A couple of years a study appeared in an obscure journal purporting to show that prayer improved the likelihood that women undergoing in vitro fertilization treatments would conceive. Today, the journal refuses to answer questions about it or print criticisms of the study. Why?

In the Los Angeles Times Jeff Gottlieb writes:

The third researcher on the prayer study, Daniel Wirth, pleaded guilty in Pennsylvania to federal charges of embezzling $2 million from Adelphia Communications by submitting fictitious invoices for consulting services. Indicted on charges that included using false identifies for decades, Wirth pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.

Why have the journal and the authors ignored Flamm's questions [Dr. Bruce Flamm, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in Riverside and a clinical professor at UC Irvine Medical School], especially because scientific journals typically provide a forum for debate by printing critical letters along with the authors' responses? How did two professors from Columbia University Medical Center get mixed up with Wirth? How did such a seemingly questionable study pass the peer review process at the Journal?

The journal recently took the prayer study off its website — not as a retraction, but because the publication was receiving so much "traffic" over the article that its small staff couldn't keep up, said Dr. Lawrence Devoe, the journal's current editor. ... Flamm spoke in early 2002 to the journal's managing editor, Donna Kessel. He said Kessel told him that she was aware of his concerns but that "we don't want to add fuel to the flames. We won't publish anything else," and hung up.

It’s almost like they are trying to pretend that the study didn’t exist. I put the word medical in scare quotes because with behavior like this, it’s difficult to attribute to them any sort of genuine scientific credentials. Peer review? Medicine? Sounds like a forum for pseudoscience to me.

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