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Studying the Benefit of Prayer
The experiment cited most often by advocates of prayer is
one by a cardiologist at San Francisco General Medical Center (Randolph C.
Byrd, "Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary
Care Unit Population," Southern Medical
Journal 81 (July
7, 1988): 826-829. )
Byrd studied 393 patients between August 1982 and May 1983, dividing the group into 192 patients who were prayed for, and 201 who were not. He reported that, among other things, the people who were prayed for were five times less likely to develop pulmonary edema; that none required endo-tracheal intubation, and fewer of them died.
The Power of Prayer: An Interview with Larry Dossey, M.D includes these questions:
What led you to write a book on
prayer?
Larry Dossey: I must say that I was
dragged into it kicking and screaming. I was a typical physician
educated to believe in things that have some kind of apparent physical
basis like medication, surgery, and radiation.
I had my
come-uppance back around '87 or '88, when I discovered a study that really
looked like good science. It showed that prayer made a major
difference
for heart attack patients at a coronary care unit. This study came out of
San Francisco General Hospital. It was what is called a randomized,
prospective double-blind study in which a prayed-for group did
terrifically better on several accounts than an un prayed-for group. I was
disturbed by the results.
Did this mean there was something I
should be doing that I wasn't?
So I began to poke around the
literature, looking for other studies that might corroborate or invalidate
this. I was stunned at what I found: There are easily 130 studies that
show that if you take prayer into the laboratory under controlled
situations, it does something remarkable, not just to human beings but to
bacteria, fungi, germinating seeds, rats, mice and baby gerbils.
One of the things that intrigued me about the studies was
how this
material has been marginalized. You certainly don't hear
anything about these studies in medical school. But after considering the
evidence, I decided to incorporate prayer rituals into my medical
practice. It seemed to me that not to do so was the equivalent of
withholding a potent medication or a needed
operation.
So these studies are all out there, but
they're not well known?
LD: They've been gathering
dust on the sidelines of medical research for a couple of decades at
least.
Why do you think that
is?
LD: I think most physicians in medical science
won't even look at prayer
because it doesn't fit their theories. Well,
if a pet theory doesn't work maybe it's time to get rid of it. The whole
point of the scientific method is to guard against self-delusion. Refusing
to give the evidence a fair hearing is not the way you play
science.
It's true we don't have a clue about how prayer
works, either. All I'm saying is that it's time we looked at the data. I
was fascinated by the clarity of a lot of these 130 studies. Some of them
were extremely clean, well designed, and very precise. And well over half
of these 130 studies show statistical significance that something major is
going on with prayer.
A lot of physicians would like to write it off as placebo
effect, but that's difficult to do considering that bacteria, fungi, and
germinating seeds aren't generally considered to be susceptible to
suggestion.
A Christian view with the results of Byrd's study more closely examined: