United States: Scientists hoped a $2.5m study would end controversy over the power of therapeutic prayer, write Denise Gellene and Thomas H Maugh.
The largest study yet on the therapeutic power of prayer from strangers has found that it provides no benefit to the recovery of patients who have undergone cardiac bypass surgery.
In an unexpected twist, patients who knew prayers were being said for them had more complications after surgery than those who did not know, researchers have reported in the American Heart Journal.
The complications were minor, and doctors surmised that they were probably due to the increased stress on patients worried that their conditions were so bad that they needed extra prayers.
Fr Dean Marek, a Catholic priest who was involved in the research, said he wasn't surprised by the results.
"I am always a little leery about intercessory prayer," said Fr Marek, director of chaplain services at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves . . . It is clearly manipulative of divine action and personal choice."
Dr Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a study investigator, added: "Nothing this study has produced should interfere with people praying for each other."
Some scientists hoped the results of the $2.5 million (€2.1m) study, conducted at six US medical centres, would bring an end to the long controversy over therapeutic prayer.
"There have now been two big studies, with hundreds and hundreds of patients, that show no effect," said Dr Harold Koenig, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.
Scientists have been trying for at least a decade to determine whether organised prayer at a distance can influence the outcome of medical studies.
However, previous attempts have been flawed by experimental and methodological errors that have led critics to dismiss their findings, both pro and con.
The latest study was designed as a random and blind trial, meaning that most patients did not know whether they were being prayed for. Such trials are considered the 'gold standard' for scientific proof.
More than 1,800 patients were divided into three groups: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but knew only that it was a possibility, those who weren't prayed for and had been told it was a possibility. About 65 per cent of patients said they strongly believed in the power of prayer.
Two Catholic monasteries and one Protestant prayer group offered the prayers. The groups were given patients' first names and the first initial of their last names. The groups started praying the night before a patient's surgery and continued for two weeks. All members of the prayer group recited the same intercession, asking for "a successful surgery and a quick, healthy recovery and no complications".
Researchers said they didn't ask family members of the sick people to stop praying because it would have been unethical to do so, meaning some people received more prayers than others.
The results showed that prayer had no beneficial effect on patients' recovery 30 days after surgery. Overall, 59 per cent of patients who knew they were being prayed for had complications, compared to 51 per cent of the patients who did not receive prayers, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Atrial fibrillation, a fluttering of the heart that can be related to stress, was the most common complication in all groups, but was more likely to occur among patients who knew people were praying for them.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)