Can Prayer Heal?

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Evidence: In my article “Healing Prayer & Distant Healing,” I review several major scientific studies that have tested whether prayer can heal. These include studies by Randolph Byrd; Fred Sicher and Elisabeth Targ; William S. Harris; Kwang Y. Cha, Daniel P. Wirth, and Rogerio A. Lobo; Mitch Krucoff et al.; and Herbert Benson et al. In my article, I also review some of the major obstacles that face anyone trying to do a controlled experiment on healing prayer, e.g., defining a “dose” of prayer and controlling prayer.

The Byrd study is too flawed to consider in depth. He took a shotgun approach and looked for a healing effect from prayer in 26 categories of complications from cardiac surgery. If you scatter shot over a wide area, you’re bound to hit something. This shotgun approach led to a finding of statistical significance for 6 categories but no sign of a prayer effect in the other 20 categories, including mortality, despite explicit prayers “for prevention of . . . death.” Was this evidence that prayer works for some complications but not others? We don’t know, since the study was never replicated. Thus, we have to look to other studies for supportive evidence of a healing prayer effect.

The Sicher and Targ study is too small to be considered, and it is plagued by charges of altering their end points after the study was concluded. The Cha study is plagued by charges of fraud and the unreliable nature of one of the authors, who is now in federal prison. The Krucoff study is plagued by data mining and by convoluted personal definitions and mixed goals. The Benson study is the largest and best designed of all the healing prayer studies.

In the Benson study, patients at six US hospitals were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 604 received intercessory prayer (IP) after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer, also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG surgery. Secondary outcomes were any major event, including mortality. In the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups. It is clear from the data that intercessory prayer is not shown to have an effect on complication-free recovery from CABG surgery or on major events or 30-day mortality. Certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications, but this was probably a statistical fluke. (It is possible that knowing that people are praying for you might increase stress and hinder healing, but this is pure speculation.)

The Benson study suffers from the same problem that all such studies suffer from: there is no way to control who prays for patients. A 2002 survey by the National Institutes of Health found that 55 percent of Americans have used prayer for health reasons, 52 percent prayed for their own health, 31 percent had asked others to pray for their health, 23 percent had prayed for health in a prayer group, and 5 percent had used a healing ritual (Washington Times). Praying for intercession from the spirit world is one of the first things many people do when they find out that they or a loved one is seriously ill. It would be unethical to request loved ones not to pray for a patient; besides, if you made such a request you would be revealing which group the patient had been assigned to, which would compromise the data. No researcher can control the amount or the quality of the prayers that will be said for the participants in their study. Thus, one must question the possibility of doing a controlled study of healing prayer since the most important factor in the study cannot be controlled.

There are other reasons for doubting whether a scientific test of healing prayer is possible. Scientific tests of causality presuppose that nature follows regular patterns. If beings from another dimension could affect natural processes at will, that regularity would be lost and science would be impossible. In fact, if we could affect nature by acts of will, science would be impossible because the background regularity of nature that we depend on to do science would be gone.

Finally, there are those like Epicurus and Mary Baker Eddy who believe that gods or spirits are perfect and immutable. For a being to intervene with a natural process would imply that the being must change, which would be an imperfection. (Some religious people equate testing healing prayer with testing God and, for that reason, consider it something we should not do even if we could.) It would also imply that the natural course of things is imperfect and whoever (or whatever) is responsible for the course of things is therefore not perfect. On the other hand, there are those who think God is intervening in healing prayer studies and making them fail because He does not like to be mocked. These people take it on faith that prayer can heal. The evidence, however, that prayer can heal is solely anecdotal and unconvincing.