Praying Doesn't Help The Sick Get Better

[Up2Late]

(No, this is not an April Fool's day story, this is actual news of a real study.)

Praying Doesn't Help The Sick Get Better

Main Category: Public Health News
Article Date: 01 Apr 2006 - 15:00pm (UK)

According to a large study, praying for sick strangers has absolutely no effect on their health. In fact, it found that patients who had undergone heart surgery and knew that people were praying for their recovery had more health complications as a result.

You can read about this study in the American Heart Journal. Researchers wanted to examine the effect prayer might have on the recovery of 1,800 heart bypass patients. The study was made over a ten-year period. The John Templeton Foundation funded the study with $2.4 million in the hope of casting some light on the power of prayer for people who are ill.

According to Dr. Charles Bethea, Integris Baptist Medical Center, Oklahoma City, one of the co-authors of the study, “Intercessory prayer under our restricted format had a neutral effect.”

Three groups of people were asked to pray for patients they did not know personally. The congregations came from:

-- St. Paul's Monastery, St. Paul
-- The Community of Teresian Carmelites, Worcester, Massachussetts
-- Silent Unity, which is a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City

(more at link below)

<http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=40765>

[unblock]

1. my opinion on how prayer helps:

prayer is one way for people to call attention to and focus their energies towards helping someone.

the act of kneeling piously with hands clasped is not, in and of itself, what helps someone.

what helps is that it might call attention to the fact that someone needs help, and it might make that a priority within the community. you or someone else in your church/temple/circle of prayer might be in a position to help and become motivated to help where they weren't before. getting more visitors than usual, or getting some chicken soup from a nice neighbor, that sort of thing can help put the patients mind in a better mood to become healthier, and that sort of thing can help speed recovery for some conditions.

or someone might be able to suggest a remedy or a better doctor or a new treatment they heard about. community awareness and involvement is, if anything, what helps, and prayer can facilitate that.


personally, i don't believe in prayer, because i believe that there are more direct ways of gaining this community involvement. but i accept that prayer is a way of communicating such things among those who believe in it.

[EVDebs]

2. So psychosomatic symptoms aren't brought on by themselves ?

I fully endorse the old Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking", but ignore the Dale Carnegie route of sucking up just for the pollyanna brown-nosing it seems to endorse. Sometimes it feels great to tell the truth, despite the consequences...but more often than not you need to choose your battles.

[Peanutcat]

3. Isn't if funny

That the same ones who rejoiced when research said prayer DID help now say this research really doesn't matter?

[PetraPooh]

5. Yep, I see that too. Annoying, huh?

I don't see how prayer could ever help. It is god's wish supposedly for the good of the world to escape to heaven, yet the christians try to keep their bodies and souls earthbound. Why would god support interfering in his plans, if he really exists. I personally am atheist so would not want prayer on that basis, but still the christians who believe in a kind god with a heaven and a plan, then expect him to help them interfere in someone's rising according to his prayer. Too bizarre. And if I ever saw prayer work in this regard. . .I would have no choice but to assume they must've been praying to the devil, because nowhere does the new testament encourage avoiding death, rather it promotes peace in the concept of a life after death in heaven. So to keep someone here that could otherwise go to heaven, must be the work of the devil.



edited for clarification

[Richard D]

4. What interests me is . . .

. . . what is prayer. There are many levels of it. The gamut runs from the "God give me . . ." type prayer to simply being in the center of love and letting that love spread to others and the universe in general. The "God give me's" for sure won't ever work simply because they are of the mind and intellect and are, in their fundamental aspects, selfish or self-centered. Generally said to try to avoid pain. The other level of prayer, that of unconditional love, is of the heart. No words, nor even any deity needed. Just pure and simple love. My guess is that wasn't what was being tested in these studies, and had it been, the results may or may not have been different. But it would be interesting to see. I've personally seen some medical near-miracles occur with the second type of activity.