Praying For Positive Results

A study of intercessory prayer that came out this spring received a lot of attention. Published in the American Heart Journal by a group led by Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard University, this large study looked at whether patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery prayed for by church prayer groups did better than patients not prayed for by the groups. They did not.

This followed a large study published in the Lancet last year that also got negative results. Dr. Mitchell Krucoff and associates of Duke University examined whether either prayer or music, imagery, and touch (MIT) therapy would help patients undergoing heart procedures. Neither significantly improved the patients’ outcomes.

These studies come after others that have shown positive results for conditions such as heart disease and AIDS using either prayer or various techniques of distant healing, in which one person attempts to improve the health of another person some distance away. A review in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that out of 23 studies, 13 showed statistically significant treatment effects, which is far above what we would expect by chance. Nonetheless, the two recent large, well-done studies cast doubt on this line of inquiry as a whole.

There are a couple of reasons why we would expect researchers to have trouble getting positive results in prayer studies, even if prayer is effective. The first is that because of the need for double-blind conditions as well the need to maintain patient confidentiality, those praying have had no contact with the patients. In the Benson study, the prayer groups were given the first name of the patients and the first initial of their last names, and this is typical of these studies. This makes me wonder how intense the prayers can be when those doing the praying have no emotional connection to the patients. If we believe in prayer, would we expect the effects of someone praying for a stranger known only by a first name and an initial to be the same as that of patients or their loved ones praying for help?

This brings us to the second reason why getting consistently positive results could be difficult. The researchers can’t tell patients not to pray for their own health, and they can’t tell family members and friends not to pray for them either. The researchers just have to hope that the prayer by the study participants will add to the patient and family prayer enough so that the results will be significant. Unfortunately, the intense patient and family prayer, which can’t be controlled for in the studies, may well be much more powerful than the prayers of strangers, so it’s not surprising that studies would get negative results.

It has occurred to me that one way to avoid both of these problems would be to study owners praying for their pets undergoing a veterinary procedure. The placebo effect wouldn’t be an issue since the pets presumably wouldn’t know what their owners were doing, so it would be fine to have the owners, the people who love the animals the most, be the ones praying while the pets were undergoing the procedure. And there would be no worry about the prayer of patients confounding the results since the patients—the pets—would be unlikely to pray.

That study has never been done as far as I know, but a lot of studies have examined the effect that mental intention can have on other living organisms, looking at, for instance, rates of plant growth, growth of tumors in animals, growth of yeasts and bacteria, etc. This area is called DMILS—Direct Mental Intention with Living Systems. At last count (one done by Dr. Daniel Benor), out of 191 controlled studies that had been done, 124 had produced significantly positive results.

Given this, we certainly have reason to think that mental intention can have effects. I personally believe that prayer can have effects as well. I also think that proving those effects by getting consistent results in studies of people saying prayers for strangers may not be possible.