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THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
MAY NOT HAVE A PRAYER
Journal of Healing – April 12, 2006

By Mary Koch

I was praying for something to write about this week when I opened the newspaper and hallelujah!, my prayer was answered. Long-awaited results of a big medical study have led researchers to conclude that praying for others to recover from an illness is at best ineffective.

And I say, thank God for that. There’d be hell to pay if we ever figured out how to harness the power of prayer. Look at what we did with the atom!

The editors of the American Heart Journal, which published the Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), called it a “landmark” study. But even they had their doubts. They concluded that if patients are aware they’re the subject of a prayer study, it could “profoundly change the spiritual landscape being studied.”

Each of us, I suspect, has a relatively narrow interpretation of prayer. As a child, I was taught that prayer involved folding my hands, bowing my head and intoning certain words. Half-a-century later, I recognize that prayer comes in many disguises.

* * *

THE STEP, involving 1,800 bypass surgery patients, was limited to Christian prayer, both Protestant and Catholic. STEP pray-ers were required to pray for a patient by name and use specific words, asking for “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”

There’s a short-order prayer, if I ever heard one. God, I prefer my eggs over easy. Even the journal editors suggest that the constraints may have “impacted the quality of the prayer itself . . . “ It’s doubtful, they wrote, that you could generalize the STEP findings to other intercessory prayer approaches.

They were even more concerned about how studies like this might jeopardize patients.

The researchers were expecting prayer to be effective in limiting complications and, moreover, they expected people who knew they were being prayed for would be especially better off. Just the opposite happened.

Fifty-nine percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered complications. Only 51 percent of the patients who thought they may be prayed for – but in fact weren’t – had complications.

Oh God, thou art crafty. Thou art not about to leave some poor schmuck in the lurch just because random chance put him in the wrong group for a scientific study. As the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins commented in his daily on-line column, “Throughout the Bible, God took a dim view of people testing him.”

* * *

AS TO THE patients who knew they were being prayed for and ended up worse off, two theories have been offered. A Mayo Clinic chaplain suggested they “thought they were home free and discounted the traumatic effect that surgery has upon the body, so were ill-prepared for it.

The journal editors wondered if “approaching a patient to participate in a prayer study before a procedure could inadvertently alarm a patient, ‘You mean I’m so sick that I might need prayer?’”

I well remember, in the weeks following my husband’s stroke, very much appreciating the torrent of prayers that were offered on his behalf. At the same time, I asked visitors not to pray “over” him. It made him feel as if he were at death’s door.

He continues to be surrounded by prayer. He is now comfortable and appreciative when people pray “over” him. It’s been essential to his health and healing. No, I can’t prove that; I just know it.

I know one other thing, and the scientists may end up proving this one: Prayer is a powerful antidote; it needs to be handled with care.

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