Re: Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
- From: "Peter Moran" <pmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 06:39:36 +1000
"Rich" <joshew@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Bu1Xf.20806$%d.19577@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=7b5406becfadbd88&hp&ex=1143781200&partner=homepage
http://tinyurl.com/z433o
Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: March 31, 2006
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who
were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of
post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because
of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether
prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and
involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of
speculation.
[more at the link . . . ]
In my view such studies demean the Maker (if there is one), anyway. A
supernatural force or intelligence would not be constrained by the "normal"
variations in illness outcomes that necessitate such statistical analyses.
It would also not be constrained by what is normally possible. It/He
should produce true miracles, things outside normal experience, as
described in various Holy books and as pretended to occur in the
fundamentalist healing serivices of Benny Hinn etc. We should see severe
coronary atherosclerosis there one day and gone the next, and the truly
paralysed getting up and walking.
One reason for saying this is that statistical outcomes are always just
that, mere probabilities, and, moreover, probabilities that are very much
at the mercy of the many artefacts that so readily creep into clinical
studies. They are certainly never likely to sway prior beliefs.
Peter Moran
.
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