Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people
who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has
found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for
had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart
rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the
researchers suggested. Because it is the most scientifically
rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study,
begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has
for years been the subject of speculation. The question has been
a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer
is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and that it may
relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood.
Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and
that it presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition
beyond the reach of science. At least 10 studies of the
effects of prayer have been carried out in the last six years, with
mixed results. The new study was intended to overcome flaws in the
earlier investigations. The report was scheduled to appear in The
American Heart Journal next week, but the journal's publisher released
it online yesterday. In a hurriedly convened news conference,
the study's authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and
director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the
findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called
intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised questions about
how and whether patients should be told that prayers were being offered
for them. "One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness
of prayer should be studied further," said Dr. Charles Bethea, a
cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a
co-author of the study. Other experts said the study underscored the question of whether prayer was an appropriate subject for scientific study. "The
problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence
to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be
quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr.
Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and
author of a forthcoming book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of
Religion and Medicine." The study cost $2.4 million, and most of
the money came from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports
research into spirituality. The government has spent more than $2.3
million on prayer research since 2000. Dean Marek, a chaplain at
the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a co-author of the report,
said the study said nothing about the power of personal prayer or about
prayers for family members and friends. Working in a large
medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek said, "You hear tons of stories
about the power of prayer, and I don't doubt them." In the study,
the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received
coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a
clogged vein or artery. The patients were broken into three
groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who
received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half
were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The
researchers asked the members of three congregations St. Paul's
Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in
Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near
Kansas City to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names
and the first initials of their last names. The congregations
were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were
instructed to include the phrase, "for a successful surgery with a
quick, healthy recovery and no complications." Analyzing
complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers
found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and
those who were not.
In another of the
study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who
knew that they were being prayed for 59 percent suffered
complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain.
The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding.
But they said that being aware of the strangers' prayers also may have
caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.
"It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" Dr. Bethea said. The
study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group 18
percent suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke,
compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers. In
their report, the researchers suggested that this finding might also be
a result of chance. One reason the study was so widely
anticipated was that it was led by Dr. Benson, who in his work has
emphasized the soothing power of personal prayer and meditation. At
least one earlier study found lower complication rates in patients who
received intercessory prayers; others found no difference. A 1997 study
at the University of New Mexico, involving 40 alcoholics in
rehabilitation, found that the men and women who knew they were being
prayed for actually fared worse. The new study was rigorously
designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier
studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the
largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each
person received from friends, families, and congregations around the
world who pray daily for the sick and dying. Bob Barth, the
spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said
the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. "A person
of faith would say that this study is interesting," Mr. Barth said,
"but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know
it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting
started." |