Nothing Fails Like Prayer

Many people believe that prayer can help one recover from illness, but serious scientific studies repeatedly fail to find evidence of this. Those studies which do purport to demonstrate such an effect are consistently found to be flawed.

Forbes explains the most recent study:

The study, called Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II, was led by Dr. Mitchell Krucoff of Duke University Medical Center. He and his colleagues randomly assigned 748 patients undergoing heart catheterization and percutaneous coronary intervention to receive prayer from offsite prayer groups or no prayer. There were Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist prayer groups.

In addition, half of the patients received MIT [music, imagery and touch] therapy and half did not. The MIT therapy involved teaching patients relaxed breathing techniques and playing easy listening, classical or country music during their procedure.

Krucoff's team found that compared to no prayer or MIT therapy, prayer alone or prayer plus MIT did not affect whether patients had a "major cardiovascular event" while in the hospital or had to be readmitted to the hospital or died during the six months following the procedure.

Prayer might help a person relax and feel better, and in that way help them deal with illness. The knowledge that others are praying for one might also have a similar effect. It's thus not the prayer that actually does any good, but the positive feelings and attitudes which people experience on account of the prayers. Other methods of inducing those feelings should have the same consequences.

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