In Reply to: Re: health rel. to religious activities posted by Farmer on January 02, 2008 at 02:49:56:
An interesting article examining some of the recent studies on the efficacy of prayer. It's rather long so I provide a few excerpts so you get the gist of it.
Is Prayer Good for Your Health?
Harold Koenig, a psychiatrist who directs Duke University's Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health told the journal Nature Medicine in 2005, "Probably saying a 30-second prayer at a key moment has done more good than any psychotherapy or drugs I've prescribed." Whether he was promoting prayer or expressing dissatisfaction with his standard methods, or perhaps both, isn't clear from his statement. But he was clearly assuming that prayer has no negative effects.
That may not be a safe assumption. Consider a 1997 paper examining the possible benefits of prayer for people undergoing treatment for alcohol abuse or dependence. It found that patients who reported that "a family member or friend was already praying for them were found to be drinking significantly more at six months than were those who reported being unaware of anyone praying for them."
What is probably the most widely discussed prayer publication to date -- the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) -- also found that prayer may be hazardous to your health. It was conducted by researchers at nine medical institutions, funded by the religious John Templeton Foundation of West Conshohocken, Pa., and published in 2006. The study's results, based on 1,800 patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery, could hardly have been what the researchers had expected.
Among patients who didn't know whether or not they were receiving prayer, the prayed-for and non-prayed-for groups fared the same, so "blind" prayer had no effect. But a third group of patients who were told that they were certain to receive prayer had significantly worse medical outcomes.
Outside observers attributed the negative effects of prayer in the study to phenomena like emotional stress or performance anxiety and suggested that if prayer indeed behaves like a drug that provides no benefits but has potentially harmful side effects, it should not be administered. But the STEP researchers themselves brushed off the one significant finding of their study, writing, "We have no clear explanation for the observed excess of complications in patients who were certain that intercessors would pray for them ... the excess may be a chance finding."
Richard Sloan scoffs at that explanation: "You can bet that if the results had gone the other way, if prayer had shown a positive effect, they would never have attributed that to chance."
Citing the STEP study and others that find pitfalls in prayer, Bruce Flamm warns, "Readers with a scientific world view understand that faith healing does not work but might assume it will at least do no harm. Actually, it can do harm." Some of the broader dangers he points to:
* It can cause patients to shun effective medical care.
* It can lead doctors to diminish their medical efforts.
* It can steer insurers to faith-based interventions.
* It can promote guilt by suggesting that God is somehow punishing a patient with illness or injury and demands penance as the price of recovery.
* It is often linked intimately to prayers for Christian salvation to which a patient might object if informed about it.
Despite what one might expect, Christian evangelicals have no monopoly on remote-prayer research. Much of the work spans several religions or is rooted in New Age spiritualism. The somewhat bafflingly named "Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Trainings" (MANTRA) study led by Dr. Mitchell Krucoff of Duke University incorporated distant prayer directed at cardiology patients by Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Christian devotees, either with and without in-person "music, imagery and touch therapy."
The study, published in 2005, came to a by-now familiar conclusion: "Neither therapy, alone or combined, showed any measurable treatment effect."
...
"The countless millions of dollars wasted by groups like the Templeton Foundation on superstitious nonsense could have been used to fund legitimate scientific medical research," says Bruce Flamm. "Sadly, they have squandered vast amounts of money that could have been used to study and perhaps cure many diseases."
...
Pleased with the curtailment of federal prayer funding, Richard Sloan says, "Private foundations are free to fund stupidly if they want. But we should not be recommending interventions that have no explanation in this universe. It's based on a belief that the universe is a cosmic vending machine -- a belief that you can deposit prayers in the slot and the desired outcome will appear in the hopper."