Can Prayer Heal?

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A scientific study on healing prayer would attempt to isolate prayer as a causal factor in healing. The best causal studies use controls, randomize the assignments of the participants to a control group (whose members would not be prayed for, in this case) and an experimental group (whose members would be prayed for), and blind the researchers and the subjects to what groups the participants have been assigned. Ideally, a scientific study on healing prayer would study a significant number of people who need healing for the same reason (say, cardiac bypass surgery patients or AIDS patients). At least 50 participants would be needed. They would be randomly assigned to a prayer group or a control group. The researcher who assigns the patients to their groups would not immediately reveal this information to either the patients or the researcher who will be evaluating the healing process in the patients. After the data have been collected, the first researcher reveals which group each patient was in. Only then do the researchers analyze the data to determine if prayer made any difference.
    
The researchers would have to define what they mean by “prayer” and “healing” before the study begins. For example, they might consider a patient healed if he doesn’t die or if he is released from the hospital or if he has no complications from a surgery. (Whatever is identified as healing should not be defined after the study has been completed; otherwise, the researchers might go data mining, trying to find anything that seems to support their hypothesis. Since the support for the hypothesis, if it comes, is going to come in the form of a statistic; and since it is known that if you do a statistical analysis of many factors, one or two might seem to support your hypothesis, there is a very good chance that such results would be spurious.) The study should have a specified beginning (say, when a person is admitted to the hospital for treatment) and a specified ending (say, when the patient is released from the hospital or dies, or some specific time frame, e.g., six months from the beginning point). If prayer is a causal factor in healing, then a significantly higher number of people, statistically speaking, should be healed in the prayer group. Statistical significance is determined by mathematical formulae, which we need not go into here.

Have such scientific studies been done? Yes, and the results clearly show that no healing effect from prayer has been found.