in 2005.

Today, an estimated 10,000 faith-community nurses work in American congregations.

In San Francisco, a leading researcher in mind-body medicine found a positive link between intercessory prayer and the well-being of people with AIDS.

Prayed-for patients in a study by late University of California-San Francisco professor Elizabeth Targ had fewer setbacks and lived longer than a comparison group. A follow-up study found the same results. Targ later found a link between spirituality and well-being among women with breast cancer.

THE CONFLICT

Some academics recoil at the blurring of the line between faith and healthcare, saying prayer, meditation and other faith practices resist definition or measurement.

Far more studies show no link between religious belief and healing than a positive one, said Richard Sloan, a Columbia University behavioral medicine professor and the author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. Suggesting one can mislead people and put an unfair burden on them, he said.

"Look, nobody disputes that religion and spirituality bring comfort in a time of difficulty, but when spirituality is brought into medical care, it is another issue entirely," he said.

"It can do all sort of harm because it causes people to confuse medical care with other aspects of their lives," he said. "It can lead them to avoid conventional medical care. And it can lead them to believe their health problems are from inadequate faith and devotion."

Labels: American Nursing Association, faith, healing, health, intercessory prayer, Rebecca Rosen Lum, science, spirituality

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Do Intercessory Prayers Work?

By Mansur Hallaj Sindhi

28 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org

As a child, the author learnt that self help, rather than prayers or dua would help. The result of a recent comprehensive study about intercessory prayers, which is common in Christianity and Islam, showed that it does not work. Similarly, having people pray for rain as often done by our leaders is futile.

Before long I realized from my report card that the Almighty had better things to attend to than listen to a lad in Karachi. This was about the time that science education, books and film documentaries had raised doubts in my mind about this method of marks-enhancement. Plain hard work turned out to be a surer way to success. This was also the time when I became aware of the importance of prime numbers and began wondering about the magic of '3' and '7': the first was the number of times one washed each limb before prayers; ablution and '3' went together. As for '7' that would be a whole new ball game…

At university I became aware of the historical battles between science and religion, starting with the case of Galileo, and the continuing lack of acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution. After considerable amount of reading and thought I could no longer keep the ideas of science and religion in separate compartments .

Science is our way of arriving at empirical truths. Its process of refining truths or turning them around completely are evolutionary, in that when people come up with better ideas and experimental results, old findings are altered or discarded. In contrast, most religious scholars refuse to accept that religious texts need to be interpreted differently for each age to match the findings of science and be in line with rational thinking. This is particularly so for areas where interpretations of religion generally differ from what science offers. But for religion to be relevant to people's lives its interpreted doctrines cannot be in opposition to what is found by science, whose strength is based on the idea that there is no finality in ideas. Therefore for religion to remain alive and relevant to modern believers, its interpreters should exercise flexibility. This means not trying to force science into the straight-jacket of religion.

Some of these contentious issues will become clearer through a discussion of a ten-year rigorous study conducted on intercessory prayers, with results announced in 2006. In Islam and Christianity this is a prayer to God on behalf of another person or situation. The prayer pleads on behalf of the subject, believing that God will answer the prayer.

The study cost $2.4 million and was supported by the Templeton Foundation. It was directed by a Harvard University cardiologist Dr Herbert Benson, who is a believer in the power of personal prayer and meditation. There have been at least 10 studies on the effect of prayers since year 2000 with mixed results, with this one intended to overcome the flaws in earlier investigations. The US government has itself spent $2.3 million on prayer research over this period.

The outcome of the study was that prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery. Patients who knew they were prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications perhaps because of the expectations that prayers created or that their condition was so bad that prayers for them was warranted.

Some have argued that prayer is a deep response to illness and it may relieve suffering by some mechanism as yet unknown. Skeptics contend that studying prayers is a waste of money and it presupposes supernatural involvement, and therefore, by definition, beyond the scope of science.

In the study over 1800 coronary bypass patients at six hospitals were monitored. The patients were divided into three equal groups, with groups A & B both prayed for. While group A was told that they would be definitely prayed for, group B was told that they may or may not be prayed for. This resulted in patients in group B not knowing for sure if they were being prayed for. Group C knew that it was not being prayed for.

Members of three different Christian congregations in different parts of the U.S. were asked to pray for the patients in any manner they liked but were instructed to include the following phrase in their prayers: "for successful surgery with a quick healthy recovery and no complications." Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued daily for two weeks after. List of names of people each congregation was to pray for was given as first names and initials of the last names.

Results showed no statistically significant difference between prayed-for and non-prayed for groups. Results were also computed for two types of complications: (a) not serious and (b) major. Patients who received prayers were marginally more likely to develop complications of category (59 to 51 percent) – this is category (a). There were substantially more likely to develop major complications (18 to 13 percent) than patients who received none.

Needless to say, I as a teenager, with my experience of prayers, could have predicted the main findings of this research. The Americans wasted $4.7 million on it.

Labels: God, intercessory prayer, Mansur Hallaj Sindhi, religion, Templeton Foundation

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Thursday, March 15, 2007

Does God answer prayer? ASU research says 'yes'

Does God or some other type of transcendent entity answer prayer? The answer, according to a new Arizona State University study published in the March journal Research on Social Work Practice, is "yes."

David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College of Human Services at Arizona State University, conducted a comprehensive analysis of 17 major studies on the effects of intercessory prayer – or prayer that is offered for the benefit of another person – among people with psychological or medical problems. He found a positive effect.

“There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered for the benefit of another person,” said Hodge, a leading expert on spirituality and religion. “Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered on behalf of another yields positive results.”

Hodge’s work is featured in the March, 2007, issue of Research on Social Work Practice, a disciplinary journal devoted to the publication of empirical research on practice outcomes. It is widely recognized as one of the most prestigious journals in the field of social work.

Hodge noted that his study is important because it is a compilation of available studies and is not a single work with a single conclusion. His “Systematic Review” takes into account the findings of 17 studies that used intercessory prayer as a treatment in practice settings.

“This is the most thorough and all-inclusive study of its kind on this controversial subject that I am aware of,” said Hodge. “It suggests that more research on the topic may be warranted, and that praying for people with psychological or medical problems may help them recover.”

The use of prayer as a therapeutic intervention is controversial. Yet, Hodge notes that survey research indicates that many people use intercessory prayer as an intervention to aid healing, which raises questions about its effectiveness as an intervention strategy.

“Overall, the meta-analysis indicates that prayer is effective. Is it effective enough to meet the standards of the American Psychological Association’s Division 12 for empirically validated interventions? No. Thus, we should not be treating clients suffering with depression, for example, only with prayer. To treat depression, standard treatments, such as cognitive therapy, should be used as the primary method of treatment.”

In addition to his inclusion in the upcoming issue of Research on Social Work Practice, Hodge is widely published and has appeared on the pages of Social Work, Social Work Research, Journal of Social Service Research, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Families in Society. He has also authored the book “Spiritual assessment: A handbook for helping professionals.”

Source: Arizona State University

Labels: God, intercessory prayer